Is Trump a Man?

Is Minority President Trump a man? 

Words have meaning, of course, and “man” has many meanings. Sometimes it’s an interjection, as in “Man! Did you hear what that President Goofy just said?” In other circumstances “man”  can mean “boss.”  (I’m working for the man, every night and day.) “Man” is what Wittgenstein called a family resemblance word, one with a variety of loosely related usages. 

“Man” is a descendent of the old English “mann,” which meant “a human person.” About a thousand years ago, that changed to “adult male.” In the United States it became “adult white male.” But a chess piece is also a man. “Man” can be a verb, as in manning a destroyer, and some of the men will be women. You man up to fortify yourself, and so on. 

Science claims that some examples of the category “man” are recognized as more central than others. Donald Trump clearly has several attributes of men. He has lungs. He has hair on his back, some of which has been transplanted to his head and dyed the color of urine. On the other hand, his vocabulary is so small as to be sub-human, and it contains non-words like “bigly.” Restricted to a meager hundred words, he repeats them like a parrot. “My day was great. It was really great. The Mormons I met were great people. I love Mormons. Many told me my speech was great. The fake news won’t say it was great.”

As I understand it, categories like “man” have central members. Minority President Trump is robotic, too stiff to meet the main definition of a man, but we have to give him this: he’s a fringe member of the category, nearly a person, the kind linguists and linguistic philosophers call a nutty creamsicle.