“Clever, passionate, and erudite.”
Hear the NPR commentary.
“It is, dare we say, fiendishly clever.” - Chicago Tribune
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Monday, February 13, 2012 at 06:17PM This astonishing performance by the late Whitney Houston at the 1994 Grammies shows the emotional power of a classical oration: exhortation, narration, division, and killer peroration. This Ciceronian outline works emotionally in a song as well as it does logically in a speech. RIP, Ms. Houston.
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 11:52AM This is a bit outside of our beat, but we can’t resist this illustration of that trickiest of punctuation marks, the comma. The Greeks came up with the name komma to refer to a phrase or clause. (A period in that verbal culture was a stretch of words about the equivalent of a breath.)
Club that, comma!
Wednesday, February 8, 2012 at 10:44AM Congratulations to Rick Santorum, who became the Not-Romney du jour by sweeping three states on Tuesday. Yes, he garnered few delegates; but we’re talking politics, not reality. Santorum came up with our favorite Romney label: “Obama Lite.” Rhetoric lovers around the globe pondered: What figure of speech is that, exactly? We’re here to help.
The ancients were unfamiliar with lite beer, and they failed to come up with a technical term for an analogy that includes differences. Analogy is Greek for “proportional thought” or, in modern-speak, “template.” Santorum says that Obama is an analog for Romney—except that Romney is a watered-down, lo-cal version. An analogy with a difference.
In our book Word Hero, we devised a new figure to cover that analagous base.
Like…Only Technique. A figure of thought that uses a simile or analogy and points out the differences. Romney is like Obama, only less filling. You’ll find more examples at our sister site.
Meanwhile, we wish Rick Santorum all the joy that 15 minutes of fame can bring.
Monday, February 6, 2012 at 04:32PM Yawn: More dogs, naked women, and babies. (Also polar bears, vampires, exploited chimps, and a naked man, but they’re just fancy babies.) There was one different theme this year: a not-so-subtle dose of tribal politics. So, before we get to the rhetorical winner, let us review:
Dogs: Skechers has a dog wearing running shoes. Who wants to run like a dog? Bud Light’s dog fetched Bud Light. And Volkswagen’s dog worked out and lost weight. What that has to do with the car, Figaro can’t say. Advertisers paid $3.5 million just to get 30 seconds of Bowl-time. The point should be to sell the product. The most effective means is by “virtue,” making consumers identify themselves with the product or its benefits. That means showing the product and either linking it to the values of the viewer, or showing the benefits. In that respect, this year’s dogs didn’t hunt.
Naked women: Figaro loved Teleflora’s ad, which featured supermodel Adriana Lima. The message is simple and direct: buy flowers, get laid. The Toyota Camry gets a couch made of naked women, an analogy to the car’s redesign. The car itself isn’t shown, probably because of its poor resemblance to naked women. Babes do sell product, but they’re generally not very virtuous.
Babies: A basketball made of Bridgestone tires lets a baby sleep. Nice idea, but Figaro isn’t into dribbling babies. Doritos has a baby slingshot into a bag of junk food. While it’s winning the online polls and associates Doritos with good American values like revenge and bungies, two wrongs make a very wrong. Then there’s Etrade, which once again does babies voiced-over with adults. A muddled message.
Politics: Yeah, there were overt political ads, but we’re talking about the non-political political ads. Politics in America is about tribes, about who’s in and who’s out, about what we Americans stand for and what we don’t. It’s about values. Aristotle said that politics should be about decisions and choices. But he was a Greek, and look what happened to that country. The fact that Mad Ave is selling cars, beer and soda politically shows how tribally saturated we’ve become.
The politics cover the political spectrum from left to right, with Clint Eastwood rasping away in the moderate center. On the far, far right, Chevy trucks survive the Rapture (it’s the Mayan Apocalypse in the ad; same thing). The survivors emerge and smugly eat Twinkies, then discover that their friend Dave had been driving a Ford. Dave is dead. Long live Twinkies.
Budweiser proves without a doubt that Prohibition caused the Depression. The damned government finally gets out of the way, the beer flows, and people have jobs and happiness again. Thank God for beer. Strangely enough, a co-op ad with GE proves that turbines make beer. Again, Figaro is mystified.
