“If Trump and Harris were forced to eat their words, at least they’d have plenty of fiber in their diets,” writes Frank Bruni, longtime New York Times contributing writer and professor at Duke University (online Opinion, 10/31/24). Those in the media have accused both candidates of tossing up their version of word salad, and thousands of references have appeared in recent Google searches about the current political scene.

For Bruni, there is no comparison between Harris’ “semantic slaloms” and occasional evasive and digressive answers and Trump’s “verbal incontinence” and “twisted journeys across random subjects with scant connection.”

Continues Bruni, "Adjust your diction diet. Why can't Harris be cooking up a word bouillabaisse? ... Why can't Trump be gorging on shepherd's pie of jumbled verbal ingredients?"

Bruni is correct. The term is not only overused, but it also does not apply. And while each candidate may seem "green in judgment" to their critics, as Shakespeare's Cleopatra described her "salad days" (1608), neither Harris nor Trump exhibits speech that exemplifies word salad, which is a specific type of thought disorder.

It has a history long enough to have wilted by now. Present-day journalists and pundits may be using the term metaphorically. They should appreciate, however, that they are misappropriating a technical term from the annals of psychiatry that is still in use by mental health clinicians today.

Reportedly, the expression was first used in 1894 at the May meeting of the Association of German Alienists and Neurologists.

Specialists who treated those with “mental alienation” were alienists, who believed that all mental disorders resulted from brain lesions.

Though the word psychiatre was introduced in France in the early 19th century, its use did not become widespread until the beginning of the 20th century when it replaced the term alieniste (Bogousslavsky and Moulin, 2009).

It was at this 1894 meeting that Dr. Emil Kraepelin, a German professor of psychiatry famous for his classification of mental patients, described “a peculiar group of insane patients, who among other distressing symptoms, exhibited the most striking phenomenon,” a tendency to coin new words and “drop into a meaningless........

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