It seems White House press officials are accused of altering what Biden said by adding an apostrophe to his garbage remarks, changing “supporters” to “supporter’s”, thereby altering the garbage part from referring to people who support t to what one of his supporters said. All hail the power of an apostrophe!
My question is how would a transcriber know whether there should be an apostrophe there or not. If you look at the grammar of the sentence and what immediately follows (won’t repeat; it’s in the article), an apostrophe actually makes the grammar correct and fits the context. However apparently the House Repubs are now mulling over whether to launch an investigation. I suppose after listening to t for so long and having their brain meld into his, it’s understandable that they no longer recognize grammar and context.
Furthermore, I do work where transcripts of things I say are occasionally made, and it’s customary for me to be provided with a draft before it’s finalized to clear up ambiguities like this.
I get that the WH officials may have leapfrogged a step in protocol, but, really, how is this a scandal? (Rhetorical question. I predict it will fizzle fast.)
The media is assuming that this is another “deplorables” moment. I’m not even convinced that had an effect on anyone who’s mind was already made up. In this case, biden says this kind of stuff a fair amount - it was a bigger story with Hillary because she’s usually very careful in how she speaks. And once you’re arguing about which transcript was the original one that the stenographer yadayadatada… you’ve already lost anyone who didn’t have a preset opinion before any of this happened.
It may really have been another “deplorables” moment. I don’t think it’s clear at all.
Better, I think, to have dealt with it by saying “Well then don’t elect Biden!”. Or by using it to distance Harris from Biden, as she’s doing.
But the distancing thing seems to be hypersensitive in some way I’m not getting. All the time Trump spends criticizing the past four years, as if Harris was in charge, I’ve wondered why Harris can’t question whether Pence was in charge the previous four years. Nobody seems to touch that, though.
It’s all nonsense, but I gotta say making sure that apostrophe was there was pretty quick thinking and a brilliant bit of spin! Great way to make a gaffe less gaffey-looking.
It’s stupid for many reasons, one of which is that any stylistic/semantic review of how Biden talks about people would show that he doesn’t refer to people this way. OTOH, 45 donning his garbage collector costume reinforces a narrative that he will throw out garbage [people].
ETA: Can’t we spell it Apos’trophegate or Apostrophe’gate to emphasize its stupidity?
Were Biden’s remarks awkward and easily misunderstood? Sure. But it’s also easy to deduce that the way his comment came off was unintentional. Biden has no record of using rhetoric to disparage American voters he disagrees with, and his rhetorical style is to emphasize unity and what binds people together. What Biden does have a record of doing is misspeaking, speaking unclearly and confusingly shifting course midsentence. In fact, the sharp increase in his career-long tendency to generate gaffes, due to apparent age-related decline, is a reason he’s not running for re-election. It is reasonable to assume that he didn’t mean to trash Trump supporters, and to take his immediate clarification in good faith .
That hasn’t stopped Republicans from freaking out over the statement and acting as if Biden’s comments were worse than Hinchcliffe’s. Vance said at a rally in defense of Hinchcliffe’s joke, “We have to stop getting so offended at every little thing in the United States of America,” and called Harris’ inability to take a joke a sign that she was not “fit to be the president.” But the next day Vance breathlessly condemned Biden’s gaffe as a “disgusting” attack on half the country and said, “There’s no excuse for this.” Former President Donald Trump argued that Biden’s remarks were “worse” than “deplorables,” a reference to then-Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton’s 2016 reference to half of Trump’s supporters as belonging in a “basket of deplorables.” (Clinton later apologized.)
How convenient it is to have the collective dissonance to claim that Biden is in terminal dementia and can’t utter a coherent statement in one breath, and then that he intentionally and with malice aforethought insulted Trump supporters to try to intimidate them into not supporting him.
Also, while I don’t think Biden legitimately intended to call Trump supporters “garbage”, he accidentally made a completely true observation. I’ve tried to give people who supported Trump, reluctantly or otherwise, the benefit of the doubt that they just haven’t really listened to him, or are disaffected and frustrated, or are just part of a mass delusion that somehow Trump will make good on promises to bring back jobs and make critical pharmaceuticals affordable. But they’ve had eight years to not only realize that he has done none of these things (nor even really followed up on his more odious promises and threats) but that he has fully evidenced a naked desire to be an authoritarian and undermine not only established democratic norms but the Constitution itself, and if that means that a few million people get herded into concentration camps, that pregnant women carrying non-viable fetuses have their lives put in jeopardy due to some hyper-radicalized agenda against abortion in any case, that he persecutes political opponents and silences critics, that we gut public education and let religious nutters take over with an anti-science and counterfactual history agenda, that we abandon our strategic partners in upholding democracy and limiting armed conflict in Europe, and that we end up tanking the American economy while being completely obtuse to ecological impacts and the sustainment of our critical industries and agricultural systems, well, you gotta break a few eggs to burn an omelet, amirite?
Trump supporters are garbage, supporting a trash-mouthed candidate whose only ‘policy planks’ are demonizing immigrants, undermining public trust in one of most secure election systems in history, and insulting and not just occasionally threatening to arrest or promoting bodily harm to his detractors and political opponents. Even if Biden didn’t mean to say it that way, he got it absolutely right.
Yes. I read transcripts all the time that have what from context is clearly a transcription error where the transcriber typed a homophone of the word the person actually said. It would be like seeing a transcription that said “These people need help, they’re out in the snow in their bear feet,” and arguing that the speaker must have dementia to think that people had bear feet.
The transcripts I read have a step like that as well, but they are often hundreds of pages long, so the review is usually cursory at best. People rely on the transcriber having legal transcription training and/or experience to know what word fits the context. I’ve read a couple of transcripts where it was immediately apparent that the transcriber lacked that, and the transcripts were nearly useless nonsense.
I think in this case, the transcriber should have included the apostrophe because the word was followed by a singular pronoun. If the transcriber was not sure, they should have asked the speaker which word they said. * And since neither of those things happened, the supervisor who was unavailable to approve the change should be doing a bit more mea culpa alongside the complaining about the failure of the press office to follow protocol.
It’s probably also protocol to ask the speaker which word they said before making something the person may or may not have said the official record.
It’s not the word they “intended.” It’s what they actually said.
To steelman the narrative, it’s more like Biden had a senior moment and accidentally said what he actually thinks.
I’m optimistic this won’t work because going back decades biden has been really unfiltered. I don’t think this’ll resonate any more than “if you don’t vote for me you ain’t black” or anything else. Literally the last time I personally heard him talk he was (deservedly) insulting the media.