On the moderate scale, Clint Eastwood declares “halftime in America” for Chrysler. It’s a cliché, but done well, and it speaks honestly about political divisions. And Detroit actually looks kind of cool in that campaign. If Mitt Romney had done that ad, he’d be leading Obama in the polls. But Romney wouldn’t do that; Republicans are furious at Chrysler because they interpret the ad as a celebration of the government bailout. Which, by the way, goes unmentioned. Never mind that Eastwood is a Republican.
Moving to the left, the Arab Spring appears metaphorically in the form of X-Factor winner Melanie Amaro. She sings “Respect” while deposing Elton John. Figaro loved this ad for the wrong reason: An overweight young woman plugging a sugary drink constituted the most honest advertising of the evening.
Farther to the left, a woman head-butts John Stamos, who’s hogging her yogurt. Feminism dumbed down for men! Oh, wait: it’s women who buy that stuff. Feminism dumbed down for women!
And to the bizarrely left we have Met Life telling us that insurance shouldn’t just be for the intelligent and wealthy. Yes, a mega-insurance company representing the 99 percent. God, but Figaro loves America.
And the winner? Chrysler. Virtue at its best. It makes Figaro feel guilty driving a foreign car. Even one made in America.
Wednesday, January 25, 2012 at 09:30AM Let the campaign begin! The president’s first campaign speech, cloaked in his term’s last State of the Union address, deployed two central metaphors: the economy is a car, and it’s also a playing field.
An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded.
While Figaro hates the clumsy rhythm and passive voice, he likes the trope. It uses the auto industry’s success as a model for what the rest of the economy can do. Thanks in part to government intervention (never mind that disaster in Japan), GM is back on top as the world’s number-one car company. Chrysler is accelerating, the industry is creating a growing number of jobs… And the feds provided the jumper cable.
Figaro would like to see Obama make the connection more overtly, saying something like, “What we did for the auto industry, we are doing for the whole economy.” Not socialism. Jump-starting. Building the economy Ford tough. Taking the economy from zero to, um, more than zero in under a decade!
Still, the trope works. Why? Because it focuses on the future, the long term, and the modest progress made so far. The Republicans know this, which is why their “prebuttal” and rebuttal work hard to shift the focus from the future to the present misery. The election will come down to a Reaganesque “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” versus Obama’s slow build for the future.
Obama has the steeper road. The economy is already like a rock—a barely movable object. The Republicans’ present carries more emotional weight than the Democrats’ future. Besides, Obama described the future four years ago, and it’s now a bald-tired present.
Which is why Obama pulled out his second trope, the playing field. The present is shabby, he argues, because some players aren’t playing fair.
We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.
At last, the Democrats are catching on: Forget the figures. It’s the tropes, stupid.
Monday, January 23, 2012 at 04:26PM The tribal rhetoric gets better and better. Mitt Romney, the inevitable Republican candidate who can’t seem to convince Republicans of his inevitability, uses a strong syncrisis to define “99 percent” protesters. They shouted, “We are the people.” Romney shouted back.
No, actually, these are the people. These are the people; you’re the interrupters. We believe in the Constitution. We believe in the right to speech. And you believe in interrupting. Take a hike.
Mitt Romney in Ormond Beach, Florida, quoted in the L.A. Times
syncrisis (SIN-crih-sis), the contraster. From the Greek, meaning “compare with.” Weighs two points side by side with similar clauses: “These are the people; you’re the interrupters.”
As Figaro explains in his first book, tribal rhetoric focuses on values and the present—unlike deliberative rhetoric, which deals with the future. The most tribal-tastic tribal rhetoric of them all defines “the people”—that is, who’s in and who’s out of the tribe. Romney supporters are people. People, according to Romney, are a species who believe in the Constitution. Interrupters aren’t people. (Corporations are people, too; they obviously don’t interrupt.)
But wait, it gets better. The 99 percenters started chanting “USA! USA!” and the People took up the chant. For a moment both the People and the Interrupters chanted their tribal slogan together.
No one got persuaded, nothing got decided, and soon everybody took a hike.
