Fo-Bros (Forgettable Brothers)

Quote:  “You know it’s a grim summer-movie season when mediocre rom-coms starring a Wilson brother open two weeks in a row. ” Movie review of “My Super Ex-Girlfriend” by Dana Stevens in Slate.

Figure of Speech: apocope (a-PO-co-pee), the word compacter.

For all you computer geeks, rom-com means romantic comedy, not  “read-only memory communication.”  The phrase joins two apocopes (“shorten”), a figure that kills the last part of a word.

But rom-com is a particular kind of apocope, and one that’s increasingly popular.  It twins with a rhyming cut-off word, as in SoHo, lit crit (literary criticism), and Ab Fab (“Absolutely Fabulous,” darling).  So Figaro will just have to conjure a new figure:

Henceforth, the term for consecutive rhyming abbreviated words is repcope (REP-cope), as in “repetitive cope.”  Yes, that mixes English with Greek.  But restaurants in London do it successfully, and so will Figaro.

Snappy Answer:  “Mediocre” and “Wilson brother” are redundant.

But Enough of My Needs.

Quote:  “I need to see some I.D.”  Figaro, speaking to a woman who stole his backpack near Lander, Wyoming.

Figure of Speech:  the kindergarten imperative.

When Figaro put his backpack down to visit a waterfall in the Wind River Range, a local band of pack rustlers swiped it.  Not an easy thing to do; the pack weighed 45 pounds and the altitude was a breathless 9,000 feet.  With the help of a fellow hiker, Figaro found his pack, the thief (an extremely fit 22-year-old woman), and the thief’s mother.  Not knowing what else to say, Figaro resorted to copspeak.  To his astonishment, the woman handed over her driver’s license.  Figaro turned it in to the police when he hiked out next morning.

“How’d you get this? What did you do to her?” a detective asked him.
“I didn’t do anything.  I said I needed to see some I.D.”

Slate’s word maven, Ben Yagoda, refers to this increasingly popular device — “I need you to do this” in place of the simple command “Do this”  — as “the kindergarten imperative.”  It replaces the harsh old imperative mood with a request to meet one’s needs; e.g., “I need you to put down your crayons now.”  The figure is brilliantly rhetorical, he notes, because it “psychologizes directives,” turning commands into appeals to empathy.  On the down side, it wimpifies speech. Without the imperative mood, Yagoda says, “the Ten Commandments would be the Ten Suggestions.”

Of course, when the suggestion is made by a red-faced, packless hiker, it can look a lot like a command.
 
Snappy Answer:  “I don’t need more needy people.”

SUVs Fall Off Cliff, Reporter's Prose Follows.

Quote:  “Though SUV sales have been SLIPPING for the past year or so, lately it looks like the road has DROPPED OUT from under them. Sales of Chevrolet’s Suburban SLID 24% in the year’s first half, Toyota’s Sequoia FELL 30%, Jeep’s Grand Cherokee DROPPED 32%, the Ford Expedition DECLINED 33% and the Durango PLUNGED 37%.  Not only is the downturn sharper than expected, but it has hit smaller SUVs as well:  Ford’s once-best-selling Explorer FELL 29%, while Jeep’s compact Liberty WAS OFF 16%.” Wall Street Journal (capital letters added).

Figure of Speech:  synonymia, synonyms gone wild.

Pity the poor business reporter who has to turn numbers into a trend story.  The writer has to apply all his lexigraphical skill to say “go up” or “go down” as many ways as possible, thus employing a figure called synonymia (“like words”).

The ancients saw the synonymia as a form of copia, or rhetorical abundance.  But Figaro, who’s more easily bored, considers it a vice.  Sports announcers drive him crazy when they combine synonymia with anthropomorphism:  “The Harriers buzzed the Minute Men 7-0, the Banana Slugs slimed the Boll Weevils 87-85, and the Stoners smoked the Born-Agains 100-20.”  Just give us the scores, Dude.

Figurist Brian Edwards, who sent us the quote, notes that the Wall Street Journal calibrates its verbs to match the numbers.  A plunge is worse than a drop, which is worse than a fall, which is worse than a slide.  So there truly is poetry in math — a dangerous mix of rhyme and reason.

