Kamala Harris‘s rambling ‘word salad’ speeches may be a symptom of a little-known but common psychological condition called logorrhoea — also known as verbal diarrhoea.
The US Vice President, who was endorsed by Joe Biden after he bowed out of the presidential race on Sunday, is known for her jumbled, sometimes incoherent speaking style.
Some of her most infamous speeches have included ones about the ‘significance of the passage of time’ and the ‘need to get to go and need to be able to get where you need to go’.
A baffling anecdote about falling out of a coconut tree has also been a rich resource for internet meme-makers, and a study that analysed Ms Harris’s speech during a vice presidential debate concluded that ‘social factors’ were the most likely cause of her ‘word salad’ rambling.
Ratu Annisa of the University of North Sumatra said: ‘The causes of the speech errors made by Kamala Harris are social factors, both situational anxiety and social circumstances.’
Kamala Harris has become known for her occasionally nonsensical speeches
Republican strategist Matt Whitlock has previously accused Ms Harris of being unable to speaking ‘normally’
A 2009 study of the condition in Spain found the risk of logorrhoea was linked to level of schooling.
Those with lower educational achievement were more likely to ‘speak in circles’.
It can be a symptom of anxiety or over-confidence, but logorrhoea can be no laughing matter — and may indicate a brain injury, autism or serious condition, although there is no indication that Ms Harris suffers from these conditions.
Logorrhoea is also associated with laughing wildly at random moments, something Ms Harris has become known for, with Donald Trump even nicknaming her ‘Laughin’ Kamala’.
American behavioural specialist Gregg Levoy wrote in a blog on Psychology Today that for people who ramble on and on, speech can become ‘a barrier rather than a connector’.
He wrote: ‘It’s easy to dismiss them as merely narcissistic, but this is immensely hard to undo and not necessarily their fault.
‘It’s a holdover from that original egocentric stage around one or two years old, when children naturally feel grandiose and at the centre of the universe.’
But logorrhoea is also a common frontal lobe deficit that many traumatic brain injury survivors suffer, and is linked to several serious psychiatric and neurological disorders.
These include schizophrenia, lesions on the brain, damage to areas of the brain that deal with language, and ADHD.
A Washington bar started offering $5 ‘Pina Kamala’ coconut shots all night after Joe Biden stood down from the presidential race on Sunday
Hawaii senator Brian Schatz posted a picture of himself climbing a coconut tree, a reference to Ms Harris’s infamous anecdote about something she claimed her mother used to say
People with autism may also display logorrhoea, defined as uncontrollable or jumbled talking, due to an inability to organise their thoughts or read social cues from other people.
Ms Harris became tongue-tied during a speech about ‘expanding access to transportation’ at the White House in July 2022.
She said: ‘You need to get to go, and you to be able to get where you need to go, to do the work and get home.’
The same year, she made a widely-mocked speech about high-speed internet in Louisiana, saying: ‘The Governor and I and we were all doing a tour of the library here and talking about the significance of the passage of time.
‘The significance of the passage of time.
‘So, when you think about it, there is great significance to the passage of time in terms of what we need to do to lay these wires, what we need to do to create these jobs.
‘And there is such great significance to the passage of time when we think about a day in the life of our children.’
Ms Harris’s preoccupation with time raised its head again last April at a political event on reproductive rights.
She told attendees: ‘I think it’s very important…for us at every moment in time and certainly this one, to see the moment in time in which we exist and are present, and to be able to contextualise it, to understand where we exist in the history and in the moment as it relates not only to the past but the future.’
Last March, she asserted that, during Women’s History Month, ‘we celebrate and we honour the women who made history throughout history, who saw what could be unburdened by what had been.’
On at least two occasions, she has spoken of her baffling love for Venn diagrams, a simplistic illustration that uses overlapping circles to show the relationship between two or more sets of items.
She said last year: ‘I just love Venn diagrams. I really do, I love Venn diagrams. There’s just something about those three circles and the analysis of that, where there’s the intersection, right?’
And last year, she uttered her most famous meaningless statement at a swearing-in ceremony at the White House.
‘My mother used to — she would give us a hard time sometimes, and she would say to us, “I don’t know what’s wrong with you young people. You think you just fell out of a coconut tree?” she said, laughing. ‘You exist in the context of all in which you live and what came before you.’
On Sunday night, after 81-year-old Biden announced that he was stepping down from the presidential race and endorsing Ms Harris, the coconut tree comment went viral online.
A Washington bar started offering $5 ‘Pina Kamala’ coconut shots all night.
And Hawaii senator Brian Schatz posted a picture of himself climbing a coconut tree with the words: ‘Madam Vice President, we are ready to help.’
Republican strategist Matt Whitlock has previously accused Ms Harris of being unable to speaking ‘normally’.
He posted: ‘It’s pretty striking that she is simply incapable of speaking normally. Is she actually smoking weed before grabbing the mic? It would explain so much.’
And Laura Ingram, from Fox News, said: ‘While Joe is slipping into dementia, Kamala is slipping into a different dimension.’
