Figures of Speech Served Fresh

Fig,
I'm sure you won't let Bush's Mandela comment of today pass for long: "I heard somebody say, where's Mandela? Well, Mandela is dead, because Saddam Hussein killed all the Mandelas."

In this context, writes James Taranto in the WSJ,it is clear that the literal meaning of "Where's Mandela?" is "Where is the Iraqi who will play the role in his country that Mandela played in postapartheid South Africa?" This was a pithy metaphor, not an "embarrassing gaffe." I have to admit, I see it that way too, Fig. Can everybody else on the web be wrong?
m stone

Dear M. Stone,
The president is using an ANTONOMASIA (an-toe-noe-MAY-sia), the nicknaming figure. It uses a proper noun in place of a description, or vice versa. "You're such a Polyanna!" "I'm no Rambo." "Miss Cleavage" (said to describe the late Anna Nicole Smith). The antonomasia is most effective in recalling memorable characters and applying them to new situations. It links the present to the past. And, in Mr. Bush's case, it's a refreshing bit of figuring. Figaro loves it when journalists tie themselves in knots trying to describe a device that can be named in one (unpronounceable) word.
Fig.

Hi Jay,

The first Seinfeldian sentence of this article completely tickled my conservative little heart. What is that figure of speech...when, by denying the truth of something, you end up convincing your reader it’s true? The whole article is a crack-up, particularly the “diagnosis” at the end. Thank you, Dr. Kennedy.

From today's nydailynews.com:"Hillary Clinton: I'm not a lesbian
Hillary Clinton has publicly announced that she is not a lesbian.

Hillary Clinton officially declared she's not a lesbian - not that there's anything wrong with that. During an interview with The Advocate to be published next week, Sean Kennedy, the gay magazine's news and features editor, asked the presidential candidate, "'ow do you respond to the occasional rumor that you're a lesbian?'
'People say a lot of things about me, so I really don't pay any attention to it,' Sen. Clinton (D-N.Y.) replied. 'It's not true, but it is something that I have no control over. People will say what they want to say.'
Kennedy told the Daily News he's convinced. 'I 100% believe she's a straight, heterosexual woman,' he said."

Martha

Dear Martha,

In my book (pages 167 to 168), I call that a kind of INNUENDO -- from the Latin, meaning "make a significant nod." One of the more insidious political innuendos implies something while denying the opposite. You can do that to an opponent (Richard Nixon denied that his rival for California governor, Pat Brown, was a Communist.) Or you can do it to yourself ("I am not a crook!").

Hillary-haters are probably the only ones who ever believed the lez rumor, and only because they really, really wanted to. But Figaro is almost disappointed to see it debunked. After putting up with the heterosexual horndogs and cowboys in the White House for 17 years, he's ready to try just about any other flavor.

Fig.

Picture of rhetorica tattoo, as per your request. Rhetorica

http://viewmorepics.myspace.com/index.cfm?fuseaction=viewImage&friendID=70405085&albumID=622213&imageID=13004611

Dear Figaro,

I've just started taking a course in rhetoric, a college-level high school course. Thank You For Arguing was required reading, and let me say it's the only thing that's helping me out. The teacher's taken the opportunity to consistently not teach, chastise students for not teaching themselves, and has even, in just the two weeks we've been in class, gone so far as to deliberately demoralize students. I'm kind of sick of being shoved around, so to speak, and I was wondering what advice you'd give to someone who has to learn as much about rhetoric in as little time as possible. Absolutely anything you might have to say on the matter is much appreciated.

Yours,
Rob.

Dear Rob,

I'm sorry about your plight, though it is my bounden duty to love any teacher who requires my book. Of course, your desire to gorge on rhetoric wins Figaro's figurative heart as well. Here's what I suggest:

--Go to your local college library for a few evenings and browse the Encyclopedia of Rhetoric. It offers a comprehensive, if uneven, view of the field. Read the articles on Ethos, Pathos, and Logos, along with the one on "Contingency and Probability." That last one may seem a little over your head, but if you're smart enough (and you sure seem to be), it'll blow your mind.

--Get hold of Corbett's "Classical Rhetoric for the Modern Student" (you can order it through my site by going to the "Best Books on Rhetoric" page). It's a bit outdated and pedestrian, but Corbett's book remains the best general introductory text there is.

--Ask your teacher if you can collaborate with her (him?) on classroom exercises. I'm hoping to post some teaching aids this weekend. Print them out and take them in to school.

Your teacher may be suffering from the classic Horror of the Abyss, the unnerving experience of gazing out over a sea of affectless adolescents. By showing keen interest in the subject, and an eagerness to collaborate, you may find your teacher warming up to the task--and, more important, to you. Check back with me in a few weeks and tell me how your rhetoric is progressing.

Fig.

