speech of word salad

What Is a Word Salad in Speech or Writing?

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• An Introduction to Punctuation
• Ph.D., Rhetoric and English, University of Georgia
• M.A., Modern English and American Literature, University of Leicester
• B.A., English, State University of New York

The metaphorical expression   word salad  (or word-salad ) refers to the practice of stringing together words that have no apparent connection to one another—an extreme case of jumbled speech or disorderly  writing . Also called (in psychology)  paraphrasia .

Psychiatric clinicians use the term word salad to refer to a rare form of disorganized speech:

• Campbell's Psychiatric Dictionary ...a group of neologisms ," according to Robert Jean Campbell. "They are meaningless until the patient discusses the neologisms at length, thus revealing their underlying significance. It is a coded language, not unlike dreams in principle; the patient holds the table to the code and only he can provide meanings to the otherwise incomprehensible dialect .

Examples and Observations

• Manfred Spitzer [Psychiatrist Eugen] Bleuler described the relatively high frequency of indirect, oblique, or remote, associations in schizophrenic patients. This type of association, observed either in spontaneous speech or in the word-association test, goes from one word to another word via a not overtly spoken intermediate word. One of Bleuler's examples is wood-dead cousin . At first glance, this association appears to be a complete word salad . However, if you know that a cousin of the patient had died recently and was buried in a wooden coffin, it becomes obvious that this was, in fact, an indirect association, from wood to wooden coffin to dead cousin .
• D. Frank Benson and Alfredo Ardila Neologistic and semantic jargon are the primary components of a schizophrenic language output that has been termed word salad , an apt phrase for the mixture of misused linguistic features produced by the schizophrenic subject. Much more often, however, word salad is based on brain damage (Benson, 1979a).
• Noam Chomsky Colorless green ideas sleep furiously.
• Susan Neville When there are recognizable words but no one else can make sense of them, they call it ' word salad .' No one ever thinks to call it music.
• Gregory Corso How nice it'd be to come home to her and sit by the fireplace and she in the kitchen aproned young and lovely wanting my baby and so happy about me she burns the roast beef and comes crying to me and I get up from my big papa chair saying Christmas teeth! Radiant brains! Apple deaf! God what a husband I'd make!

Word Salads and Creative Writing

• Heather Sellers The next key characteristic of schizophrenia was the tendency toward 'word salad.' There was an example, a rambling block quotation that strung together a grandmother's death, sunlight, dinner, and cats that didn't exist, interspersed with inappropriate laughter. Again not my mother. Again more like me. 'Word salad' was the exact name of a writing exercise I gave my students at the beginning of the year. In a piece of writing, those moves from death to dinner could be crucial, heartbreaking. I opened a fat gray volume titled Schizophrenia . I found a chart that listed the warning signs of the disease: birth complications, separation from parents, withdrawn behavior, emotional unpredictability, poor peer relations, solo play. One could also consider this the recipe for becoming an artist, a writer.

Word-Salad Poetry

• Nancy Bogen [Y]ou mustn't become so enamored of the sounds you're using as to lose sight of your meaning. To do so would be tantamount to creating word-salad , and even as a form of rebellion, that won't do, it simply won't. Why? Because it's been done too many times already and by now it's just plain boring, as boring as saying the same word or phrase over and over like a mantra. If people found it on a printed page, they'd simply shrug and move on; if they heard you reading it aloud, they'd just tune out. So what, some of you are saying? So plenty; you're supposed to be communicating—poetry is a special form of communication between yourself, the poet, and others who want to or may be persuaded to hear what you have to say in your language.

Word-Salad Spam

• Pui-Wing Tam Word-salad spam has become especially problematic in the last year, say antispam software companies. The technique of stringing together gibberish phrases was devised specifically to dodge a sophisticated type of screening technology, known as a Bayesian filter, which gained popularity in 2003.
• What is Clang Association?
• agrammatism
• Definition and Examples of Baby Talk or Caregiver Speech
• Direct Speech Definition and Examples
• Definition and Examples of Word Boundaries
• Definition and Examples of English Pronunciation
• Word Words (English)
• Definition and Examples of Back-Formation
• Reported Speech
• Biased Language Definition and Examples
• Definitions and Examples of Filler Words
• Pejorative Language
• The Definition of Taboo Language
• Ellipsis: Definition and Examples in Grammar
• Indirect Speech Definition and Examples
• What Are Assemblage Errors in English?

Dementia Today

A Better Way

Educational Insights

You ask your loved one, “Did you sleep well last night?”  They respond with, “Well, makapak bailed.  Can you help?”  How do you interact and dialogue with someone who is speaking a “language” you cannot understand?  Maybe it’s a good time to learn to understand word salad.

This may be your first experience with word salad , a disorder most often found in schizophrenic and dementia populations.  Onset of word salad for dementia is often first noticed in Stage II.

Possibly the loved one’s intent here was to say they had an incontinent episode during the night, but we don’t know for sure.

These “​tossed together​ words.” hence the name word salad, appear to be completely nonsensical. They too are aware they are combining words which can frustrate them to the point they may lose their temper during the simplest of communications.

There are helpful clues and tools you can take advantage of to ensure your loved one feels heard and validated, even in moments when you can’t understand what they are saying.

“Understanding” word salad

Your loved one might say something like, “Ice cleeting burning nickel pickles.” Most likely I would respond with whatever came to mind first like, “I think I’m too warm too (normalizing their feeling). Do you want to take your sweater off?”  An agreeing nod of the head tells me I figured out the need.  How did I know how to respond?

I can do this with confidence because unless it is a physical or medical need, ​ there are no wrong responses ​ if I am matching or complimenting their facial expressions, intonations, and body language.  Believe it or not the content of their communication is not  what is important.  They are looking for validation, comfort, consoling, and/or nurturing.

.A successful word salad conversation is designed around

• active listening
• validation of expressed emotions, and
• interaction in a positive, nonclinical, nonjudgmental manner.

Body language, facial expressions, intonations, word salad sensory interpreters

Three valuable tools that will guide your every response during a word salad conversation are:

• Facial expressions:  observe and evaluate if facial expressions match the situation.
• Intonations:  listen to mood indicators in their vocal intonations.
• Body language:  confirm their body language matches their apparent mood.

Remember the popular expression, “a picture is worth a thousand words?”  In this case we’re looking at the loved one’s facial expressions as they can immediately tell us a lot about their mood state .

Also helpful is to pay attention to their intonations as they are the verbalized sounds of their emotions .

Lastly, look at their body language, the final punctuation to their communication.

In word salad it’s their feelings that need validation, not the content

To illustrate, I could respond to the question, “Where is my dog?” with a totally “inappropriate” answer like, “The library was closed for remodeling,” and that answer would be completely acceptable if I matched or complimented the correct body language, facial expressions, and intonations.

Most likely their response would be just as “inappropriate” as mine.  “Inappropriate” equating to the fact I did not address the dog question.

The topic (dog) was switched suddenly to library without clarification and nobody questioned the change nor did it add confusion.

Normal conversations stay focused on the original topic, switching only by using a transitional word or phrase because there content is important.

A minor “tweak” in how we interact

Most amazingly, the loved one’s brain can ​still ​intuitively distinguish whether they are getting their needs met or not in the exact same way infants can. To not meet their needs indicates you are going to see unwanted behaviors cropping up that you will later need to address.

Adjusting our thinking to focus on their expressed feelings rather than content will help maintain a greater sense of calm.  Just imagine how terrifying it would be if you suddenly realized nobody understood your words anymore. How would you get a need met for instance?

