pogo wrote:I can’t see there being a diplomatic rule against speaking English that people will understand.
It does exist as an unwritten rule. I've heard politicians explicitly talk about it before.
It's not so much about understanding, as cultural sensitivities. Lacking what the Germans call "Sprachgefühl" - literally "language feeling" - it's not so much about using what are technically the right words, as getting the whole surrounding cultural context of the language correct too.
Like if David Cameron went to the South and started using "y'all". Sure, technically correct, as it's just the explicitly plural "you". So, indeed, how are y'all doing? But there are cultural layers to everything and you'd have to be careful in its usage. You don't want to make it look like you're a white foreign guy trying to speak in Ebonics - which could come across if, say, most of your audience is black when you say it. You don't want to come across as a patronising arsehole. Certain words, in the wrong time and place, can quickly become a minefield.
Witness, for example, Hillary mentioning in an interview that she always carries a bottle of hot sauce with her. There have been accusations flying that, as she was doing this interview on "black" radio, that she was trying to pander to black voters.
Thing is, the BBC covered this in an article where they pulled up other articles - from years ago - where the fact that Hillary really does carry around a bottle of hot sauce, as she really does apparently like things spicy, has been covered. She didn't just make it up to appeal to black voters. It's apparently just true. She's a hot sauce fiend, so much so that she carries her own bottle to ensure it's always on hand for any occasion.
Diplomacy is not communication. Communication is communication. Diplomacy is the shrewd and subtle use of that communication to best effect.
Basically, if you think this shit ain't important and doesn't matter, then you're in for a whole world of hurt in the realm of politics.
Indeed, bringing this back to Trump, he's actually a perfectly good communicator. What he's atrocious at is diplomacy. There is, to be fair, plenty of room for interpretation and understanding in what Trump says that not all of it really is necessarily half as bad as it seems. But it's not just what he says, but the way he says it.
You might come back at me there, though, with the fact that Trump gets away with it. But that's a different dynamic. He basically gets away with it, because he so atrociously lacks any grace or diplomacy, it helps with the "not part of the establishment" image he's got that, at the moment, people are responding to because the establishment has fucked us all over and let us down (across the board, but the Banking Crisis is the most obvious inflexion point of where the public's trust of the establishment collapsed that they're now seeking alternatives).
He's actually doing well with those people, exactly because he is so fucking atrociously bad at diplomacy. It says "not establishment" loud and proud. It's because he's so dreadful at it that they like him. Proves his credentials, they feel.
(Though, really, it is objectively rather ridiculous logic. He's a billionaire businessman. In various ways, he's more "corporate establishment" than anyone else there. But his cack-handedness in even the most basic levels of diplomacy actually serves to blind and blinker people from noticing that if your intent is to "stick it to the establishment" then that's Sanders, not Trump.)
"Words ought to be a little wild - for they are assaults of thought on the unthinking."
- John Maynard Keynes
