Study? Fuggedaboudit!

“Forgetting is the
friend of learning.”

Nate Kornell, a psychologist at Williams College, in the New York Times.

paradox, the two-faced figure. From the Greek, meaning “contrary to received wisdom.”

A recent study seems to show that concentrated study in one place leads to less learning than bursts of study with intervals of unlearning. It’s the re-learning that makes the material stick, apparently. The study’s lead author, Nate Kornell, sums up the conclusion in a neat paradox. To learn, you must forget.

The paradox and its Siamese-twin cousin, the oxymoron, show that the world is neither black-and-white nor gray. It’s black on white, a jumble of realities and beliefs. The ancient Greeks called these perceptions doxa, a term that survives in the Christian Doxology, a statement of belief.

Some ages tolerate a riot of doxa. Other ages burn Korans and call political opponents traitors. Want to think like an Aristotle? Take everything you believe and construct a cogent argument against it.

Do it when you’re supposed to be cramming for an exam or studying a memo. You’ll learn a lot. 

Mrs. Figaro Rocks the Marriage Boat!

Figaro’s wife, Mrs. Figaro, put this author in a terrible bind. Writing a question on Ask Figaro, she clearly wanted her husband to excoriate a certain pudgy commentator for lying about a historical document. Instead, Figaro found him innocent! Can this literal marriage be figuratively saved?

Dear Fig.,

Is a lie a figure of speech as Stephanie Mencimer implies in her piece for Rolling Stone?

Love,

Mrs. Fig.

Dear Mrs. Fig.,

It’s so nice to exchange sweet nothings over a public website. In this case you refer to Glenn Beck’s claim that he “held the first inaugural address written in his own hand by George Washington.”

The National Archives promptly replied that no one, not even a Constitution-adoring patriot, is permitted to touch the sacred documents. Glenn Beck most certainly did not make physical contact with Washington’s first inaugural address.

But does his claim constitute a lie? According to Figaro’s Oxford English Dictionary, to “behold” an object implies that one is holding that object in one’s eye.  This is a definite trope—a metonymy, to be exact.

Therefore, Figaro declares Mr. Beck’s little stretcher to be figurative (or, more accurately, tropical) and not a literal lie.

On the other hand, if Mrs. Figaro plans to take this conclusion badly, we declare Mr. Beck to be a lying two-faced bastard.

All our love,

Fig.

Heil, Glennster

“That’s what Goebbels did. That’s what Goebbels did. The truth didn’t matter.”

Glenn Beck, complaining about ABC News coverage of his Washington rally

Godwin’s Law, the theory that online arguments inevitably end up using Hitler rhetorically. A form of hyperbole, the trope of exaggeration.

Mike Godwin had his tongue in his cheek when he first invoked his law in 1989: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” No matter what the subject—gardening, fashion, even tea parties—Hitler will raise his evil analogous head.

Godwin, an attorney and expert on Internet law, added that mention of Hitler stops the conversation. But Beck and his fellow hysterics actually seem to reverse this corollary. They start with Hitler and go on from there. According to the Washington Post, Nazism had cropped up 202 times on Beck’s Fox News show by mid-July.

The Nazi references constitute a hyperbolic analogy, a way of tarring the enemy with a horrid comparison. Hyperbole and analogy are both tropes—non-literal language that says one thing while conveying an additional meaning.

Figaro loves tropes (see “The Four Most Dangerous Figures”). They make the rhetorical world go round. But when we take tropes literally, when citizens believe there’s a faint Hitler ’stache growing under the presidential schnozz, then we’ve got real propaganda going on.

Just what Goebbels did.

Update on Tuesday, August 31, 2010 at 05:37PM by Figaro

Thank you, Figarists, for your attempts to name the kind of anticipatory figure in which the employer of Nazi tactics first accuses others of the same tactics.  (And, yes, anticipatory figures fall under the category of PROLEPSIS.) 

The aptly named Farfignoggin came up with the winner:  The Beckfire.

Fig.

Rhetorical Eye of the Storm

We all remember it keenly: water pouring through broken levees; mothers holding their children above the waterline; people stranded on rooftops begging for help; bodies lying in the streets of a great American city.

President Barack Obama in a speech about New Orleans

pragmatographia (prag-ma-toe-GRAF-ia), the action sequence. A form of enargeia (en-AR-ja), the special effects of rhetoric. From the Greek, meaning “action writing.”

President Bush’s inaction over Katrina spoke louder than words, proving the conservative claim that you can’t rely on government. Obama’s latest speech tries to show that government actually can work. But first he wants to recall the disaster and its shameful aftermath.  “There’s no need to dwell on what you experienced and what the world witnessed,” he says, and then he proceeds to dwell on the experience with a neat pragmatographia, the action sequence of oratory.

You can find the pragmatographia in Shakespeare whenever breathless characters describe what took place offstage, while the magic of technology lets film directors do the same thing with  a short sequence of scenes called a montage. 

A good pragmatographia builds to a climax, and so does Obama’s. It starts with women holding up their babies, jumps in time to desperate victims on rooftops, and concludes with scandalous corpses.

Want to try the figure yourself? Consider using an individual or very specific scene for your climax—not corpses but a single awful body. An individual conveys more emotion than a mass of people. And, despite its name, emotion is what the pragmatographia is all about.

Sign of the Times

Figaro gets a nod from the New York Times Sunday Magazine:

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29FOB-medium-t.html

We Want to Meet Ms. Pneumatic

From Ask Figaro:

 Dear Figaro,

A friend just sent me this query: One of our architect’s little girls is visiting the office today and is reading a book where the characters’ names represent them (like Mrs. Little is tiny and Mr. Quatro teaches fourth grade). I know there’s a for it but can’t remember it. Can you help?

I think it’s just a pun, but she’s not so sure. What say you?

Thank you!

Bonsmots

Dear Bonnie,

The Littles and Quatros of this world constitute a periphrasis (per IF rah sis), the figure that swaps a description for a proper name. That’s Greek for “speak around.” While most periphrases are more than one word (e.g., He Who Must Not Be Named), the descriptive one-word nickname counts as well. 

Fig.