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"This is a very strange political season, and in terms of presidential contests, a very strange linguistic season as well," Bryan A. Garner, the world's leading authority on the English language, told Business Insider.
Garner was speaking in a recent interview about English grammar and usage, and we took the opportunity to ask him whether he had made any observations about the candidates. The 57-year-old Texan has written 25 books and is the editor-in-chief of "Black's Law Dictionary," the world's most widely cited law book.
He considers himself "pretty apolitical," though he was close friends with Antonin Scalia, the late conservative Supreme Court justice with whom he wrote two books.
We also took a look at the findings posted on the language blog Wordwatchers by Kayla N. Jordan and James W. Pennebaker at the University of Texas at Austin. Their site "explores how we can learn about the candidates' personalities, motives, emotions, and inner selves through their everyday words."
Whether one candidate sounds more listenable than another is obviously very subjective, but here's where we'd rank the candidates in terms of listenability: