Trump wants to be the next Zuckerberg as well as the first Emperor of Amurrika.
Donald Trump’s plan to launch “Truth Social”, a special purpose acquisitions backed social media company, early next year may have hit a roadblock after US regulators issued a request for information on the deal on Monday.
The request from the SEC and the Financial Industry Regulatory Authority for information from Digital World Acquisition Corp (DWAC), a blank-check SPAC that is set to merge with Trump Media & Technology Group, comes as a powerful Republican congressman, Devin Nunes, announced he was stepping out of politics to join the Trump media venture as CEO.
The twin developments set the stage for a major political battle over Truth Social, a platform that purportedly plans to challenge Twitter and Facebook, social platforms that have banned or curbed the former president over his involvement in stoking the 6 January Capitol riot.
I think it’s spelled Truth Soshul. That’s how Trump pronounces social, at least.
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14 responses to “Truth Social”
Do you pronounce it any differently?
GW, you and I are both natives of NYC, and some of Trump’s speech patterns that Ophelia complains about seem normal and familiar to me, including matching the way I speak. That might be the case here. I don’t have an audio of Trump saying the word, though.
I looked up British versus American pronunciation of the word, finding no pronunciations that would not be reasonably transcribed “soshul”. If I might guess, all IPA pronunciations I found used the [ə] sound for the last vowel, and it’s possible Trump uses the [ʌ] sound, as a lot of people (well, Americans, NYCians) seem to have trouble distinguishing them.
I remember an arrogantly-titled book, “Dictionary of Misinformation”, that contained some interesting tidbits and some blatantly incorrect items. One of the latter was the idea that there was only one unaccented vowel sound in English. This was based on the idea that English is intelligible if you use [ʌ] for all unaccented vowels. That fact that English can be understood decently doesn’t mean that no other vowel sounds are used, of course, nor does it preclude that English might be more intelligible with better vowel differentiation. Maybe the author was from New York.
Oh, the fun we can have with Trump’s mispronunciations.
“DJINA!”
Trump had a lot of mispronunciations.
Having listened to a recording of multiple instances of him saying “China”, I think your transcription is about right; he voices the initial consonant. I never noticed that before. The rest of the word sounds standard Queens accent to me.
Mispronunciation would be “Yo, Semite”. He did have a bunch of those.
Being banned from twitter and facebook shouldn’t be the only consequences he faces, but the efforts to usurp those successful internet shitholes is a small consolation. As if ‘truth’ and ‘social’ are anything but a complete contradiction to who he is. Good symmetry there, Mr. Dipshit. Yet another venture doomed to fail, brought to you by the Dipshit Organization.
If he says “Soshul” rather than “Soshil” that would be NZ pronunciation, where the short “i” is replaced by a short “u” as in “fush and chups.”
Sackbut @ 2 – I don’t think Trump’s mushmouth version of “social” is NYC or Queens so much as just Trump. Not accent, just not good at saying words. The Cuomo brothers are very New Yawky, whatever their other virtues or vices, and they sound perfectly fine to me.
It’s funny, because Trump talks a lot, so he’s had plenty of practice, but he sounds all wrong. No doubt it’s partly deliberate, but only partly.
This conversation is amusing to me, because when my husband and I first met, I realized he was listening to whether I pronounced things like an Okie. His big bugbear is their tendency to always emphasize the first syllable, such as INsurance.
My mother taught me to talk (not too surprising, right) She was not an Okie. She was from New York, though not NYC. I am often misidentifed as having come from Michigan, maybe because of both the New York and Okie influences, not to mention all the other states that shaped the language of a Navy brat.
Sackbut, Yo Semite is how I first pronounced it when I saw the word. I hadn’t heard it pronounced before. All the students laughed at me. I was embarrassed.
Merriam-Webster (my go-to for words) gives only the [ə] sound for social. I found a site with recordings of [ə] and [^], and I can just barely distinguish them. (English is my native language, parents from Kearny, NJ).
It’s hard it imagine Truth Social succeeding as social media. Many competencies–technical, financial, organizational–are required to make a site like that work. Trump manifestly has none of them, the people he attracts mostly lack them as well, and when competent people do fall into his orbit he drives them away. You can hire people to do things that you can’t, but people that you hire expect to be paid, and Trump’s not good at that, either.
I expect that Truth Social will shamble along for a while as another one of his scams: an engine to extract money from investors and users.
For the soc part or the ial part?
In my view Trump gets the cia part wrong by saying it too wetly and the ial part wrong by saying it too heavily.
Maybe he’s got some partial facial paralysis that slurs his speech?
Yose-mite, personally. I don’t think I heard Yo-seh-mih-tee until I was an adult.
Around the age of 8 or 9 I did a bible reading in church. It must have been during Advent, or possibly Ephphany, hence children doing the readings and the particular verses… Now – I had both read the word Egypt and heard the name of the country many times, but unaccountably had never linked these two unrelated pieces of information together…
To their credit, the Methodists of North Dublin kept straight faces throughout.
Heh.
In my family the pronunciation of “ridiculous” was often “ridicaluss” because at one point when I was little my mother told me how babies are made and I replied with “That’s ridicaluss.” I think all families have toddler joke words of that kind. Eggypot is a very nice one.