An especially good episode of the BBC Radio 4 podcast Word of Mouth: “Lying,” with Michael Rosen, Laura Wright, and guest Dawn Archer, professor of pragmatics and corpus linguistics. Listen to this twenty-eight-minute conversation (which does not touch upon politics) and then consider, say, the following:
“Well, I don’t know him. I don’t know Parnas, other than I guess I had pictures taken, which I do with thousands of people, including people today that I didn’t meet — but, just met ’em. I don’t know him at all, don’t know what he’s about, don’t know where he comes from, know nothing about him. . . . I don’t even know who this man is, other than I guess he attended fundraisers. So I take a picture with him. I’m in a room, I take pictures with people. I take thousands and thousands of pictures with people all the time, thousands during the course of a year. . . . No, I don’t know him; perhaps he’s a fine man, perhaps he’s not. I know nothing about him. . . . I don’t know him; I don’t believe I’ve ever spoken to him. I don’t believe I’ve ever spoken to him. I meet thousands of people. I meet thousands and thousands of people as president. I take thousands of pictures, and I do it openly and I do it gladly, and then, if I have a picture where I’m standing with somebody at a fundraiser, like I believe I saw a picture with this man. But I don’t know him; I never had a conversation that I remember with him.”[My transcription and ellipses.]
comments: 4
This would be either a very easy or an insanely difficult candidate for a “How to improve writing” post (or in this case speaking).
Steven
As Zippy would say, Yow! The only problem is that to improve it would be to better lie.
I don't know that it could be improved upon, it is such perfect lying hash, with lying gravy on top, sprinkled with crispy fried lies.
Frex = Fresca
Other than the imbecilic repetition, this is probably the most coherent transcription of him speaking that I’ve ever read.
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