Loved ones can alert us to a lack in physical, medical, or psychosocial needs the same way infants do.  In return they want that sense of genuine validation, nurturing, and active psychosocial interaction. Just like the infant, they are reassuring themselves “ you are the one that will cause them to survive .”

Interesting note: If English is their second language you may find it is not word salad they are using at all, but instead a blending of both their first language and English. Amazingly, they still understand English but have lost some of the fluency to use it.

And as the decline continues, sometimes they may go ahead and add word salad in addition to the English and first language mix.  But no worries, you know what to do!

Psychosocial Encouragement

• Maintain a strong sense of autonomy in them by providing options, not orders.  “Would you like to read a book or watch TV?”
• Echo their own words back as this will validate their feelings.  “‘You were very, very happy to eat cake.’  Yes, you looked joyful!”
• Remember to give them opportunities to contribute to their community.  “Will you help me set the table for dinner?”
• Express their qualities.  “I love your never-ending sense of humor.  You totally bless me every day!”

Meet Sheila

Sheila Moreno, MA Dementia-wise Interaction Behavioral Educator and Trainer

Mental Health Counselor with expertise in dementia-wise interaction, has worked hands on with the dementia population, their loved ones, and healthcare professionals for nearly two decades. READ MORE…

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Thought Disorder

Formal thought disorder refers to an impaired capacity to sustain coherent discourse, and occurs in the patient’s written or spoken language.

• Indeed, the most basic assessment of thought content requires at least some degree of language competence.
• For research purposes, scales have been developed to study the quality and severity of abnormalities in thought, language, and communication.
• In clinical practice, formal thought disorder is assessed by engaging patients in open-ended conversation and observing their verbal responses.
• A number of medical and surgical conditions can affect language performance; the term formal thought disorder is used when these conditions are excluded from the diagnosis.
• The cause of formal thought disorder is not established. Research has implicated abnormalities in the semantic system in patients with schizophrenia .
• Thought disorder is often accompanied by executive function problems and general disorganization.
• Abnormalities in language are common in the general population, in everyday conversation. Thus, the categorical presence or absence of the following language problems is not absolutely diagnostic of any condition. However, heightened frequency and severity of these problems should be noted by the physician and accounted for in the patient’s diagnostic formulation.

Formal thought disorder descriptors (adapted from the Thought, Language, and Communication scale) [1] :

• Poverty of speech: restricted quantity of speech; brief, unelaborated responses
• Poverty of content of speech: adequate speech quantity with prominent vagueness and inappropriate level of abstraction
• Pressure of speech: increased rate and quantity of speech; speech may be loud and difficult to interrupt
• Distractible speech: topic maintenance difficulties due to distraction by nearby stimulus
• Tangentiality: Replies to questions are off-point or totally irrelevant.
• Derailment (loosening of associations): spontaneous speech with marked impairments in topic maintenance
• Incoherence (word salad, schizaphasia): severe lack of speech cohesion at the basic level of syntax and/or semantics within sentences
• Illogicality: marked errors in inferential logic
• Clanging: speech in which word choice is governed by word sound rather than meaning; word choice may show rhyming or punning associations
• Neologism: the creation of new "words"
• Word approximations: unconventional and idiosyncratic word use
• Circumstantiality: excessively indirect speech; speech is liable to be overinclusive and include irrelevant detail
• Loss of goal: difficulty in topic maintenance in reference to failure to arrive at the implicit goal of a statement
• Perseveration: excessive repetition of words, ideas, or subjects
• Echolalia: speech repeats words or phrases of interviewer
• Blocking: interruption of speech while ostensibly in pursuit of a goal
• Stilted speech: odd language use that may be excessively formal, pompous, outdated, or quaint
• Self-reference: The patient is liable to refer the subject of conversation back to him/herself.
• Paraphasic error (phonemic): word mispronunciation, slip of the tongue
• Paraphasic error (semantic): substitution of an inappropriate word to make a specific statement

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Clang Association in Bipolar Disorder and Schizophrenia

Steven Gans, MD is board-certified in psychiatry and is an active supervisor, teacher, and mentor at Massachusetts General Hospital.

• What They Sound Like
• Part of "Word Salad"

Writing Associations

Clang associations are groupings of words, usually rhyming words, that are based on similar-sounding sounds, even though the words themselves don't have any logical reason to be grouped together. A person who is speaking this way may be showing signs of psychosis in bipolar disorder or schizophrenia.

In bipolar disorder , clang associations generally appear in psychotic episodes in the manic phases of the illness. In schizophrenia, clang associations are closely linked with a thought disorder, one of the hallmark features of the illness. "Clanging" also has been referred to as "glossomania" in medical literature relating to speech alterations in schizophrenia and bipolar disorder .

What Clang Associations Sound Like

Clang associations generally sound a bit like rhyming poetry, except that the poems don't seem to make any sense.   (They don't make sense because there's no logical reason for those particular words to be grouped together into a poem.)

For example, in the song "X Amount of Words" by Blue October's Justin Furstenfeld (who has bipolar disorder), the words "pathetic" and "sympathetic" are rhymed with "prosthetic" and "paramedic":

Imagine the worst Systematic, sympathetic Quite pathetic, apologetic, paramedic Your heart is prosthetic

These words don't have much of a logical reason to be grouped together, but they create a catchy, clang-y sort of rhythm ... hence the term "clang associations." You can have a clang association with any words that don't make sense when grouped. Here's another:

Auto, tomorrow, swallow, Zoro, borrow

The words used in clang associations generally rhyme, although they may only rhyme partially.

Part of "Word Salad"

In bipolar disorder and schizophrenia, clang associations are considered to be part of a language disorder condition called schizophasia (popularly known as "word salad"). In fact, language disturbance is a major feature of schizophrenia.

A person is said to have schizophasia when his speech is jumbled, repetitious, and simply doesn't make sense.

This speech may feature neologisms, which are made-up words or expressions or simply be mumbled and impossible to understand.   People whose speech features clang associations and other symptoms of schizophasia may also have a flat-sounding voice or another unusual voice quality.   They may seem to have problems with remembering words or using them correctly, as well.

Along with leading to clang associations, neologisms , and another jumbled spoken language, schizophasia may also affect written the language.   In 2000, Université de Montréal researchers tested the writing and dictation ability of people with "paranoid schizophrenia with glossomanic schizophasia."

They found that the patients weren't able to write down dictated words accurately—they replaced letters in words with similar-sounding, but not identical letters, for example. This indicates that the language problems inherent in schizophrenia extend beyond spoken language in patients.  

In fact, there's some speculation that language problems in schizophrenia, such as clang associations, may connect to the genetic basis for the condition: "Recent research has begun to relate schizophrenia, which is partly genetic, to the genetic endowment that makes human language possible," concluded one group of clinicians.

Fountoulakis KN. The emerging modern face of mood disorders: a didactic editorial with a detailed presentation of data and definitions .  Ann Gen Psychiatry . 2010;9:14. Published 2010 Apr 12. doi:10.1186/1744-859X-9-14

Bipolar Disorder . National Institute of Mental Health.

Kuperberg GR. Language in schizophrenia Part 1: an Introduction .  Lang Linguist Compass . 2010;4(8):576–589. doi:10.1111/j.1749-818X.2010.00216.x

Schizophrenia . National Institute of Mental Health.

Coron AM, Stip E, Dumont C, Lecours AR. Writing impairment in schizophasia: two case studies . Brain Cogn . 2000 Jun-Aug;43(1-3):121-4. PMID: 10857677.

By Marcia Purse Marcia Purse is a mental health writer and bipolar disorder advocate who brings strong research skills and personal experiences to her writing.

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Definition of word salad

Examples of word salad in a sentence.

