JD Vance is a strange man. We have ample evidence of this—consider the way the man orders doughnuts and his need to drag his vegetarian wife to a campaign stop at a butcher shop. But perhaps Vance’s strangeness is never more in evidence than when he opens his mouth and starts talking. About anything.
Apparently Vance’s inability to simply express himself in normal terms is a real phenomenon, and it’s not distinct to Vance himself. It’s called “white guy vocabulary,” and TikToker meggy_mcthicc is here to help us understand it.
“It’s when white dudes, usually of a certain socioeconomic class, use a vocabulary that is a lot of syllables, but they clearly don’t actually know what the words mean,” she explains. “They just string these big syllable words together in a way that makes it seem like they know what they’re talking about.”
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I mean…bingo! Where was this information before now?
Obviously we’ve seen this effect with so many men in positions of power. Anyone who’s heard Elon Musk talk (or seen him tweet) has to wonder how this man got people to invest money in any of his ventures, and Trump himself famously has a weird, wandering speech style that gets less coherent the more you try to actually parse what he’s saying.
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But with Vance, we’re seeing something different. He may have learned how to talk pretty one day at Harvard, but because of his complete and total lack of charisma, it’s not having the impact it might have in someone who’s a slightly more convincing snake oil salesman.
“The speed at which [these men] are exposed as frauds is hilarious,” Meggy explains. It’s true: JD Vance was seen as a silly jerk before he joined the Trump ticket. Now that he’s having to speak on actual issues, he’s constantly putting his foot in his mouth. Childless single cat ladies was clearly just the beginning.
“He actually thinks he’s smart,” Meggy says. “He thinks that the white guy vocabulary makes him smart.”
But clearly most people—and hopefully voters in swing states—know the difference.