Dear Figaro, What is the rhetorical term for modifying a person's name? A student of mine used the term "Bill Bellicheat" in response to the head coach of the New England Patriots being punished for cheating. Portmanteau? Eponym? Thanks in advance,
Mark

Dear Mark,
Coach Belichick, like General Petraeus, is a victim of a play on his name. I say in my blog that the proper figure is a PARONOMASIA, a near-pun; but you could also call it an ADNOMINATIO, which plays on the sound and--some rhetoricians say--meaning of a person's name.

Fig.

Dear Figaro,
Donna Reed was in "It's a Wonderful Life," not Deborah Kerr (Chapter 2). I almost died laughing when I read the Indian Restaurant exchange with your daughter. It's a great book. I'm really enjoying it. Thanks.

Steve

Dear Steve,
Yeah, I should have known better. The Kerr-Reed blunder is being fixed in the second printing--along with some other mistakes.
Fig.

Hi Jay,
Is your book available electronically
and if so, please send location. I have the paperback but would also like to have it on my computer.Thanks JFord

Dear JF,
No, Random House, which owns the Three Rivers imprint to "Thank You for Arguing," is not big on electronic publishing. And it owns the rights. Nor do I have the audio rights--and there's no immediate plan to publish it that way, either. If you think that's wrong, please write Random House, c/o President Bartleby T. Scrivener.
Fig.

Dear Figaro,
Is your book available in languages other than English? Thank you! Jeanhee

Dear Jeanhee,
Not yet, but next year, "Thank You for Arguing" will be published in Italian, Polish, British (through Penguin UK) and--this might please you especially--Korean. Figaro has an energetic agent who's arm-twisting publishers around the globe!
Figaro

Hi Fig., quick question: is there other, (different, other than) classical rhetoric, "neo classical", "modern", "post classical" type of rhetoric?
surf

Dear Surf,

Um, what was the question? Are you asking whether there are other kinds of rhetoric than classical? There are indeed, generally categorized by their historical periods--Byzantine, Renaissance, Enlightenment, etc. (That's not counting the rich rhetorical traditions in Asia and the Middle East.) The twentieth-century was a brilliant one for rhetorical theory, ranging from Chaim Perelman--a Belgian legal scholar who suffered the Holocaust and wanted to find a better form of cooperative communication--to Kenneth Burke, whose theories of identification revolutionized the discipline. Check out Figaro's list of the best books on rhetoric for more.

Hey, what's HIS OWN BOOK doing there? What a sleazebag.

Fig.

Fig.

Fig,
General Petraeus...General Betray-us. What think ye of this as a declaration and is it a form of argument? Also, I commend to you read Jane Hamsher's advice to Eliz. Edwards at Firedoglake blog. An inside look at liberal logic. How does it play?
m stone

Dear Geode-like One,

"Betray-us" constitutes a figure of speech called PARONOMASIA, a near-pun. It plays on words that sound or mean the same but aren’t identical. The paronomasia is great for labeling an opponent, provided that your opponent is under the age of six. In the context of the most talented general to come along in a decade, the figure -- used in a New York Times ad by the group MoveOn.org -- comes off as clumsy and, dare we say it, illiberal.

Elizabeth Edwards wagged her rhetorical finger at the group: “Someone who’s spent their life in the military doesn’t deserve ‘General Betray Us,’” she said. Elizabeth is playing her long-established role of being the bad cop in the Edwards camp. It's an effective strategy endorsed by Aristotle himself. And he was no liberal.

Blogger Jane Hamsher's admonition -- never give the right "a cudgel to beat the left with" -- is plain old partisan rhetoric. It's a strategy Ronald Reagan urged on GOP candidates. And he was no liberal either.

How does Figaro feel about it? He says, DOWN WITH PARTY DISCIPLINE! Now, that's a slogan he can march to.

Fig.

What is the origin of "I love him to death"?
Terry

Dear Terry,
While Figaro enjoys looking up the origins of idioms--groups of words with their own collective meaning--it's not technically his bag, baby. And this one has him stumped worse than Ahab. But we DID learn from H.L. Mencken's incomparable volumes on slang that "love apples" are testes. How do you like them apples?
Fig.

Jay, really enjoyed your book. My business is helping executives with key presentations, such as IPOs and product launches, and I'd like to incorporate some of your rhetoric for fun (art for art's sake and all that). Please help me reconcile the following. The 3 steps of persuading people are (1) stimulate emotions by changing the audience's mood (presumably pathos per Augustine!), change its mind (logos) and get it to act (? pathos?). Pg 22. Yet the classical order of a speech is ethos (character), logos and pathos (send them out with emotion). Pg 249. Can you clarify please?