These examples are programmatically compiled from various online sources to illustrate current usage of the word 'word salad.' Any opinions expressed in the examples do not represent those of Merriam-Webster or its editors. Send us feedback about these examples.

Word History

1904, in the meaning defined at sense 1

Articles Related to word salad

Making Sense of 'Word Salad'

It describes the disordered speech of the mentally ill—but now it's also being used to describe political speeches

Dictionary Entries Near word salad

word/rumor has it

words fail someone

Cite this Entry

“Word salad.” Merriam-Webster.com Dictionary , Merriam-Webster, https://www.merriam-webster.com/dictionary/word%20salad. Accessed 17 May. 2024.

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The most awkward and embarrassing Kamala Harris ‘word salads’ of 2022

Harris once said, 'it's time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day'.

Year in review: Vice President Kamala Harris’ biggest word salads of 2022

Harris occasionally stumbled over words, talked in circles during key events throughout the year.

2022 was another year filled with awkward and meandering quotes and soundbites from the Vice President of the United States, Kamala Harris .

This year, Harris cemented her legacy as being the politician most likely to break out into an indecipherable "word salad" during one of her speeches, press conference appearances, or meetings with world leaders. 

In these moments, which seemed to occur and go viral every few weeks throughout the year, Harris could provide long-winded, vague, and cumbersome statements about random subjects.

Vice President Kamala Harris, during a campaign stop back in 2020. (AP Photo/John Raoux)

Fox News Digital picked out six of the vice president's most memorable "word salads" of the year. 

KAMALA HARRIS DUCKS LATIN AMERICA DESPITE ASSIGNMENT TO DISCOVER THE ‘ROOT CAUSES’ OF ILLEGAL IMMIGRATION

Harris on community banks: ‘We know community banks are in the community …’

In September, the vice president, along with Education Secretary Miguel Cardona and student leaders, spoke at a roundtable discussion at Claflin University in South Carolina. While Harris touted the policies of the Biden administration, particularly its investment in " community banks ," she stumbled into a rambling, circular sentence on the subject.

She said, "We invested an additional $12 billion into community banks, because we know community banks are in the community, and understand the needs and desires of that community as well as the talent and capacity of community." 

Outkick.com founder Clay Travis slammed Harris with a sarcastic post, tweeting, "Kamala Harris, the greatest orator since Winston Churchill, on community banks. Enjoy."

Vice President Kamala Harris called her husband in a fit of rage after the Supreme Court overturned Roe v. Wade earlier this year. (Reuters/Hannah Beier)

Harris on diplomacy: ‘We will assist Jamaica in COVID recovery by assisting in terms of the recovery efforts in Jamaica …’

During a White House event focusing on the relationship between the U.S. and Jamaica, Harris tripped through a statement describing America’s help with the Caribbean nation’s pandemic relief efforts.

Harris stated, "We also recognize just as it has been in the United States, for Jamaica, one of the issues that has been presented as an issue that is economic in the way of its impact has been the pandemic." 

She added another mystifying stanza, saying, "So to that end, we are announcing today also that we will assist Jamaica in COVID recovery by assisting in terms of the recovery efforts in Jamaica that have been essential to, I believe, what is necessary to strengthen not only the issue of public health but also the economy."

Radio host Buck Sexton blasted the word salad on Twitter, comparing it to that of a smug college student who never read the assigned the material. He tweeted, "She reminds one of the student[s] in college who never did the reading, but insisted on talking a lot about it in class anyway, and always thought he/she was brilliantly fooling everyone. But nobody was fooled."

Harris: ‘It’s time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day'

Harris gave a confounding answer in January when asked by NBC's Craig Melvin about the administration's coronavirus mitigation strategy.

"Does the administration say, ‘You know what, this strategy isn’t working. We’re going to change strategies,’" Melvin said. "Is it time?" 

Harris responded that "it’s time for us to do what we have been doing, and that time is every day" before quickly pivoting to vaccines. 

"Every day it is time for us to agree that there are things and tools that are available to us to slow this thing down. And so right now we know we still have a number of people that, that is in the millions of Americans who have not been vaccinated, and could be vaccinated, and we are urging them to get vaccinated because it will save their life," Harris said. 

Politico’s Alex Thompson responded at the time, "Not quite sure what that answer means."

Harris on Roe V. Wade: ‘I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe that certain issues are just settled …’

A perplexing Harris word salad happened during a CBS News interview in July on the topic of abortion. Speaking about the Supreme Court’s overturning of Roe v. Wade with correspondent Robert Costa, the vice president used an overabundance of words to communicate her view that Roe v. Wade should still be intact.

She told Costa, "I think that, to be very honest with you, I do believe that we should have rightly believed, but we certainly believe that certain issues are just settled. Certain issues are just settled."

Doing his best to contribute to the conversation, Costa replied, "Clearly were not," to which Harris gave another somewhat awkward answer. "No, that's right," Harris said, adding, "And that's why I do believe that we are living, sadly, in real unsettled times."

Reacting to the statement on Twitter, NewsBusters managing editor Curtis Houck asked, "What is with this administration and an aversion to basic speaking skills and grasp of the English language?"

Harris on Chicago shooting: 'We've got to take this stuff seriously, as seriously as you are because you have been forced to take this seriously …'

Another Harris word salad went viral that same month, this time during her speech to Highland Park, Chicago residents in the wake of a horrific Independence Day mass shooting. The shooting claimed the lives of seven people and injured over 30, though Harris’ bumbling efforts to comfort the shellshocked town became a spectacle all their own.

Speaking to the press and the mourning local residents, Harris said, "We've got to take this stuff seriously, as seriously as you are because you have been forced to take this seriously." 

She also claimed, "The whole nation should understand and have a level of empathy to understand that this could happen anywhere [to] any people in any community. And we should stand together and speak out about why it's got to stop."

Seeing the word salad on Twitter, National Review contributor Pradheep Shanker declared, "She is amazingly bad at this."

KAMALA HARRIS MOCKED FOR GUSHING OVER A ‘YELLOW SCHOOL BUS’: ‘THEY REALLY CAN’T LET HER TALK IN PUBLIC'

Harris on Russian gas: ‘Our allies have stood firm and unified in a way… to ensure that we are unified’

Harris uttered another affront to proper sentence construction in a March interview on NBC morning show, "TODAY." Only weeks after Russian president Vladimir Putin launched his invasion of Ukraine, the Biden administration had been facing tough questions about whether it would be banning Russian oil imports anytime soon. 

"TODAY" host Savannah Guthrie asked Harris, "Is that something the administration would consider in terms of future sanctions, cutting off the oil and gas part of the economy for Russia?" The vice president’s answer was yet another meandering, and underwhelming attempt at a coherent answer.

She began, saying, "As you know, on this issue, for example, we applaud Germany in terms of what it has done as it relates to Nord Stream 2. As it relates to what we need to do domestically as well as what we need to do in terms of this issue generally, we have, as the president said, to reevaluate what we’re doing in terms of strategic oil reserves here in the United States to make sure that it will not have an impact, or we can mitigate the impact on the American consumer."

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The second grouping of words was worse. She added, "Understanding that right now on the issue of energy, our allies have stood firm and unified in a way that many of the pundits didn’t predict would happen, to ensure that we are unified in our approach to this issue."

Catching a clip of this half-baked exchange on social media, Fox News contributor Tammy Bruce tweeted, "Another word salad filled w crutches. Has no one tried to coach her?"

US Vice President Kamala Harris speaks during the Democratic National Committee Women's Leadership Forum in Washington, DC, US, on Friday, Sept. 30, 2022. (Leigh Vogel/Abaca/Bloomberg via Getty Images)

Gabriel Hays is an associate editor for Fox News Digital. 