Snappy Answer:  “The writer’s verbs went into a free fall, hitting terminal velocity in his last, vertiginous clause.”

A Senator's Constipation Problem

Quote:  “The Internet is not something you just dump something on. It’s not a big truck.  It’s, it’s a series of tubes.”  Senator Ted Stevens, chairman of the Senate Commerce Committee, which regulates the Internet.

Figure of Speech:  horismus, the simple definition.

Having been under the mistaken impression that the Internet is a big truck, you might feel tempted to click on the link above and view Ted Stevens’ informative comment.  Please don’t.  It will clog the Senator’s Internet.  “Ten movies streaming across that, that Internet, and what happens to your own personal Internet?” Senator Stevens asks, rhetorically.  “I just the other day got Internet that was sent by my staff at 10 o’clock in the morning on Friday, I got it yesterday. Why?”

Stevens’ simple analogy, downgrading the Information Superhighway to something in need of a plumber, counts as a horismus (“boundary”), a definition that explains the distinctions between terms and meanings.  At its best, the horismus unclogs the rhetorical tubes and clears things up nicely.

It’s good to know the Internet is in such capable hands.

Snappy Answer:  “Perhaps a little fiber…optic cable might be the answer.”  Jon Stewart.

Performing a Fallacious Act

Quote:
Bad logic wastes time, and it ruins our health and our budgets. Children use it to torture their parents. (“All the other kids get to.”) Parents respond with bad logic. (“If your friends told you to go jump in a lake…”) Doctors kill patients with it. (“There’s nothing wrong with you; the tests came back negative.”) It can make you fat. (“Eat all of it — children are starving in Africa.”) Candidates base their campaigns on it (John Kerry: “Every American family has to live within their means. Their government should, too.”) We even wage wars over bad logic. (“If we pull out now, our soldiers will have died in vain.”) Push polls — fake surveys with loaded questions — are bad logic. (“Do you support government-financed abortions and a woman’s right to choose?”) These are no mere logical punctilios. We’re talking credit lines and waistlines, life and death, the future of human existence!
Jay Heinrichs, in his book Thank You for Arguing.

Figure of Speech: hyperbole (hy-PER-bo-le), the figure of exaggeration.

 Hyperbole (“exaggeration”) is an incredibly useful figure (to coin a hyperbole); to make it easier to swallow, start small and work your way up—budget and diet, life and death, and the future of humanity. One Ivy League slogan—“God, man and Yale”—got it backwards. But perhaps they thought otherwise.

Forgive us for the shameless self promotion, but there has to be some catch to getting all these free figures. Our book is now available for pre-order on Amazon. It offers cures for what ails us: instant wit, a way out of our political problems, seduction techniques, and fallacy inoculation. Figaro will make himself available to book clubs, and if you ask him really nicely, he may speak to your school

Snappy Answer: “Isn’t hyperbole a kind of fallacy?”

Al-Qaeda's Secret Weapon (Extra Butter, Please)

Quote:  “Maybe because popcorn explodes?”  Brian Lehman, owner of Amish Country Popcorn, in the New York Times.

Figure of Speech: charientismus (cha-ree-en-TIS-mus), the figure of gentle irony.

The Department of Homeland Security lists Amish Country Popcorn of Berne, Indiana, as a “national asset” at risk of terrorism, along with Ole MacDonald’s Petting Zoo and the Mule Day Parade.  Figaro agrees these are national assets.  But are terrorists so evil they would take out parading mules?

Mr. Lehman clearly doesn’t think al-Qaeda is about to weaponize his popcorn.  He’s just poking mild-mannered, Midwestern fun with a charientismus (“graceful joke”), a figure that employs an inoffensive sort of irony.  Ironic humor takes many forms, all having to do with saying one thing and meaning another.

So why did corn-fed Indiana end up number one for terrorist targets while the District of Columbia is in 42nd place?  Do the Islamists plan to snack us to death?

Surely we can do that ourselves.

Snappy Answer:  “Did that man just leak a national secret?”