YOU: Yes, I’m talking like an egghead. I am an egghead.
If that definition fails to suit your argument perfectly, change it, or redefine the insult.
YOU: If talking like an egghead means knowing what I’m talking about, then I’m talking like an egghead.
When you’re on your best definition game, you can spike any label that comes your way, slamming it back at your opponent with double the power. In fact, this is one instance where the best offense is a good defense. (That is not the case when you define whole issues instead of people and individual concepts.)
Obviously, you want to avoid giving your opponent an easy label to spike. Make sure the definitions you start with work in your favor. Suppose you’re the one who accuses a sibling of talking like an egghead. Include an airtight definition.
YOU: You’re just talking like an egghead—using fancy jargon to show everybody how educated you are.
SIBLING: So I’m educated. If you’re insecure about your own lack of knowledge, don’t go attacking me.
TRY THIS IN THE OFFICE
Arguments don’t just attach labels to people; they also label everything you do at home or work. If a coworker labels your idea “unoriginal,” say, “Sure, in the sense that it’s already been used successfully.” Better to use concession—employ your opponent’s language—than to deny it. “Sure” trumps “No, it’s not.”
Whoa, what went wrong? You defined “egghead” neatly—as showing off with fancy jargon—but then you dropped another term, “educated,” without defining it. Better just to stick with:
YOU: You’re just talking like an egghead—showing off with fancy jargon.
SIBLING: I’m not showing off! I’m using words that any educated person would know.
Now you have your opponent on the defensive, and you can bear down.
YOU: Using obscure words doesn’t show you’re educated.
At this point you can feel free to switch the argument to the future tense and win the day.
YOU: So let’s talk in simple terms how we’re going to pay for Mom’s insurance.
My Word Versus Theirs
Now we’re ready to begin defining entire issues. It works like the definition tactics we just talked about, except on a grander scale. Defining an issue means attaching words to it—making those words stick to the issue whenever it pops up in the audience’s heads. The politicians’ glue of choice is repetition. In the 1980s, conservatives called up the image of the “welfare cheat” who claims nonexistent children and lives high on the government dole. The political right repeated this message in speeches and ads until it was difficult for many Americans to see welfare as anything but a rip-off. In the 1990s, President George H. W. Bush promoted tort reform by referring over and over to “frivolous lawsuits.” Opponents of tort reform—particularly the Democratic Party, which receives a big chunk of money from trial lawyers—have had a hard time redefining the issue as a citizen’s right to a day in court. That’s a less vivid label than “frivolous.” They might do better with “the right to sue bad doctors and corporate crooks.” A personalized definition usually beats an impersonal one.
Useful Figure
The periphrasis swaps a description for a name—good for labeling a person or an issue. A more general word for this is “circumlocution.”
And then there’s Barack Obama, who understood a good label when he saw one. During the 2012 campaign he came out with a zinger.
OBAMA: Honorable people could disagree about the real choice between tax giveaways to the wealthiest Americans and health care and education for America’s families. I’m ready for that honest debate.
What an honest debater, willing to weigh things objectively side by side—while labeling the blazes out of them.
To do your own personal labeling, define your side with a term that contrasts with your opponent’s. Let me give you a personal example. I’m currently consulting with a publishing company that is bidding for the privilege of doing a major airline’s in-flight magazine. Several other publishers are competing with my client; one of them puts out a highly respected general interest magazine that sells on newsstands. Its editors are some of the brightest in the business—well educated, imaginative, with a thorough knowledge of magazines. My client, on the other hand, has only one editor dedicated to the project, besides me. I’ll help hire a staff only if my client wins the bid.
I can picture walking into a conference room after the well-dressed, articulate rival team has finished its brilliant presentation. Gulp. What rhetorical device could I use to beat it?
I can make the opponent’s most positive words look like negatives. I don’t mean trashing them to the airline executives, calling them sissy intellectuals and making fun of their (terrific) shoes. Nor am I going to maintain that professionalism and editorial talent are bad. Instead, our team will pitch a magazine around one simple-sounding word: “fun.” The airline uses that word frequently in its materials. It likes to convey a spirit of egalitarian informality. So my clients and I will pitch a fun magazine—one filled with humor and pleasant surprises. Because the airline doesn’t offer movies, we’ll provide an “in-flight cinema” right in the magazine: tiny flip-book images that animate when you flip the pages’ lower right corner.