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Meaning of word salad in English

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• He spat out an angry stretch of word salad .
• It's hard to tell what they're saying. It's just total word salad .
• He speaks in word salads that never get anywhere .
• a crock (of shit) idiom
• double-talk
• doublespeak
• mumbo jumbo
• nonsensical

You can also find related words, phrases, and synonyms in the topics:

Examples of word salad

Translations of word salad.

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Word of the Day

to try to persuade a customer who is already buying something to buy more, or to buy something more expensive

Searching out and tracking down: talking about finding or discovering things

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Listen to What They’re Chanting

A close look at the words being shouted at protests on campuses across the country reveals why some see the pro-Palestinian cause as so threatening.

I f you want to gauge whether a protest chant is genocidal or anti-Semitic or disagreeable in any other way, you have to pay attention to more than the words. A chant is a performance, not a text. A leader initiates a call-and-response or else yells into a bullhorn, eliciting roars from the crowd. Hands clap, feet stomp, drums are beaten. The chanting creates a rhythm that can induce a sort of hypnosis, fusing individuals into a movement. The beat should be no more sophisticated than Bum -bah bum- bah bum- bah bum -bah, as in, “ There is on ly one so lu tion! In ti fa da, rev o lu tion! ” To claim that a chant means only what it says is like asserting that a theatrical production is the same as a script.

You can start with the words, though. Take the chant about intifada revolution. Etymologically, intifada denotes a shaking-off, but in contemporary Arabic, it means an uprising: For instance, a 1952 uprising in Iraq against the Hashemite monarchy is referred to in Arabic as an intifada. But in English, including in English-language dictionaries and encyclopedias, the word refers primarily to two periods of sustained Palestinian revolt, the First and Second Intifadas. The first, which ran from 1987 to 1993, involved protests and acts of civil disobedience and was relatively peaceful, at least compared with the second, from 2000 to 2005, which featured Palestinian suicide bombings and targeted reprisal killings by Israeli forces; more than a thousand Israelis died in 138 suicide attacks. These intifadas received so much international press coverage that surely everyone in the world to whom the word means anything at all thinks of them first. The more general idea of insurrection can only be a poor second.

If that’s the association, then intifada is not a phrase that would indicate genocidal intent. Total casualties on both sides during these earlier periods of conflict run to somewhere between 6,000 and 7,000. At its most innocuous, though, it still implies violence. In the context of this particular chant, it might imply much more than that. Revolution doubles and intensifies intifada —an uprising is the beginning of a fight; a revolution is the wholesale destruction of a social order. “There is only one solution”: This has been deemed offensive on the grounds that “solution” evokes the Final Solution, the term used to describe the German decision to kill all Jews during World War II. The more salient point, it seems to me, is that the declaration rejects the idea that there is a political path to peace. It says that diplomacy is not an option, and compromise is not a possibility.

Of course, that’s just the chant on the page. The chant on college campuses is one slogan among many, taking on meaning from those that come before and after it. And, at the same time, it may be uttered by people who don’t care what they’re saying. At any given march or rally, some number of participants will have shown up in order to show up, to signal membership in a movement that they identify with much more than they agree with. When the protesters aren’t directly affected by the matter they’re protesting, the politics of identity frequently supersede the politics of ideas, as Nate Silver pointed out in his Substack newsletter last week. Participating in a political action becomes a way of fitting in, and a chant is the price of admission. As the police enter campus after campus, I’m guessing that the chants also channel rage at the authorities. “Free Palestine!,” sure, but also, Free my friends!

And yet, the plain meaning of a chant has an impact, even if the chanters aren’t fully aware of it. A chant is particularly effective when its message echoes and explains the overall mise-en-scène. “ Globalize the Intifada! ” is an ironically apt chorus for students marching through an American campus under Palestinian flags, their heads shrouded in keffiyehs, their faces covered in KN95 masks. “ We don’t want no Zionists here! ” has the ring of truth when chanted at an encampment where students identified as Zionists have been forced out by a human chain.

The other day, I stood outside a locked gate at Columbia University, near a group of protesters who had presumably come to support the students but couldn’t get inside. From the other side of the gate, a bespectacled student in a keffiyeh worked them into a rage, yelling hoarsely into a microphone and, at moments of peak excitement, jumping up and down. She had her rotation: “ Intifada revolution,” then “Palestine is our demand; no peace on stolen land!” Then “Free, free Palestine!” Then “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free!” Finally, “Intifada, Intifada!” No one stopping to watch could fail to get the message. The young woman wasn’t calling for a cease-fire or a binational confederation of Palestine and Israel. She was calling for war. Is that anti-Semitic? It depends on whether you think that the violent eradication of the state of Israel is anti-Semitic.

C hants may feel like spontaneous outbursts of political sentiment, but they almost never are. So where do they come from? Social media, of course—most chants are rhyming couplets; repeated a few times, they’re just the right length for an Instagram Story. Another source is the political-organizing manuals that are sometimes called toolkits. These function more or less as a movement’s hymnals.

The “ rally toolkit ” of the group Within Our Lifetime, a radical pro-Palestinian organization with connections on American campuses, lists 40 chants. I’ve heard almost half of them at Columbia, including “Say it loud, say it clear, we don’t want no Zionists here,” which, I learned from the toolkit, is a translation of a chant in Arabic. A fall-2023 Palestine Solidarity Working Group toolkit contains chant sheets from the Palestine Youth Movement and the U.S. Palestinian Community Network . (This word salad of names is in no way nefarious; political organizing is the art of building coalitions.) The lists overlap, with minor differences: The Palestinian Youth Movement’s sheet, for instance, includes several “Cross Movement Chants” that connect the Palestinian cause to others, such as “Stop the U.S. War machine—From Palestine to the Philippines.”

Some observers believe that one toolkit in particular reflects outside influence. A lawsuit claiming that Hamas is working with the national leadership of two organizations, National Students for Justice in Palestine and American Muslims for Palestine, has just been filed in the U.S. District Court for the Eastern Division of Virginia on behalf of nine American and Israeli plaintiffs, including six victims of October 7; it specifically cites NSJP’s Day of Resistance Toolkit as evidence. The chairman of AMP, Hatem Bazian, who was also one of NSJP’s founders, denies the claim, and told The Washington Post that the lawsuit is a defamatory “Islamophobic text reeking in anti-Palestinian racism.” The question remains to be adjudicated, but it is safe to say that the toolkit makes NSJP’s ideological affinities clear. The toolkit, released immediately after October 7, advised chapters to celebrate Hamas’s attack as a “historic win for the Palestinian resistance” and to lay the groundwork for October 12, “a national day of resistance” on campuses. Student groups across the country did in fact hold rallies and walkouts on October 12, two weeks before Israel invaded Gaza.

The Day of Resistance Toolkit is an extraordinary artifact, written in stilted, triumphalist prose that could have been airlifted out of a badly translated Soviet parade speech. “Fearlessly, our people struggle for complete liberation and return,” the document states. “Glory to our resistance, to our martyrs, and to our steadfast people.” NSJP includes graphics for easy poster-making; one of these is a now-notorious drawing of a crowd cheering a paraglider, a clear allusion to the Hamas militants who paraglided into Israel. And under “Messaging & Framing” come several bullet points; one group of these is preceded by the heading “When people are occupied, resistance is justified.” Under it, one finds the entire state of Israel, a recognized member-state of the United Nations, defined as an occupation, rather than just the West Bank, and its citizens characterized as “settlers” rather than civilians “because they are military assets used to ensure continued control over stolen Palestinian land.” If Israelis are not civilians, of course, then murdering them could count as a legitimate act of war. That heading, inverted (“Resistance is justified when people are occupied”), was soon being chanted by thousands of people around the country. The phrases did not originate with the toolkit, but it surely gave them a boost.

