 I'm a linguist. I've been working on political language, writing about political language for a very long time. And this cycle is obviously very interesting. It's not easy to say how much this election is a one-off and how much it signals a real sea change, either ideologically or linguistically. Is it a black crow or just a gray one? But I do think it's clear that whatever happens in November, we're not going to go back to the same kind of political discourse that's been dominant for the last 40 or 50 years. It isn't just a matter of phraseology, though it's true that we're hearing lesser phrases like big government and traditional values, but that's partly because Trump isn't really cut from the standard conservative mold, partly because everybody's focused on personalities rather than issues. But it's also because the election has brought home the growing fissures in the coalitions of the right and of the left. You can hear this in the way people talk about race and gender. On the right, things have gotten cruder, more explicit. I think of the revival of the Nixon-era dog whistle, law and order. That's a phrase that somehow gathers inner-city blacks, Mexicans, and Muslims together into this single dusky menace. And on the left, people are allowing themselves to talk about racism and sexism more directly than in most recent times. People used to be called racially insensitive now. People on the left are allowing themselves to say they're racist. I have to say, though, that the most significant shifts in political discourse are really tonal. Public and private used to be these very distinct settings, but that line's been blurring for a long time and technology's obviously accelerated the process. True. Now, Trump is an outlier here. Never mind how he talks about race. Just listen to him label his adversaries with schoolyard epithets like stupid and loser. Those are words that not even Harry Truman used that way. Not in public life. They're the sorts of things you use in exchanges with your friends. But a lot of people hear that as a mark of candor and authenticity. And it's really just a marked example of the pervasive way the language of private chatter has bubbled up into public exposure. I sometimes get the feeling that all of political discourse has become just one long comments thread.