The Ditz Heard Round the World

People get so crazy about minor things like the truth. Presidential aspirant Michele Bachmann said that the American Revolution began in Figaro’s home state. A minor mistake—she was only one state off—yet snobs in her own party jumped all over her.

She makes Sarah Palin
look like Count Metternich.

GOP consultant Mike Murphy on Twitter, quoted in Politico.

After Congresswoman Bachmann mistook Concord, New Hampshire, for Concord, Massachusetts, Mike Murphy responded with what we call a Contraster.  A figure of relativity, the Contraster brings in an object of contrast to make a subject look bigger or smaller; more or less important; or more or less ridiculous. While there’s no precise formal name for this figure, the syncrisis comes pretty close.

Incidentally, we were surprised that a modern politician knew of Klemens von Metternich. The Austrian diplomat helped end the Napoleonic wars; his realpolitick inspired Henry Kissinger. And, no, Congresswoman Bachmann, Austria is not in New Hampshire. 

Charlie Like a Fox

Crazy people with money are called eccentrics. What do you call a crazy, rich, crack-addled Hollywood celebrity like Charlie Sheen? Foxy.

 “The truth of the matter is,

he could be crazy like a fox.”

Film producer Mike Medavoy in the New York Times.

“Crazy like a fox” is a fave idiom of Figaro’s. An idiom is a set of words that form a stand-alone meaning—a sort of rhetorical molecule made up of little word atoms.

Of course, foxes aren’t known for insanity, or even for feigning insanity. They leave that role to loons and celebrities. Instead, foxes are supposed to be crafty.  And so “crazy like a fox” means “craftily crazy.” Which makes the idiom a paradox.

Now, a paradox (Greek for “against common belief”) performs a shotgun marriage between things that don’t belong together logically: such as “jumbo” and shrimp,” or “Charlie Sheen” and “sanity.”

But wait, there’s more:   “Crazy like a fox” also employs marvelous sound symbolism—words that evoke a meaning by the way they sound. “Crazy” sounds craaaaazy, man. “Like a fox” sounds like something uttered by a narrow-jawed, muzzle-licking canid. Or by a rabid, moneymaking TV network.

Sir Michael Tyson's Delivery

Cicero said that the 5 building blocks of oration are invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery. While we focus mainly on style here, occasionally we come across a brilliant story of delivery.  And, no, we don’t mean the “King’s Speech.” Watch and learn:

Update on Wednesday, March 2, 2011 at 02:13PM by Figaro

Learn to talk like Bush!  Click here.

Yo, Check Out This Dude’s Metonymy

While unions (gay and workers’) dominate the news and stuttering kings rule the Oscars, Figaro focuses on a more serious issue: MTV’s Jersey Shore.  Why do people watch that show when they can see live theater at any Burger King on a Saturday night?

We’ll tell you why we watch: “Jersey Shore” is a tropical paradise. That’s “tropical” as in tropes. The show is packed with ’em. Let us count the ways:

1. The stars proudly call themselves Guidos and Guidettes. The terms come from an Italian first name, Guido, which represents a gold-chained, swaggering stereotype. What’s the rhetoric here? Calling a type of person by a representative proper noun is a periphrasis, Greek for “speak around.” This form of periphrasis is non-literal—few Guidos actually bear the first name “Guido”—which makes the figure a kind of trope.

2. The show’s name qualifies as a metonymy, a trope that makes a characteristic of something stand for the whole thing, or vice versa. “Jersey Shore” was originally filmed on Miami Beach. So why not call it “Miami Shore”? Because the characters were denizens of coastal New Jersey, or claimed to be. Because they were Jerseyans, they represented its shore in Miami—which, for show business purposes, made Miami New Jersey. If this doesn’t make sense, well, neither does the show.

3. One of the leading men is both a metonymy and a synecdoche—a related trope that makes a part stand for the whole or vice versa. Mike Sorrentino goes by the nickname “The Situation.” Originally, that was the monicker he gave his over-developed abdominal muscles after they caused a situation with a young lady and her jealous boyfriend. So the situation came to represent the abs, and the abs came to represent the Guido, and New Jersey suddenly became unbearably tropical.

Or maybe just unbearable.

Metaforking

Tropes make up rhetoric’s most powerful language in part because people often fail to notice them. A recent Stanford study shows how metaphors prod people into unconscious decisions. 

Thanks to figarist Mike Darling for bring this to Figaro’s attention.

"Do that thing where you fart through your head!"

Forgive us, patient Figarists, for we have gone astray. We just turned in the final, edited manuscript to our next book, Word Hero: Mark Twain, Warren Buffett, and Mr. Potatohead Help You Master the Art of Expression. In the race to the deadline, we ignored you, and we’re sorry.

To soothe your feelings, we offer a bit of anthropomorphism, the trope of personification. It doesn’t get enough respect in the figurative world, and yet it’s the stuff of gods. After all, what do you get when you take a metonymy—a trope that makes a characteristic of something stand for the whole thing—and mate it with personification? A god! That’s how the ancients came up with gods of drunkenness, lust, and even rhetoric. 

But enough serious rhetoric. Now for dolphin fart jokes, zebras suffering from paronomasia, and a gorilla executing a neat metallage.