Many protest chants come across as unoriginal, but lack of originality is actually desirable. The more familiar a chant’s wording and cadence, the easier it is to pick up. A chant modeled on a much older one may also subtly advance a geopolitical argument. “ Hey hey, ho ho! Zionism has got to go! ,” which is an echo of “Hey hey, ho ho! LBJ has got to go!,” suggests a link between Gaza and Vietnam, Israeli imperialism and American imperialism. I don’t think that’s a stretch. The 1968 analogy is everywhere. Last week, I watched a Columbia protest leader praise a crowd by saying that they’re continuing what the anti-war protesters started. That night, dozens of today’s protesters did exactly that by occupying Hamilton Hall, also occupied in 1968.

I’m guessing that the Houthis—another Iranian-backed terrorist group, which controls a part of Yemen—provided a template for at least one chant. Around February, Columbia’s protesters were recorded chanting “ There is no safe place! Death to the Zionist state! ,” which struck me, in this context, as a taunting reply to Jewish students’ complaints about safety, followed by what sounded like a version of the actual, official Houthi slogan “God Is Great, Death to America, Death to Israel, A Curse Upon the Jews, Victory to Islam.” And indeed, a month earlier, the crowd had openly chanted in support of the Houthis, who had been firing missiles at ships traveling through the Red Sea and the Gulf of Aden. The U.S. and Britain had just begun bombing them to stop the attacks, and the students sang, “ Yemen, Yemen, make us proud, turn another ship around! ”

Does support for the Houthis and alleged support for Hamas mean that the students also support the groups’ sponsor, Iran? I doubt that the Islamic Revolutionary Guard Corps and the student groups exchange messages on Signal. But at the very least, the chants raise the possibility that some of the more extreme radicals on campus align themselves with the Iranian government’s geopolitical orientation more than with America’s, and have somehow persuaded their followers to mouth such views.

O ne slogan, however, has become emblematic of the debate over the possible anti-Semitic content of pro-Palestinian chants. Its stature can be attributed, in part, to Republican Representative Elise Stefanik, who infamously insisted, during hearings on campus anti-Semitism, that it amounted to a call for genocide. The slogan, of course, is “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” Israel’s supporters hear it as eliminationist: From the Jordan to the Mediterranean, which is to say, across the land that had been under British control before it was partitioned by the United Nations in 1947, Palestine will be free of Jews . Where are they supposed to go? Many Jews find the possible answers to that question very disturbing. Palestinians and their allies, however, reject the Jewish interpretation as a form of catastrophizing. They say that the chant expresses the dream of a single, secular, democratic nation in which Palestinians and Jews would live peacefully side by side, in lieu of the existing Jewish ethno-nationalist state. (It is hard to dispute that in this scenario, Jewish Israelis would lose the power of collective self-determination.)

Before “From the river to the sea” caught on in English, it was chanted in Arabic. It is not clear when it first came into use, but Elliott Colla, a scholar of Arabic and Islamic studies at Georgetown University, believes that it emerged during the First Intifada—or rather, two versions of it did. One was nationalist: “ Min al-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya ”: “From water to water, Palestine is Arab.” The other was Islamist: “ Falasteen Islamiyyeh, min al-nahr ila al-bahr ”: “Palestine is Islamic from the river to the sea.” At some point during the Oslo peace process, Colla says, a third chant appeared: “ Min al-nahr ila al-bahr, Falasteen satataharrar ,” or “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free.” “It is this version—with its focus on freedom —that has circulated within English-language solidarity culture from at least the 1990s,” Colla writes in a recent article .

Therefore, Colla writes, “Palestine will be free” should be considered a new chant expressing the ideal of a more inclusive state, not merely a translation of the older, more aggressive chants. It gives voice to a “much more capacious vision of a shared political project.” The problem with Colla’s benign reading of the slogan, however, is that the more nationalist or Islamist Arab-language chants are still in circulation; they share airtime with the English-language variant at American protests. In January, I started seeing videos of American students chanting “ Min al-maiyeh lel mayieh, Falasteen Arabiya . ” The menace implicit in the Arabic chant bleeds into the English-language version.

If a chant’s meaning changes according to the other ones being chanted at the same event, the signs being waved, the leader’s general affect, and so on, then today’s chants of “From the river to the sea, Palestine will be free” are not beautiful messages of peace. A voice breaking the calm of a neoclassical quad with harsh cries of “ Intifada, Intifada ” is not a harbinger of harmonious coexistence. “We don’t want two states! We want all of it!” seems especially uncompromising when sung next to snow that’s been stained blood-red with paint. (I imagine that the red snow was meant to allude to the blood of Gazans, but sometimes a symbol means more than it is intended to mean.) Student protesters often say that all they want is for the killing to stop. That may well be true. But that is not what they’re chanting, or how they’re chanting it.

Word Salad answers for Tea Time #77, May 16th

W ord Salad tasks players with conjuring themed words from a letter grid, and the Daily Game gives you a new word game challenge to undertake every single morning.

While perhaps not as challenging as something like Strands , it's still tough to crack the game some days, and that's why having the answers here waiting for you can save you in those moments when your streak looks to be slipping away.

Word Salad Daily hints for today

Even with the new theme every day it can still prove difficult to find all of the answers. You don't always want to have it simply revealed though, and that's where it helps to have a nudge in the right direction.

With today's hint being 'Tea Time' , here are hints for the seven answers:

• 6 letters, starting with 'G'
• 6 letters, starting with 'H'
• 8 letters, starting with 'E' and 'G'
• 5 letters, starting with 'G'
• 7 letters, starting with 'J'

This still leaves things quite vague though, so if you're still feeling stumped then worry not as I've laid it all out for you below to ensure that you can move on without losing your streak!

Today's Word Salad Daily #77 answers

Here are the five answers that you'll need to finish today's Daily Word Salad puzzle for May 16th, 2024 , under the theme of 'On The Timetable':

You'll still need to find them on the grid, of course, which can prove quite challenging in of itself - but knowing what to look for certainly makes things a lot easier in the long run. Furthermore, letters that can't be used anymore will also be removed, so if you can't spot one initially you should be able to find it as you pick out more words.

When does Word Salad reset?

A new daily game will become available at midnight in your local time zone , so make sure to check back in at that time or whenever you wake up in order to complete it and keep your streak going.

It's also super easy to go back and complete previous puzzles that you've not yet done, as there are old Daily games, alongside themed ones for Geography, Natural World, and US Sports if you've got a particular interest in those subjects.

How to play Word Salad

Word Salad presents you with a 4x4 grid with jumbled letters , and tasks you with finding all of the theme-related words hidden within . Themes can range from topics like 'Planets' to 'Zoo Animals' and 'Sports', so you'll definitely need to stay alert to catch all of the relevant words.

One neat trick is that letters that can no longer be used will disappear , making the game easier as you find new words, which I definitely appreciate down the line. This, theoretically, stops you from getting stuck on that final word - but don't be lulled into a false sense of security as it can still be tricky!

Furthermore, you can play the game either on the official website or through the dedicated app , giving you options if you prefer staying up to date on either platform. Do be warned though as streaks don't carry over between the two, so make sure to stick to the one place if you care about keeping it alive.

Now that you've got today's Word Salad answers, why not head over to our dedicated word games homepage too? We've got the answers for other titles like Connections , Spotle , and Conexo - letting you stay on top of your daily routines with ease.

