I used to hate listening to George W. Bush (the son) talk. I found his speeches cringeworthy. Literally. I would listen to him say something stupid and I would actually cringe. He was famous for butchering the English language. His grammar was horrendous and he would sometimes make up words when he couldn’t remember the right way to say what he meant. One such word is “misunderestimate”.
Personally, I think it’s a great word. There is no other single word that means “to inadequately underestimate” something. In other words, you underestimated someone or something, just not enough.
That’s the great thing about the English language, it’s always evolving. An example is the word “woke”, which used to mean “awakened”, but now is synonymous with the phrase: “to become an uninformed asshole”.
Years ago, I carpooled with a good friend of mine. He had a habit/disability similar to the one W has. He also would make up words that seemed to exactly fit what he was trying to say. It happened all the time. One day I was listening to him talk on the phone and he used the word “dramastically”.
Knowing him, I’m certain that he meant to say either “dramatically” or “drastically”, but instead his mind combined the two. Like W, he wasn’t trying to coin a new word. It just happened.
The English language evolved again and absorbed “dramastically” into the lexicon. It means “when something is outrageously extreme beyond almost all proportion”.
Which brings us to Joe Biden.
I never thought I’d say this, but we’ve finally got a “President” who is even more cringeworthy than W. It’s an embarrassment every time Joe opens his mouth. At least with W, you knew what he was trying to say. Joe can barely string together enough words to make a coherent sentence, and that’s on one of his good days.
Those of us paying attention (in other words, everyone except Joe Biden supporters) knew even before the election that he wasn’t all there. Comparing videos of him now and when he was younger, it was easy to see he was in an obvious mental decline. We saw him hide in his basement and watched as he constantly spewed racist things.
So, we waved a red flag to let everyone know that Joe Biden has essentially lost his mind. We tried to explain to people how far he had slipped and that electing him would be a huge mistake. His supporters said that we were wrong, and that Joe was as sharp as a tack.
It turns out that we were wrong. But, so were his supporters. He’s actually worse than we assumed he’d be.
If we had underestimated Joe’s abilities, then he would be performing better than we expected. But, he’s functioning at a level lower than even the already-low bar we had set for him. We didn’t underestimate him enough. We actually overestimated his abilities. In other words, we misunderestimated him.
Watching Joe Biden is painful. He can’t function without note cards and teleprompters, and even with their help, he still gets things wrong. The pauses in his speech while he tries to form his thoughts are becoming longer each day. When he does manage to mumble something somewhat intelligible, his handlers invariably need to “circle back” and explain what they want you to believe he meant to say.
As low as our expectations of Joe Biden were, they weren’t low enough. Not even close. His mental deficiencies have turned out to be worse than we estimated they would be. Much, much worse.
In other words, Joe Biden’s cognitive decline was dramastically misunderestimated.