Bob

Dear Bob,

So you saw my brilliant idea for a hospitality franchise called "Bed & Breakfast& Beyond" on page 267, right? What do you say we gather some serious VC, launch a chain of "Consistently Unique" hotels, get fabulously rich and sire celebutante daughters who make asses of themselves!

When we make the pitch to the venture capitalists, the whole ethos-logos-pathos thing won't be as complicated as it sounds. Changing an audience's mood, mind, or willingness to act isn't necessarily a three-step process; you can change someone's mind without changing his mood, for instance. But mood, mind and action are three goals of persuasion in ascending order of difficulty.

Nonetheless, organizing a speech by ethos, pathos and logos actually follows the mood, mind, and action order. Cicero said you must get the audience to identify with you and make them receptive to your pitch. That's a mood, but it takes the tools of rhetorical character to achieve it. (Aristotle actually said Ethos was a kind of emotion--a cooler kind--while pathos tends to run hotter.)

Once we get our audience of VCs to like us, then we can convince them that our B&B&B chain will be the greatest thing since the breakfast bar. Then we'll stimulate the richest business emotion of all: pure greed.

Fig.

What is this figure, structurally speaking? Is it an anaphora? I feel like it may be something else but am not sure: "To take away a man's home is to take away his dignity; to give him a chance to live autonomously is to instill in him self pride."
BAW

Dear BAW,

Yes, it's an anaphora--a figure of speech that starts consecutive phrases or clauses with the same words. But your surmise that it's something else is correct as well. The quote qualifies as a SYNCRISIS (SIN-crih-sis), the not-that-but-this figure. From the Greek, meaning "to compare," it weighs two things side by side.

Personally, Figaro is interested less in self pride than in government humility. but explaining that would take a whole nother syncrisis.

Fig.

Dear Figaro--I teach a Digital Rhetoric course (and, naturally, I introduce the topic of rhetoric through your book). I'd like to hear from you about where you think that rhetoric is headed given the technological advances and the many new media available to us for rhetoric? Do the internet, TV and cell phones ("smart phones") lead us toward orality again and away from a literate culture? What are your thoughts?
Dr. Sig

Dear Doc,

Let's look at the facts. Newspaper and magazine readerships are down. In 1995, the average American read at least the beginning of 10 books; the number has shrunk to 4 today, with more than a third of adults reading no books at all. Our political debates are conducted orally, through sound bites, ad campaigns, and televised debates. Business decisions get made orally, through PowerPoint presentations, teleconferencing, and face-to-face meetings. Yes, we do have emails, and blogs like this one, but as I argue in my book, those media count as quasi-oral. (See chapter 22, "The Jumbotron Blunder.")

Figaro isn't thrilled about the trend. He's hawking a book for one thing. Plus, we lose the depth of thought that reading enables. Good or bad, though, it's reality: we have already switched from a written to an oral society. Schools and colleges must follow your fine example and foster oral sophistication through the teaching of rhetoric.

But then, anachronism is one of the many charms of the liberal arts. During the American Revolution, pamphlets and newspapers led the charge; yet colleges still taught as if the printing press hadn't been invented.

So give them time. They'll catch on in a century or so.

Fig.

Figaro -
I'd love to hear you speak sometime in my great city (well, town actually). Have you thought of being on a panel at the Conference of World Affairs (see http://www.colorado.edu/cwa/information.html)? Every April for the past 59 years, and you could become a lasting part of it! Hope to catch you there..
Geode

Dear Geode (your name rocks!),

Figaro has never been big on panel discussions, because (a) they multiply the windbag factor by the number of panelists, (b) full-blown orations and head-to-head debates are way cooler, and (c) Figaro fears sitting next to someone who actually knows what he's talking about.

However, that's a big, prestigious meeting, and I'll definitely check it out. Many thanks.

Fig.

Dear Figaro,
Isn't Obama's speaking of "common" aims, etc., a demonstration of the concept that logos is culturally defined? He's almost deconstructing logos, in the sense that logos, or logic, is culturally defined, yet we think it's absolute. Thus to Bush, logic is one thing, while to us, it's certainly not what he thinks it is because we emerge from very different cultures.
M

Dear M,

In rhetoric, logic itself isn't culturally defined, but many of the tools of logos are. The commonplace is the best example. The building block of logos, it expresses a belief or value of the audience.

But Obama's reference to common aims isn't so much a logical tactic as an ethical one, projecting the ethos of the Great Uniter. Both he and Bush use what Aristotle called "demonstrative" rhetoric, and what Figaro calls "values speech." It expresses what's right and what's wrong, who's right and who's wrong, and it attempts to unite the audience while distinguishing the group from outsiders. Obama emphasizes the united part, while Bush prefers to bring us together through the threats from enemies.

Figaro prefers to unite his audience through big words.

Yrs,
Fig.