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Illness took away her voice. AI created a replica she carries in her phone

A team of Rhode Island doctors show that artificial intelligence voice-cloning technology that has triggered widespread fears of misuse, can be tremendously helpful to some people. (AP Video: Rodrique Ngowi) The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archives. AP is solely responsible for all content.

Alexis Bogan, whose speech was impaired by a brain tumor, uses an AI powered smartphone app to create a audible drink order at a Starbucks drive-thru on Monday, April 29, 2024, in Lincoln, R.I. The app converts her typed entries into a verbal message created using her original voice. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

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Alexis Bogan types a response to a reporter’s question with an app which approximates her lost voice, Thursday, March 11, 2024, at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, R.I. Doctors treating Bogan, whose speech was impaired by a brain tumor, used a voice-cloning tool from OpenAI to recreate her previous voice. (AP Photo/Josh Reynolds)

Alexis Bogan, whose speech was impaired by a brain tumor, uses mobile phone with an app that features a voice-cloning tool to order a drink at a Starbucks drive-thru Monday, April 29, 2024, in Lincoln, R.I. Doctors treating Bogan are recreating her original voice using a voice-cloning tool from OpenAI. (AP Photo/Steven Senne)

Dr. Rohaid Ali plays a video from a high school project made by his patient Alexis Bogan on Thursday, March 11, 2024, at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, R.I. Doctors treating Bogan, whose speech was impaired by a brain tumor, used the recorded sample of her speech and a voice-cloning tool from OpenAI to recreate her previous voice. Neurosurgeon Dr. Konstantina Svokos, right, looks on. (AP Photo/Josh Reynolds)

Alexis Bogan, center, and her mother Pamela Bogan, right, react to hearing a recreation of her lost voice from a prompt typed by Dr. Fatima Mirza, left, on Thursday, March 11, 2024, at Rhode Island Hospital in Providence, R.I. Doctors treating Bogan, who’s speech was impaired by a brain tumor, used a voice-cloning tool from OpenAI to recreate her previous voice. (AP Photo/Josh Reynolds)

PROVIDENCE, R.I. (AP) — The voice Alexis “Lexi” Bogan had before last summer was exuberant.

She loved to belt out Taylor Swift and Zach Bryan ballads in the car. She laughed all the time — even while corralling misbehaving preschoolers or debating politics with friends over a backyard fire pit. In high school, she was a soprano in the chorus.

Then that voice was gone.

Doctors in August removed a life-threatening tumor lodged near the back of her brain. When the breathing tube came out a month later, Bogan had trouble swallowing and strained to say “hi” to her parents. Months of rehabilitation aided her recovery, but her speech is still impaired. Friends, strangers and her own family members struggle to understand what she is trying to tell them.

In April, the 21-year-old got her old voice back. Not the real one, but a voice clone generated by artificial intelligence that she can summon from a phone app. Trained on a 15-second time capsule of her teenage voice — sourced from a cooking demonstration video she recorded for a high school project — her synthetic but remarkably real-sounding AI voice can now say almost anything she wants.

She types a few words or sentences into her phone and the app instantly reads it aloud.

“Hi, can I please get a grande iced brown sugar oat milk shaken espresso,” said Bogan’s AI voice as she held the phone out her car’s window at a Starbucks drive-thru.

Experts have warned that rapidly improving AI voice-cloning technology can amplify phone scams, disrupt democratic elections and violate the dignity of people — living or dead — who never consented to having their voice recreated to say things they never spoke.

It’s been used to produce deepfake robocalls to New Hampshire voters mimicking President Joe Biden. In Maryland, authorities recently charged a high school athletic director with using AI to generate a fake audio clip of the school’s principal making racist remarks.

But Bogan and a team of doctors at Rhode Island’s Lifespan hospital group believe they’ve found a use that justifies the risks. Bogan is one of the first people — the only one with her condition — who have been able to recreate a lost voice with OpenAI’s new Voice Engine. Some other AI providers, such as the startup ElevenLabs, have tested similar technology for people with speech impediments and loss — including a lawyer who now uses her voice clone in the courtroom.

“We’re hoping Lexi’s a trailblazer as the technology develops,” said Dr. Rohaid Ali, a neurosurgery resident at Brown University’s medical school and Rhode Island Hospital. Millions of people with debilitating strokes, throat cancer or neurogenerative diseases could benefit, he said.

“We should be conscious of the risks, but we can’t forget about the patient and the social good,” said Dr. Fatima Mirza, another resident working on the pilot. “We’re able to help give Lexi back her true voice and she’s able to speak in terms that are the most true to herself.”

Mirza and Ali, who are married, caught the attention of ChatGPT-maker OpenAI because of their previous research project at Lifespan using the AI chatbot to simplify medical consent forms for patients. The San Francisco company reached out while on the hunt earlier this year for promising medical applications for its new AI voice generator.

Bogan was still slowly recovering from surgery. The illness started last summer with headaches, blurry vision and a droopy face, alarming doctors at Hasbro Children’s Hospital in Providence. They discovered a vascular tumor the size of a golf ball pressing on her brain stem and entangled in blood vessels and cranial nerves.

“It was a battle to get control of the bleeding and get the tumor out,” said pediatric neurosurgeon Dr. Konstantina Svokos.

The tumor’s location and severity coupled with the complexity of the 10-hour surgery damaged Bogan’s control of her tongue muscles and vocal cords, impeding her ability to eat and talk, Svokos said.

“It’s almost like a part of my identity was taken when I lost my voice,” Bogan said.

The feeding tube came out this year. Speech therapy continues, enabling her to speak intelligibly in a quiet room but with no sign she will recover the full lucidity of her natural voice.

“At some point, I was starting to forget what I sounded like,” Bogan said. “I’ve been getting so used to how I sound now.”

Whenever the phone rang at the family’s home in the Providence suburb of North Smithfield, she would push it over to her mother to take her calls. She felt she was burdening her friends whenever they went to a noisy restaurant. Her dad, who has hearing loss, struggled to understand her.

Back at the hospital, doctors were looking for a pilot patient to experiment with OpenAI’s technology.

“The first person that came to Dr. Svokos’ mind was Lexi,” Ali said. “We reached out to Lexi to see if she would be interested, not knowing what her response would be. She was game to try it out and see how it would work.”

Bogan had to go back a few years to find a suitable recording of her voice to “train” the AI system on how she spoke. It was a video in which she explained how to make a pasta salad.

Her doctors intentionally fed the AI system just a 15-second clip. Cooking sounds make other parts of the video imperfect. It was also all that OpenAI needed — an improvement over previous technology requiring much lengthier samples.

They also knew that getting something useful out of 15 seconds could be vital for any future patients who have no trace of their voice on the internet. A brief voicemail left for a relative might have to suffice.

When they tested it for the first time, everyone was stunned by the quality of the voice clone. Occasional glitches — a mispronounced word, a missing intonation — were mostly imperceptible. In April, doctors equipped Bogan with a custom-built phone app that only she can use.

“I get so emotional every time I hear her voice,” said her mother, Pamela Bogan, tears in her eyes.

“I think it’s awesome that I can have that sound again,” added Lexi Bogan, saying it helped “boost my confidence to somewhat where it was before all this happened.”

She now uses the app about 40 times a day and sends feedback she hopes will help future patients. One of her first experiments was to speak to the kids at the preschool where she works as a teaching assistant. She typed in “ha ha ha ha” expecting a robotic response. To her surprise, it sounded like her old laugh.

She’s used it at Target and Marshall’s to ask where to find items. It’s helped her reconnect with her dad. And it’s made it easier for her to order fast food.

