Have you heard that Donald Trump is unraveling? His use of profanity has become increasingly casual, in rallies that stretch almost twice as long as they did in the past. His references to Vice President Kamala Harris have gone from dismissive to vicious. He has left us with more information about the golfer Arnold Palmer than most of us really needed. And then there is the uptick in his tic of designating everything as superlatively unprecedented. “Groceries, food, has gone up at levels that nobody’s ever seen before,” and “We had the greatest economy in the history of the world. We had never done anything like it,” etc.

In this, many see mental decline. I see it differently. Trump is just bored.

The evidence lies in what linguists have termed extravagance. As Martin Haspelmath has explained it, extravagance is the linguistic effort not simply to be understood but to be noticed. Haspelmath says this effort drives much of human communication and the way language changes over time. He notes that “speakers not only want to be clear or ‘expressive,’ sometimes they also want their utterance to be imaginative and vivid — they want to be little ‘extravagant poets’ in order to be noticed, at least occasionally.”

One tool of extravagance is humor, which, with its exaggeration and irony, adds a jolt. In the 1980s when it was new, the expression “from hell” — I am agnostic as to whether it was popularized by the comedian Richard Lewis — was a genuine belly buster. I remember being in a play in which a fellow cast member described some singer as “the bass from hell” and it was one of the hottest backstage jokes of the production.

Extravagance can also involve putting a label on things that used to be left to context — like the expression “I just can’t even” for a very particular kind of weariness and frustration. Or the relay procession, underway since Early Middle English, of words meaning “very,” with each new one starting as a more attention-grabbing version of what preceded. First was “truly,” followed by “very” itself, then “really” and “actually.” More slangy entrants like “hella,” “mad” and “straight up” have continued the relay below the Standard English radar. All that is extravagance, too.

Everything we’re seeing more of in Trump — the cussing, the going on too long almost as if seeking a better high, the exaggerating, the recreational name-calling, the references to genitals — makes sense as someone turning up the volume to keep himself entertained. His audiences have remained loyal, so it’s not them he’s worried about; this is about what’s in his own head.

I’ve even noticed a similar escalation in the way I sometimes communicate. I have often told a story about being 5 years old and hearing a friend speak Hebrew with her parents — the first time I had encountered a language I couldn’t understand — and about how I found the experience so frustrating that I cried. My telling of the tale has, shall we say, grown over the decades, honed by audience response and my own quest for novelty. My latest version has me frantically asking my mother why we didn’t speak Hebrew, and her responding with tart affection “Because we aren’t Jewish! Get in the car, Jughead!”