What would you do if we were having lunch and talking about immigration policy, and I said to you, “Let me be very clear. I’m aware of what we need to do in order to do the things we need to do around the important issue of immigration, in America, which is to listen to the American people about their hopes, and dreams, and aspirations, and ambitions, around what we need to do to fix the broken border”?
Or, try this. Say we were riding on a commuter train together talking about mortgage rates, and you asked me what interest rate I paid on my first mortgage. In response, pretend I said, “Look. I grew up in a middle class family. I know small businesses and their hopes and dreams. My mother worked very hard–we knew all the small businesses and how much they meant.”
You might pick up your phone and search out the signs of a stroke and ask me to tell you what day and year it was. Or, you might wonder if I’d been spiking my Diet Coke from a flask of Smirnoff.
But no! I wouldn’t be having a stroke, and I wouldn’t have been nipping vodka on the train. Instead, I was speaking to you in a new language called “Kamalese.” It’s the native tongue of the current vice president and the Democrat party’s nominee for the White House. Kamalese is a modern creole language that one woman has fashioned from the PowerPoint decks in San Francisco office towers (and, some say, with a little chemical help).
It’s a variation on corporate and academic-speak. Full of sound and fury but signifying nothing, Kamalese is composed mainly of filler words that do not refer to specific subjects. Instead, the speaker aims to leave the listener somewhere between confused and uncomfortable so they won’t ask any too-specific questions.
For a gourmand’s sampling of Kamalese, check out this collection from The Conservateur.
We all know academic and policy-wonk-speak. You don’t say, “Children are going hungry,” you say, “Youth in the United States of America don’t have access to nutritional resources.” You don’t talk about homeless people who die of exposure from sleeping on the streets in winter, you speak of “Unfortunate outcomes of those experiencing homelessness and lack of weather-abatement resources.”
The thing about corporate-speak and Kamalese is that everyone knows it’s a bunch of bullshit. Except Ally Sammarco.
Sammarco is a Democrat strategist and political consultant at ARS Media. And according to her, Miss Kam-Kam actually sounds like a super-smart lady, and we’re all just stupid for hearing word salad.
No. Really:
Oh, dear. Let’s see what other X users had to say. Here’s Mollie Hemmingway:
Aaaaaand here comes Miss Sammarco face-planting even harder:
Carmelita here is just straight-trolling.
Ha!