Dear Figaro,
As an unfunded researcher, I am faced with a difficult dilemma. I am forced by circumstances to request the time and attention of busy people, but have nothing to offer in return. Sure, by agreeing to participate in my interviews they will be contributing to academia. So far though, I haven't found that to be a very appealing carrot for folks doing "real work." The result is a lot of rejection. Do you have any advice for persuading prospective research participants to give me something for nothing?
Erik

Dear Erik,

You are in a classic sales situation, but you don't believe in your product. "Oh, really?" you ask. "What's the product?"

Before we get to that, let's treat ourselves to a refreshing gulp of Aristotle. He said that to get people to do something, you must make them believe that the action is easy and that they'll love the result. So of course you'll want to call your survey "brief."

Now for the result part. You don't say what your research project is, but I'm sure it has to do with some fascinating aspect of humanity, and you're doing your participants a favor by introducing them to it. That's your product: a chance to be a part of an intriguing piece of science, and to learn something.

Now, in order to sell your product, you have to project absolute, unabashed belief in it. How? Keep these things in mind:

1. What you're doing IS "real work," at least as real as the work of, say, a bond salesman or government tax assessor. You are your victims' equal.

2. You have a lot to offer. You have chosen your victims for some extremely flattering reasons, I have no doubt. You stroke their ego by wanting to know about them. It's not every day that we get to contribute to science. And in return for a short, interesting session, they'll be doing their bit for humankind. They should thank you for that.

3. Note: They're not contributing to "academia." They're contributing to SCIENCE.

4. People aren't as busy as you think. Practice the rhetorical skill of KAIROS, or timing, by hitting them at the beginning of the workday or just before lunch.

5. As a salesman, you must never, ever, ever apologize. I sense that your apologetic tone is what's getting you in trouble. Project a confident ethos, and the world is your rhetorical oyster.

When you give your Nobel acceptance speech someday, Figaro wouldn't mind at all if you mentioned him.

Yrs,
Fig.

Jay:
The war on drugs metaphor/figure of speech has transformed the U. S. into the most incarcerated nation in the history of human civilization. About one of every four prisoners in the world is locked in an American jail or prison.

What metaphor/figure of speech can counter the war on drugs metaphor/figure of speech?

Dear Kirk,

Excellent, excellent question. The so-called war on drugs offers the perfect example of unconscious abuse of figures.

But the battle--oops, I mean, EFFORT--against drugs is more of a metonymy than a metaphor. A METONYMY is a figure that takes an attribute of one thing and applies it to another, while a metaphor takes a thing and substitutes it for another thing. Drug suppression and war share the attribute of a mutual societal effort to get rid of a threat. Which makes the war on drugs a metonymy, you see.

Beyond that, though, the overlap between war and drug policy breaks down. Who's the enemy, exactly? Drugs themselves? The dealers? The users? Do you wage this war with military tactics? Do you take prisoners and grant them rights under the Geneva Convention?

You'll find a similarly troubling metonymy problem with the "war on terror." While terror and enemy nations share an attribute or two, there's a danger to seeing the war on terror as truly a war. The confusion could result in, say, attacking Iraq--a nation with an evil leader but few terrorists--while cozying up to Pakistan, a "friendly" nation whose security services have coddled al-Qaeda for years. Figures of speech can be a very serious business.

So what's an opposing figure for the "war on drugs?" I'd suggest swapping one metonymy for another: It's an addiction crisis.

P.S. "Jay" is the pen name I used for my book. "Figaro Speech" is my real name.

Alo Figaro!

You have an exquisite site, I think. I have also read your book, "Thank You For Arguing," which, I must say is very clever. Anyhow, to the point (1st time posing a question here):

I am currently studying for my LSAT, and as you must know (the rhetorical essence of your wife's job), the language is screwy, but not usually to the degree of making me wonder...

I am wondering if you could clarify the distinction between the usage of "suppose" versus "presuppose" for me? If this question is a bit jejune for this forum, or even inappropriate for that matter, an email reply would suffice.

Thanks for your time, and I look forward to reading your break down of this silly seeming matter.

choppy

Dear Choppy,

The distinction between "suppose" and "presuppose" is the same as that between "presumptuous" and "sumptuous." My son likes to take the biggest piece of steak before I can. He is presumptuous, while the steak is sumptuous. Get it?

"Suppose" and "presuppose," therefore, um, have nothing to do with what I just said.

Actually, there is a difference between the two words, though only lawyers are annoying enough to use "presuppose" in casual conversation. To presuppose means to assume something without prior knowledge; it has the negative connotation of deliberate ignorance. To suppose something, on the other hand, is to theorize or conjecture, which, despite the deniers of evolution and global warming, can be backed with a great many facts.

Now, a suppository and a presuppository, on the other hand...

Nothing is too jejeune for this site, baby!

Fig.