As Donald Trump was suggesting, recently, on Truth Social, his new social media platform… that January 6th “represented the greatest movement in the history of our country,” I was thinking of an actor’s alimentary canal, as referenced in an old James Bond movie.
Someone had swallowed something of great value, to prevent others from laying their hands on it, as I recall, and, playing on the word “elementary,” Sean Connery, as James Bond, facetiously told another one of the characters in the film — a certain Dr. Leiter — that recovering the concealed item was “alimentary.”
What the person in the movie had swallowed would, at some point, emerge from the very bottom of the person’s digestive tract.
Other than, perhaps, being a bit messy, getting at the concealed item would be relatively easy.
Thinking back to that decades-old movie, Donald Trump’s “greatest movement” took on an entirely different meaning, one I’m pretty sure the 45th president had not intended.
In the field of psychology, that’s ‘word association’… associating “greatest movement,” for example, with an alimentary canal movement.
My journalism teachers at school had much to say about word association, and word choice as well, sometimes tripping people up.
So… which movement was it, at the U.S. Capitol, last January 6th?
Harvey Radin is former senior vice president in charge of corporate communications and media relations, Bank of America Western Region. He makes his home in Redwood City, CA.