Bogan’s doctors have started cloning the voices of other willing Rhode Island patients and hope to bring the technology to hospitals around the world. OpenAI said it is treading cautiously in expanding the use of Voice Engine, which is not yet publicly available.

A number of smaller AI startups already sell voice-cloning services to entertainment studios or make them more widely available. Most voice-generation vendors say they prohibit impersonation or abuse, but they vary in how they enforce their terms of use.

“We want to make sure that everyone whose voice is used in the service is consenting on an ongoing basis,” said Jeff Harris, OpenAI’s lead on the product. “We want to make sure that it’s not used in political contexts. So we’ve taken an approach of being very limited in who we’re giving the technology to.”

Harris said OpenAI’s next step involves developing a secure “voice authentication” tool so that users can replicate only their own voice. That might be “limiting for a patient like Lexi, who had sudden loss of her speech capabilities,” he said. “So we do think that we’ll need to have high-trust relationships, especially with medical providers, to give a little bit more unfettered access to the technology.”

Bogan has impressed her doctors with her focus on thinking about how the technology could help others with similar or more severe speech impediments.

“Part of what she has done throughout this entire process is think about ways to tweak and change this,” Mirza said. “She’s been a great inspiration for us.”

While for now she must fiddle with her phone to get the voice engine to talk, Bogan imagines an AI voice engine that improves upon older remedies for speech recovery — such as the robotic-sounding electrolarynx or a voice prosthesis — in melding with the human body or translating words in real time.

She’s less sure about what will happen as she grows older and her AI voice continues to sound like she did as a teenager. Maybe the technology could “age” her AI voice, she said.

For now, “even though I don’t have my voice fully back, I have something that helps me find my voice again,” she said.

The Associated Press and OpenAI have a licensing and technology agreement that allows OpenAI access to part of AP’s text archives.

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Fresh Green: A Salad Lover's Guide Kindle Edition

Embark on a journey through the vibrant world of salads with "Fresh Greens: A Salad Lover's Guide." Dive into a treasure trove of recipes, tips, and techniques designed to elevate your salad game and transform simple greens into culinary masterpieces.

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Frank Bruni

When donald trump met hannibal lecter.

By Frank Bruni

Mr. Bruni is a contributing Opinion writer who was on the staff of The Times for more than 25 years.

How many of your acquaintances have been eaten by an immigrant who crossed the U.S. border illegally? How many such cases have you read or heard about?

I’m going to go out on a limb — the botanical kind, not the sort that a cannibal might call dinner — and guess zero. I’m also going to guess that a few of you are wondering if I’ve lost my mind. It’s the right worry, directed at the wrong person.

Donald Trump is the one who should be drawing your concern.

Although he has always allowed himself the loopiest of digressions, frequently babbled pure nonsense and found metaphors in strange and sinister places, a new oratorical preoccupation of his suggests a doubling of the bats in his belfry.

On numerous occasions, including a speech last weekend in Wildwood, N.J., Trump has swerved from the accusation that other countries are dumping criminals and institutionalized psychiatric patients on us to mentions of the fictional serial killer Hannibal Lecter, a.k.a. Hannibal the Cannibal. You know, from “The Silence of the Lambs.” The character who once ate the liver of an impertinent census worker “ with some fava beans and a nice Chianti .” A role that won Anthony Hopkins an Oscar.

Trump is apparently implying that illegal immigration puts such monsters in our midst . But the “apparently” in that last sentence bears a load heavier than Atlas’s, because Trump’s remarks in New Jersey grew odder even than that lurid specter. After introducing Lecter, Trump celebrated him — as if he were a real person, as if we should be impressed by his hunger. Here’s Trump:

Has anyone ever seen “The Silence of the Lambs”? The late, great Hannibal Lecter. He’s a wonderful man. He oftentimes would have a friend for dinner. Remember the last scene? “Excuse me, I’m about to have a friend for dinner,” as this poor doctor walked by. “I’m about to have a friend for dinner.” But Hannibal Lecter. Congratulations. The late, great Hannibal Lecter.

Where to begin? In that scene, “this poor doctor” is being marked for murder and mastication, so where do the “congratulations” come in? Heck, why not “bon appétit”? And in the novels and movies that have featured Lecter, he has never died, so why is he “late” (not to mention “great”)? If Trump is being sarcastic, well, that doesn’t come through, and if he’s doing some MAGA version of stand-up, well, it stinks. Besides which, the staccato sentences, the free association: They constitute something much less controlled, and they raise doubts about Trump’s very coherence.

That should be getting more serious attention than it is.

Trump’s legal travails and courtroom antics have to some extent obscured his performances on the stump, where his overwrought descriptions of the United States as a wasteland besieged by crime and overrun by migrants have traveled far beyond the “American carnage” of his 2017 inauguration speech, and where his proposed remedies have grown more severe. “Very simply, if you rob a store, you can fully expect to be shot as you are leaving that store,” Trump told one crowd late last year. He was speaking not of some multimillion-dollar bank heist. He was referring to shoplifters.

I strongly recommend a recent article by Charles Homans in The Times Magazine, “ Donald Trump Has Never Sounded Like This .” It establishes that Trump’s words of late are both meaner in a real way and surreal in a meaningful way. He gets a pass for that: The hyperabundance of his gibberish and relentlessness of his provocations incline many listeners to file even his weirdest and wildest musings under Trump being Trump.

But if our current president went on a tangent about how Pennywise, the child-killing clown in “It,” makes for a creative solution to the difficulty of finding an available babysitter on a Saturday night, few political observers would shrug it off as Biden being Biden. Trump’s supporters would demand a brain scan. They’d insist on a full cognitive work-up. I wouldn’t fault them.

But I’d ask them to listen hard when Trump moons over a maniac who turned his victims into victuals. And to feel an appropriate stab of indigestion.

For the Love of Sentences

During the two weeks since my previous newsletter, many journalists deftly mined a bountiful new lode of prose possibilities. I mean Kristi Noem, the South Dakota governor and the assassin not only of a dog named Cricket and a supposedly smelly goat but also of her own political ambitions.

In The Washington Post, Ron Charles reviewed her lavishly maligned new memoir, “No Going Back”: “Far too many people have been obsessing about Noem’s fantastical tête-à-tête with North Korean dictator Kim Jong-un. Come on — who among us hasn’t mistakenly believed that we once faced down the leader of the Hermit Kingdom? As I told Joseph Stalin, ‘We all make mistakes.’” Charles added that Noem’s, er, writing process was mostly the sloppy retrieval of “conservative maxims, like a fistful of old coins and buttons found between the stained cushions in a MAGA lounge.” (Thanks to Susan Alexander of Sequim, Wash., and Leonard and Gail Davenport of Greenport, N.Y., among many others, for spotlighting Charles’s words.)

Also in The Post, Kathleen Parker mulled the fitting manner in which Noem made her apparent bid to become Trump’s running mate. “When a politician writes a book and gets veneers,” Parker observed, “she’s probably hoping to do some victory smiling as sidekick to a reality-show scowler who pays hush money to porn actresses. They’re a match made in the tanning booth.” (Mark Van Loon, Hamilton, Mont., and Vicki Sterling Johnson, Springfield, Mo.)

