They Even Have the Nerve to Call it "Football"

Quote:  “The game — the simple game, the beautiful game — has become the global game.”   Michael Elliott and Simon Robinson in Time.

Figure of Speech:  conduplicatio (con-du-plih-CAT-io), the repeater.

The global game is soccer, of course, whose World Cup is playing in a dozen German cities.  Writers Elliott and Robinson express their love for the sport — sorry, game — with a conduplicatio (“doubling”), a figure that repeats a word for emotional emphasis, pushed along by adjectives .

In school we’re taught not to repeat ourselves.  A diligent teacher might edit the sentence to read, “Soccer has become global.”  But the purpose of the sentence is not just to make a global point; it’s to make you love soccer.  The difference, in other words, is purely rhetorical.  The art of rhetoric — the complex art, the beautiful art — is a persuasive art.

Snappy Answer:  “That explains why Americans don’t watch soccer.”

Triumph of the Shrill

Quote:  “You don’t go see Joseph Goebbels’ films to see the truth about Nazi Germany.  You don’t go see Al Gore’s films to see the truth about global warming.”   Sterling Burnett, Fox News

Figure of Speech:  anaphora (an-AH-phor-a), the beginning repeater.

“Why go see propaganda?” asks oily rightist pundit Sterling Burnett.  He backs this rhetorical question with an anaphora (“bring again”) to associate Al Gore with Hitler’s propagandist.  The figure repeats a word or phrase at the beginning of consecutive clauses.

The anaphora can build a link between thoughts that otherwise have little to do with each other.  Start with a point everyone agrees with:  Goebbels’ films are an unreliable source of information on the Nazis.  Then repeat the same line, substituting Gore for Goebbels.  The repetition establishes guilt by association — even though Gore and Goebbels make very strange bedfellows.

Burnett fails to mention that his employer, the National Center for Policy Analysis, is funded in part by ExxonMobil.  Which might make him something of a propagandist.

Snappy Answer:  “I don’t watch Fox News to see the truth about … well, we’ll stop right there.”

We’d Love to See His Expense Reports

Quote:   “Hell, I couldn’t write a better piece if given a month, five naked research assistants, and a crate of whippets.”  Jack Shafer in Slate.

Figure of Speech:  adynata (a-dyn-AH-ta), the last-people-on-earth figure.

Slate’s media columnist expresses admiration for a colleague’s hurricane story with an adynata (“without power”).  It’s a kind of hyperbole that links impossibilities:  “Even if you and I were the last people on earth, and the survival of humankind depended on us, I still wouldn’t date you.”

The adynata is like a three-ring circus of absurdity, throwing in dogs, unclad assistants, and long deadlines.  Use it as a humorous way to express, “Words cannot express…”

Snappy Answer:  “Maybe you would write better if you weren’t thinking about naked research assistants.”

The Freedom to Ban Gays

Quote:  “In our free society, people have the right to choose how they live their lives.  And in a free society, decisions about such a fundamental social institution as marriage should be made by the people, not by the courts.”   President Bush.

Figure of Speech:  enthymeme, the argument packet.

Seeking a little (platonic) love from the Christianists, the president supports a Constitutional amendment banning gay marriage.  He presses his case with an enthymeme (“something in the mind”), which takes something the audience believes and uses it to support a conclusion.

Bush favors a particularly cynical kind of enthymeme, in which he takes a commonplace that argues against his point and pretends that it supports him.  Commonplace:  People have the right to choose how they live their lives.  Conclusion:  We should ban gay marriage.  Bush knows the amendment will almost certainly die in Congress.  But in this presidency, reality takes a back seat to rhetoric.

That makes Figaro hot.

Snappy Answer:  “With freedom like that, who needs repression?”

Learn more about the enthymeme here and here.

Archive THIS, Government Spy Type!

Quote:  “The government is saying, ‘Keep everything about everyone and we’ll sort it out later.’”  Marc Rotenberg, executive director of the Electronic Privacy Information Center, in the L.A. Times.

Figure of Speech:  epiphonema (e-pi-pho-NE-ma), the pithy summary.

The feds now want Web companies and telecoms to keep records on all our emails, chats, clicks  — and blogs, for crying out loud.  Privacy advocate Rotenberg uses an epiphonema to sum up the government’s argument in a memorable way.

While the epiphonema usually applies to summary of your own argument, you can use it to redefine your opponent’s point.  We doubt that the feds would sum up their request in quite the same words Rotenberg used.   So one can bet his emails are monitored.

Snappy Answer:  “The government plans to sort it out?  Then our privacy is safe.”

Fences Make Good Bankers

Quote:  “He is expected to ring-fence his assets so that he will have no influence on how they are managed.” Goldman Sachs spokesman Lucas van Praag, in the New York Times.

Figure of Speech: anthimeria (an-thih-MER-ia), the verbing figure.

Bush’s nominee for Treasury secretary, Hank Paulson, will take a $38 million pay cut when he leaves his CEO job at Wall Street’s top firm.  To avoid any conflict of interest, he will probably create a blind trust for his $700 million in Goldman stock.

The firm’s spokesman uses highfalutin investment jargon, “ring-fence,” to describe the move.  That’s an anthimeria, a figure that turns one part of speech into another — such as a noun into a verb.

Language snobs who want to close our lexical borders hate this figure, because it’s a prodigious neologizer.  Calvin in “Calvin & Hobbes” dislikes the anthimeria (he’s surprisingly conservative for a six-year-old). “Verbing weirds language,” he says.

It certainly does.  But Shakespeare weirded language to form more than 1,500 neologisms.  In an age when the average person had a vocabulary of 700 (today’s college grad averages 3,000), Shakespeare’s exceeded 21,000.  If weirding was a turn-on for him (to use a once-popular anthimeria), it positively ecstacizes Figaro.

Snappy Answer:  “Ring-fence Bush while you’re at it.”