The Man Who Mumbled Wolf

This site dedicates itself to the tools that create unforgettable lines. But today’s quote does exactly the opposite: bureaucratic mumbling at its very best. 

We need to be able to manage them as a state to balance them with other wildlife and landowner impacts pertinent to livestock. 

Ron Aasheim, a spokesman for the Montana
Department of Fish, Wildlife and Parks, in the New York Times

Congress took the unprecedented step of removing an animal from the endangered species list. A rider in the budget bill will give western states the power to manage the Rocky Mountain wolf without judicial review. Now, if you’re an elk hunter or a western rancher, the last spokesperson you want is a Sarah Palin, who’ll shoot a colorful trope from the hip.

Palinesque Synecdoche: There’s a wolf out there that’s about to be skin on my wall.

 No, in this situation, you want colorless. Even better, come up with a statement that’s a little hard to follow, a technique the ancients called skotison—Greek for “darken it.” That’s what the Montana flack does with his “landowner impacts” and his “pertinent.” The fulcrum of his sentence? The reassuring word “balance.”

Almost makes you feel guilty for liking wildlife.

Folk Music Linked to Obesity

Bob Dylan equates folk music with obesity, piling high-fat trope upon trope.

Folk music
is fat people.

Dylan, quoted in the book, Positively 4th Street

As always, Dylan makes little logical sense. It’s our job to discover more in his words than he may have intended—just as we appear to have found more in him than he ever intended.

Maureen Dowd, the Snark in Chief at the New York Times, quotes Dylan in a column reporting that the singer allowed the Chinese to censor his recent concert in Beijing. Did the man who stood up against The Man sell out?

There was nothing to sell out in the first place, Dylan claims. He sang protest songs in the sixties because that’s where the market was. Never was a folk singer, doesn’t want to be one now. 

By “folk music” he presumably means the “folk music industry and its fans,” not the music itself. That makes it non-literal language, which makes it a trope. By taking an aspect or quality of folk music, the trope qualifies as a metonymy.  

He goes on to equate folk with “fat people.” Presumably, not all folk fans and artists are fat; in fact, many are wispier than, say, your average country fan. By making a few heavyweights stand for everybody in folk, Dylan performs a synecdoche.  

But in claiming folk IS fat people, you could say he’s pulling off a metaphor. Except not really, because he’s not talking about the music itself. Metonymy? Synecdoche? Who cares? 

While it’s important to recognize a trope here, let us not get bogged down in the muddy difference between a metonymy and a synecdoche. That’s why Figaro has combined the two in what he calls the Belonging Trope. It’s a trope that makes something represent what it belongs to—a characteristic, a representative, whatever—or vice versa.

Dylan is a master of the Belonging Trope; it’s the secret behind most of his famous lyrics. So you’ll want to know it, too. Especially if you ever sell out to China.

A Civil Conversation

If anyone could dub this dialog with the audio from a congressional debate, Figaro would be extremely grateful.  Meanwhile, feel free to suggest lines in the comments.

The Freshman 15 Is Now the Perp 5 to 10

If you are what you eat, then students and prisoners may soon be indistinguishable in Ohio. A budget proposal has Ohio State University buying food jointly with the Ohio Department of Corrections.

Eggs are Eggs,
milk is milk, bread is bread.

Ohio State spokeswoman, quoted in the Associated Press.

Repeat Changer, the figure that repeats words with a different meaning.  (Technical term: antistasis—an-TIS-ta-sis, meaning “opposite stance.”)

In the months leading up to release of Word Hero, we’ll begin using our own, practical names for figures.  Don’t worry, Greek lovers: we’ll continue to include the technical terms as well.

The Ohio State spokeswoman employs the “Boys will be boys” version of the Repeat Changer. The expression may sound like a mere truism. Boys by definition won’t be girls. But one of the most important purposes of repetition is to change the connotation of a word. In this case, boys (individual boys, that is) will generally behave like boys (the entire generalized, puppy-dog-tailed gender). As with any cliché, “Boys will be boys” has exceptions that disprove the rule. Boys, for better or worse, will often be girls. Yet clichés will be clichés, and morons will be morons, which is why clichés often get taken for profound wisdom.

Besides, the form has its unmoronic uses. You can make something sound inevitable, even inescapable, by putting it in “blank is blank” form.

Try the “boys will be boys” ploy sometime and see how it works for you. “Computers will be computers,” you say, eye-rollingly, to a colleague whose PowerPoint presentation has just crashed, and he’ll chuckle knowingly. Actually, he’s more likely to throw a laptop at your head. But then, co-workers will be co-workers.

The Only Letter to Become President

hew!  Figaro just added a favicon to his new book-promotion website, WordHero.org. That’s the little picture you see accompanying a website URL or browser tab.  The word means “favorites icon,” which makes it a portmanteau—a figure that combines two words to make a new one. “Icon” comes from the Greek eikon, literally meaning “image.” In ancient Greece, an icon was a symbol: a picture that stood for something else. So favicon makes doubled sense. 

But wait, there’s more. “W” is itself a portmanteau: a double-U. It comes from the Middle English, when the “wuh” sound was representated with a pair of U’s. (The letter itself is a diagraph, a symbol made out of two symbols.)

We hope our “W” becomes iconic.  But don’t worry, Figarists. Our blog will continue as long as there are figures on God’s figuratively green Earth.

Sneak Preview of Figaro's Next Book

Though it’s not coming until October 4, we were surprised to discover that Word Hero is available for pre-order on Amazon.  Check out the new book website, WordHero.org, for the table of contents and an excerpt that reveals the Mad Lib Protocol.