Kony 2012

If you’re near Dartmouth College Thursday, March 22, come to my lecture, “The Selling of Kony 2012.” The most successful viral campaign in history deploys the most sophisticated social-media tools-along with persuasive devices that have been around for 3,000 years. 4:30 p.m. in Dartmouth’s Filene Auditorium.

Can’t be there? Have no fear: Figaro will be offering some details in posts to come.

Ban the Teleprompter!

Rick Santorum wants to outlaw teleprompters for presidential candidates. Never mind that leaders from Demosthenes to George Washington have used speechwriters (once called logographers). We think the ban is a great idea!

See, I always believed that when you run for president of the United States, it should be illegal to read off a teleprompter. Because all you’re doing is reading someone else’s words to people.

Presidential candidate Rick Santorum, speaking in Gulfport, Mississippi, March 11

The great Roman orator and rhetorician Marcus Tullius Cicero also hated the teleprompter (or its equivalent, known as “paper.” ) Why? Because speaking from memory makes people think you’re speaking from the heart.

Cicero listed five techniques, or “canons,” for oratory: 

• Invention was all about the construction of a speech, from research to writing.
• Arrangement had to do with organization. Start by establishing your character, then tell your story, support your argument with facts, clobber the opposing argument, then conclude with an emotional summary.
• Style is where you bring in your figures of speech and tropes—the clothing you drape onto your naked oratory.
• And then there’s memory.  The ancients practiced elaborate exercises to strengthen their memory, and learned special techniques to recall the elements of a speech. Plato was skeptical of writing (even though he himself wrote), in part because he was concerned that reading would damage the all-important faculty of memory.
• Finally comes delivery, where you control your tone and gestures and wow your audience.

“It’s important for you to understand who that person is in their own words,” Mr. Santorum said. “See them, look them in the eye…hear what’s [in their] heart.” Actually, memory lets your audience think they’re hearing your heart. But they’re really just hearing what’s in your brain.

Which is fine with us. We’re more concerned about a candidate’s brain than his heart.

Hold the Cheese

Poor Mitt Romney. His tin ear gives him a chronic decorum problem. Listen to him speaking at Jackson, Mississippi.>

I got started right this morning with a biscuit and some cheesy grits.

It’s not “cheesy grits.” It’s cheese grits. Romney tries hard to fit in wherever he goes, to prove he’s a man of the people. But if you want to prove you’re part of a tribe, you have to know the tribal language. That’s a key element of decorum, Latin for “fitness.”

Fitness. Darwin used the term to refer to a species’ ability to fit into its particular environment. Rhetorical fitness—decorum—has to do with a person’s ability to fit into a particular tribal environment. And, listen up, all y’all:  It don’t get more tribal than southern Republican.

Figaro often gets emails from word snobs who mistake grammar for morals, and who see a split infinitive as a crack in civilization. But grammar, like cheese grits, is merely an element of decorum, the art of fitting in.

And Romney, for all his many abilities, just isn’t the fitting-in type. Then again, neither is Obama. Figaro cringes every time the Harvard Law grad refers to Americans as “folks.” Trust the Fig: This election will be more grammatical than folksy. 

We'd Like to Meet That Teacher

This from Ask Figaro:

Dear Figaro,

I saw this note on a high school student’s locker: “Caution: Blonde trapped in a brunette’s body.”

What would you call this? This is the one where a part stands for the whole, right? Is that synecdoche?

Michael

Dear Michael,

Close but no metaphorical cigar! That blonde is a metonymy, which transfers one trait onto another. A synecdoche swaps the part for the whole, while a metonymy takes a characteristic and makes it represent the thing it characterizes. Tricky stuff, I know. To learn more, go to our sister site and read this extremely short detective story:http://www.wordhero.org/story.

Fig.

Death to the War Metaphor!

What happens when you declare war? You get militarization. America declares war on drugs, and the little burg of Keene, New Hampshire, gets offered a Homeland Security grant for an armored vehicle. (The sensible cheapskate citizens are saying “Tanks but no tanks.”)

Figaro opposes the use of war as a metaphor because it’s silly (war on Christmas, class warfare, war on the middle class, the “moral equivalent of warfare”), expensive (war on poverty) or dangerous (war on drugs).

War is a popular word these days, perhaps because most of us haven’t had to experience war personally. On the other hand, “militarization” is an unpopular term. The “militarization” of America’s police forces—thanks to heavy lobbying by weapons manufacturers—has become an issue. If the weapons manufacturers paid Figaro lavishly, he would advise them to replace “militarization” with “upgrading.” And “police tank” with “protective vehicle.”

Meanwhile, Figaro would like to bring back the phrase “peace officers.” Pax!

Word Crushes

Figaro’s friend Heidi Stevens included us in a Valentine’s piece on word crushes: http://www.chicagotribune.com/features/tribu/ct-tribu-words-work-crush-20120215,0,1758115.story

What was your word crush?