Style Makes the Geraldo

“The style is the man himself,” said George-Louis Leclerc, Compte de Buffon. (Le style c’est l’homme meme.) Though he meant writing—the word itself comes from stylus, an ancient writing instrument—the expression has come to mean style of all kinds. 

“Just because someone wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum,” said Congressman Bobby Rush, shortly before he got thrown off the House floor for wearing a hoodie. But, Geraldo Rivera says, a hoodie can make people think you’re a hoodlum, and in rhetoric, what people think determines the persuasive world. When in Rome, wear a toga. (Figaro does this every time he’s in Rome, and for some reason people keep mistaking it for a hoodie.)

Why are we talking style in a rhetoric blog? Because style is an essential quality of decorum, the art of fitting in with an audience. On the House floor, a hoodie seems indecorous. On the street, it certainly shouldn’t get somebody killed.

And when you’re pretending to be a journalist? Nice suit, Geraldo!

The Rhetorical Hoodie

The hoodie meme—pictures on the Web of cowled people from Jesus to St. Gaudens’ haunting sculpture (shown)—displays the power of the trope. In this case, the hoodie represents a metonymy.

metonymy (meh-TAHN-ih-mee). From the Greek, meaning “name change.” One of the two belonging tropes, along with synecdoche. The metonymy takes a quality of something or someone and makes it stand for the whole.

Young Trayvor Martin was wearing a hoodie when he was shot to death by a neighborhood watch volunteer. Geraldo Rivera, the sinisterly mustachioed telecorrespondent, opined that the hoodie was as culpable in the boy’s death as the shooter.

And so was launched a whole bunch of solidaritousds pictures showing non-teenagers—from Jesus to the Miami Heat—with hoodies. The metonymy connects traits across widely disparate examples (including, in this case, a member of Congress who got booted off the floor for violating the House’s hat rules). 

As for the word hoodie itself, it’s a synecdoche, which takes a part of something—in this case, the hood, and makes it stand for the whole shebang.

Want more examples of these powerful tropes? Search for them in the box at right.

Go the F#%K to the Dictionary

This guest post, which Figaro wrote for the popular parenting blog Youth Muse, explains why a parent might teach four-letter words to kids. What do you think, Figarists? Does talking blue develop verbal wit?

Step Away From That Toy Analogy!

As you know, we’re all about speaking memorably. But we make an exception when you’re saying something stupid. 

Mitt Romney advisor Eric Fehrnstrom spoke way too memorably when CNN asked if Romney’s rightward tilt will hurt him in the general election. 

I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.

analogy (an-AL-oh-gee), the template. From the Greek, meaning “proportional thought.” (More analogizing on our sister site.)

We love an analogy for its ability to attach thoughts to physical objects. The physicality makes an abstraction seem literal. A candidate’s move to the center becomes a fun toy. The problem here is that Romney’s planned and completely unsurprising future move to the center is the last thing the campaign wants to talk about right now. First, it has to win over a whole buncha ultraconservative primary voters.

And now Rick Santorum’s people are gleefully handing out little Etch-a-Sketches.  “Great toy,” Newt Gingrich tweeted. “Losing strategy.” And Mr. Gingrich knows from losing strategies.

If a shaken Mr. Fehrnstrom needs a job, he should send his resume to the Ohio Art Company, the Etch-a-Sketch makers. Surely they’d give him a clean slate.

Aristotelian Consulting

One last self-promotion interlude: a profile of me by Peter Heller in Business Week. It talks about some of the principles of argument we talk about in this here website.

Bogarting Eponyms

Figaro goes maverick in this Chicago Tribune piece about eponyms—words named after people. “Eponym” comes from the Greek, meaning “upon a name.”