The Attractive Worm

It’s Label Monday again! Using figures and tropes, Figaro attempts to label events and issues. Today’s mission: name the brilliant cyberattack against Iran’s nuclear-weapons facilities. Positively Hollywood in its story line, it involves top government leaders, nefarious Iranians, and Russian consultants (one of them an Angelina Jolie lookalike named Natasha, no doubt) bearing worm-infected memory sticks. So if you were to make a movie, what would you title it? Here’s Figaro’s nominee.

 This week’s label: Possession

 Why “Possession?” Because the Stuxnet worm Satanically possesses particular industrial centrifuges—specifically those at two nuclear facilities in Iran—and causes them to spin wildly out of control. Possession is a powerful metaphor. What’s more, the label implies a group of geeks who gain control—possession—of the means of mass destruction. And so “Possession” also qualifies as a metonymy, a trope that, among other things, swaps an action (possession) for the thing that acts (the worm, or the plucky geeks who developed it).

It’s clear from the recent wikileaks that leaders around the world have been, well, possessed by the prospect of a nuclear-armed Iran. An Israeli military strike seemed inevitable. Then along came Stuxnet early this summer, possibly developed by Israel’s secretive cyber corps Unit 8200. Picture the scene.

Geek: Sir, if you’ll just hold off the attack a few more months, my hackers can dismantle those centrifuges without a single missile being fired.

Commander in Chief: What do you need from me?

Geek: Someone to infiltrate the facility and plant the worm.

Commander in Chief: Natasha.

Geek: Sir?

Commander in Chief: Her name’s Natasha.

Porn for Spies

It’s label Monday! Figures and trope lie behind all great political and marketing labels. So every Monday (that is, every Monday that Figaro thinks of it), we’ll construct a label and show you how we did it.

This week’s label:  snoop porn.

We refer to those fun body scanners in airports. Figaro is convinced that benign terrorists are working for the day when we all parade docilely, stark naked, through airport security. So they get a guy to light  up his shoes, and bingo! Barefoot security. Encouraged, they get a second, very committed guy to set fire to his underpants. Expect a flammable brassiere on a future flight, along with some very interesting YouTube footage.

Runners-up for body-scanner labels:  

•  Buff cycle
• Junk yard
• Molestinator
• Pervinator
• Thingamabuse 

 To create these labels, Figaro listed key words that sum up the controversy: snoop, porn, naked, genitals, and machine. Then he went to an online thesaurus and found synonyms. The phrases were easy—just find a fun combo. “Thingamabuse” is a portmanteau, which comes harder; you need to figure how to work puns into the syllables of existing words.  We’ll explain more in a future labeling exercise.

Meanwhile, keep your pants on.

“We’re Anesthetizing Our Children”

Here’s a brilliant lecture, brilliantly animated, on “divergent thinking.” Sir Ken Robinson speaks directly to Figaro’s current dilemma. He (that is, Jay) is writing a book on using figures to make your words memorable. The dilemma: do we open readers up to the richness of possibility—the idea that any one sentence can be written a thousand equally valid ways—or we set hard and fast rules?

On one side, we have the great enlightenment philosopher Desiderius Erasmus. He argued for copia, a celebration of God’s riches through our language. Shakespeare copiously followed this generous philosophy. On the opposite side, we have Strunk & White and education systems.  (In his lecture, Sir Ken Robinson even manages to link the ADHD “epidemic” to standardized testing!)

Watch the video, then please advise in the comments.

Freaks and Stoners, Jesus and Meth

Figaro’s daughter, Dorothy Junior, sent us this link to a world stereotype map.  The stereotype is a great rhetorical concept, in part because of its etymological link to that rhetorically useful device, the cliché. 

Cliché is a French onomatopoeia meaning “click,” the sound an old-fashioned typesetter made when he tapped melted lead against a cast. The end product was a reusable block of type called a stereotype.

Both cliché and stereotype have morphed into low-class metaphors, but they bear a deep neurological significance. Basically, people think in terms of stereotypes and clichés—prefab chunks of information and attitudes that combine to form perceptions and understanding.

In high school print shop Figaro learned to collect letters into common words and expressions that he could throw into his stick on the fly. Our brains do this, too. Cognitively speaking, a cow is a set of stereotypes: animal, livestock, thing that lives on a farm, milk producer, hamburger on the hoof. The problem with stereotyping only arises when we feed the wrong type into our mental sticks, or when we misread the type we have. Mark Twain understood the problem with using the wrong type mentally. “A cat that sits on a hot stove won’t sit on a hot stove again,” he said. “But it won’t sit on a cold stove, either.”

Figaro doesn’t stove. He microwaves.

Can He Be as Good as He Does?

For the next two years, who he is as president is as important as what he does as president. 

Geoff Garin, Democratic pollster, in the New York Times 

antistrophe (an-TIS-tro-fee), the last-word repeater. From the Greek, meaning “turning about.” Also called epistrophe (eh-PIS-tro-fee), meaning the same thing. See more examples here and here.

The antistrophe brings down the gavel on a sentence’s key word, letting you stress more than one aspect of a concept or thing. In this case, we’re talking about the president, whose first two years were all Logos. The next two will need a big ol’ dollop of Ethos.

Obama’s bipartisan debt-reduction commission has offered a sensible, painful, bat’s-chance-in-hell plan for a sustainable economic future. Barring a national emergency, the commission’s recommendations will set the American political agenda for the next two years. The Republicans are already firing their plentiful guns against simplifying the tax code, while the Dems wring their expressive hands over recommended cuts in Social Security.

The president, for his part, needs to decide whether to back all or part of the commission’s council and then sell the public on it. Up until the recent “shellacking” election, Obama has notched legislative victories like a checklist-mad shopper. (This viral summary will make you dizzy if you haven’t seen it.)

Now we’ll see what he stands for. And whether he stands for it.

Fry Up Some Words

British comedian-author-actor Stephen Fry gives a little animated sermon about language snobbery versus the delights of language.  Of course he’s talking about rhetoric. Everything is about rhetoric.