In The Los Angeles Times, Robin Abcarian noted that Noem, Marjorie Taylor Greene and Sarah Palin, among others, conform to a certain MAGA model for women leaders: “First, they want to prove how tough they are by shooting guns, preferably at animals, though occasionally at cars that Democrats drive. And second, they aspire to beauty standards set by Fox News anchors. Dental veneers. Cheek and lip fillers. Botox. Hair extensions. Performative cruelty and pouty lips are what it takes to succeed as a woman in the party of Trump.” (Judy Moise, Seattle)

And in The New York Times, Michelle Cottle surveyed the range of Noem’s dreams: “On top of pursuing the V.P. slot, she has been gunning to replace Wayne LaPierre as top dog at the National Rifle Association (Boom! Double pun!).” (Michael Silk, Laguna Woods, Calif., and Leonard Naymark, Toronto, among others)

Let’s move on from Noem but stick with politics before lightening up a bunch.

In Slate, Justin Peters contemplated history: “Spinning alleged campus excesses into a broader political narrative of liberal chaos and disorder has been a favorite conservative tactic since at least the late 1960s, when Main Street disapproval of the youth-driven protests over the Vietnam War helped to narrowly deliver the 1968 presidential election to an anthropomorphic sheet of sandpaper named Richard Nixon.” (Denise Showers, Janesville, Wis., and Sue Roberts, Boston)

In The Atlantic, Tom Nichols gaped anew at our country’s flight from truth and reason: “Democracies have always had conspiracy theorists and other cranks wandering about the public square, sneezing and coughing various forms of weirdness on their fellow citizens. But even in the recent past, most people with a basic level of education and a healthy dollop of common sense had no trouble resisting the contagion of idiocy.” (Tom Grasso, Somerville, Mass.)

While I don’t typically showcase words spoken in interviews, I couldn’t resist sharing what the law and ethics expert Norm Eisen, in a guest appearance on the “Pod Save America” podcast, called Trump’s courtroom slouching: “the scoliosis of justice.” (Michael Chaskes, Los Angeles)

In The Times, J Wortham studied Brittney Griner’s technique and admired “the way she lifts the ball over the rim and into the net as gently as if she were returning a lost child to a parent.” (Ann Davenport, Olmué, Chile, and Kate Kavanagh, Concord, Mass.) In a subsequent profile of the actress Jean Smart, J distilled Smart’s character in the show “Hacks”: “Deborah is a workaholic on the verge of bitter, someone who grew tired of being cut and so became a knife.” (Karen Kasnetz, Bedminster, N.J., and Donald Jurney, Amesbury, Mass.)

In The Arizona Republic, Ed Masley appraised a recent Rolling Stones concert and wrote that Mick Jagger’s physicality “invites you to imagine Mikhail Baryshnikov raised by a family of overcaffeinated roosters.” (Paul Welch, Phoenix, and Dan Olson, Spokane, Wash., among others)

In The Guardian, Jay Rayner visited Public House, a new restaurant in Paris, and savaged a lobster pie that was awfully light on lobster: “We push vegetables aside in desperate search of tail meat. It’s ‘Finding Nemo,’ only without a redemption arc.” (Laurence Mate, Champaign, Ill., and Todd Lowe, Simpsonville, Ky.)

And in The Boston Globe, Kevin Paul Dupont marveled at how sluggish and hapless several players with the Toronto Maple Leafs hockey team were as they lost to the Boston Bruins in overtime: “Ditto for their goalie, backup-turned-starter Ilya Samsonov, who was so buttoned to his goal line as the play unfolded that it’s rumored it took three master tailors from Eastern Clothing until dawn to unstitch him from the ice, toss him in a suit bag, and drag him to the team bus.” (Dan Conti, Concord, Mass.)

To nominate favorite bits of recent writing from The Times or other publications to be mentioned in “For the Love of Sentences,” please email me here and include your name and place of residence.

What I’m Writing, Doing and Reading

“I can recall Sundays when my own nonna, Adelina Bruni, who immigrated to the suburbs of New York City from southern Italy, turned her kitchen or dining room table into a chaos of Italian staples, Italian delicacies and anything in the refrigerator that might plump up the feast and everyone partaking of it. It was like some glutton’s version of a garage sale. She put out a lasagna as inexhaustible as her affection. She put out mozzarella balls, eggplant, calamari, chicken cutlets. It wasn’t so much a thoughtfully coursed meal as an act of emotional blackmail: You couldn’t get up and go home when there were so many cutlets left and a tray of cannoli and biscotti to come. You couldn’t abandon this one sacred space in a week and a life so otherwise frenzied.” That’s from my recent essay for T Magazine on the fading Italian tradition of “il pranzo della domenica,” or Sunday lunch. You can read it here .

In recent weeks I’ve had the privilege of speaking about our political dysfunctions, the degradation of our civic culture and how we could pivot in a better direction at events in Chicago, Philadelphia, New York and other cities. I still have a few more such engagements tied to my latest book, “ The Age of Grievance .” I’ll be in Washington on Saturday afternoon (details here ); near my Chapel Hill, N.C., home on May 23 (details here ) and back in New York, at Trinity Church Wall Street, on May 30 (details here ). This information in addition to articles about the book and recent interviews I’ve done can be found on my website .

I relish articles that give underappreciated artists and entertainers the recognition they deserve, and I’m especially happy when I learn that these people have enjoyed immense respect from — and have had enormous influence on — their peers. Adrienne LaFrance’s appraisal of Albert Brooks , published recently in The Atlantic, is precisely such a delight.

Retire These Words! (Handcrafted Edition)

We used to make things. Remember those days? No, I’m not referring to an American past in which factory towns abounded and the ratio of manufacturing to service jobs in our economy was different — though my first sentence was the kind that often commences such a lament. I’m talking about language. I’m talking about a less precious era in which we shared the fact that we’d made a piece of furniture or a beer, not “crafted” it. When we didn’t put a crown of self-congratulation atop every project.

That’s what “crafted” does. “Handcrafted,” too — it’s a tiara with an extra smattering of jewels.

One of my earliest encounters with the “crafted” craze was at a sandwich shop around the corner from where I used to live on the Upper West Side of Manhattan. Originally called Lenny’s Gourmet before it sprouted more locations and renamed itself Lenwich, the shop touted “hand crafted” sandwiches. And that confused me, for two reasons.

One, I pretty much assumed that human fingers — index, thumb, maybe even pinkie — had a significant part in putting together my chicken salad sub. I didn’t need confirmation. Two, I was hard-pressed to spot or imagine the elaborate craft in that chicken salad sub. It was, after all, a chicken salad sub, not a patchwork quilt or a wheel-thrown coffee mug. Its maker — excuse me, crafter — merged meat, condiments and doughy cradle and called it a day. Or, rather, a lunch.

Surfing the net the other morning, I happened upon a caterer advertising a “crafted array of artisan sandwiches.” Made with love, I’m sure, but also with a surfeit of self-regard. “Artisanal” usually subs for “handcrafted” or vice versa, one or the other appearing on labels and in promotional literature for blankets, bourbons, bonbons. But sometimes the terms team up, staging a vanity fair. For example, Pottery Barn sells an “indigo artisan handcrafted bowl.” It’s $99, but then artisanal handicrafting doesn’t come cheap, especially in indigo.

The furniture and bedding company Saatva wants us to know that “every Saatva mattress is handcrafted,” a boast it makes on its website just two sentences away from the assurance that “we deliver it factory-fresh.”

This newsletter, I’ll have you know, is laptop-fresh, and it has been handcrafted by yours truly. Picture me stitching every syllable in needlepoint. Call it artisanal exposition.

“Retire These Words!” is an occasional feature about overused, badly used or just plain annoying language. To suggest a term or phrase, please email me here , and please include your name and place of residence.

Frank Bruni is a professor of journalism and public policy at Duke University, the author of the book "The Age of Grievance" and a contributing Opinion writer. He writes a weekly email newsletter .   Instagram   Threads   @ FrankBruni • Facebook