Argument Tool
DEFINITION JUDO: Use contrasting terms that make your opponents look bad.
TRY THIS AT A PUBLIC MEETING
If you want to attack a person’s reputation without appearing to, say, “I’m not here to make personal attacks; I just want to…,” and then name the opposite of your opponent’s weakness. For instance, if you’re debating a college professor who has a tendency to overtheorize, say, “I’m not going to get personal; I just want to talk about the practicalities.”
See what I’m doing? The competition defines a good magazine as “professional”—an approach that favors them. But I redefine the issue as “fun,” using the corporation’s commonplace and moving the argument to an arena where I have a fighting chance—while making the competition’s professionalism actually work against them.
Imagine the discussion in the following days, when the airline’s execs try to decide who should get the bid. They sit around the table with mock-ups of each bidder’s proposed magazine. “I really liked the professionalism of that team that does that great magazine,” says one exec. Everyone nods. Meanwhile, several of them thumb through our mock-up and watch the little flip-book flower spit out the bee. They fill in the space for “competitive doodling.” (We’ll give prizes for the best doodles sent in.) And they quietly show one another our funny plot summaries of current (real) movies. With any luck, “professionalism” will sound like a bad thing. And pop will go our rival’s beautifully made balloon.
Will the technique win us the bid? Well, more goes into a pitch than that. (Update: We won the contract. But everybody laughed at my flip-book idea. Good labeling, bad salesmanship on my part.)
But look how well defining the terms worked for Antony in Shakespeare’s Julius Caesar. In his “I’ve come to bury Caesar, not to praise him” speech, Antony calls Brutus “an honorable man” so many times in the context of Caesar’s assassination that “honorable” begins to sound like an accusation. The crowd is ready to tear Brutus limb from limb for his honorableness.
Take Your Stance
I no longer arm-wrestle with my son the way we used to. He finds me too lame a challenge, and I get tired of feeling my arm bend the wrong way and slam against the table. Up until recently, however, we were closely matched—even though he got stronger long before that. I was better because I knew the right kind of grip: subtle enough that he didn’t feel me squirm for advantage, while enclosing enough of his hand to allow full use of my arm muscles. The moment he learned the same technique, I didn’t stand a chance.
Argum
ent Tool
STANCE: The technical name is “status theory.” Status is Latin for “stance.” It comes from the stance wrestlers would take at the beginning of a match. The technique is a fallback strategy: fact, definition, quality, relevance. If the first won’t work, fall back on the second, and so on.
This is exactly how framing works: as a rhetorical method for getting a favorable grip on an argument. In this section you will learn the technique of top lawyers and political strategists: the ability to define the terms and the issue in a way that stacks an argument in your favor.
The ancients listed definition as the tool to fall back on when the facts are against you, or when you lack a good grasp of them. If you want, you can harness definition to win an argument without using any facts at all. Facts and definitions are part of a larger overall strategy called stance. It was originally designed for defense, but it works offensively as well. Before you begin to argue, or when you find yourself under attack, take your stance:
If facts work in your favor, use them. If they don’t (or you don’t know them), then…
Redefine the terms instead. If that won’t work, accept your opponent’s facts and terms but…
Argue that your opponent’s argument is less important than it seems. And if even that isn’t to your advantage…
Claim the discussion is irrelevant.
Use fact, definition, quality, and relevance in descending order. The facts work best; fall back through definition, quality, and relevance until one works for you.
Suppose a father catches his kid smuggling a candy bar into her room before dinner. The kid takes me on as counsel for the defense. What do I advise her?
The facts don’t work for her. She was caught red-handed.
She could try to redefine the issue by saying she was not smuggling candy, exactly, but hiding it from her brother before he grabbed it for dessert. Suppose she doesn’t have a brother, though. Plus, any lame excuse risks an angry parent. So she has to fall back again.
The quality defense would have her admit she smuggled the candy. But she would argue that it wasn’t as big an offense as you might think. Maybe she hadn’t had time to eat lunch and was faint with hunger. With luck, the father lectures her on proper nutrition and lets her off without punishment. The quality defense just might work.
If it doesn’t, relevance remains as her last fallback. In a real trial, the relevance tactic entails arguing that the court has no jurisdiction in the matter. In the girl’s case, it would mean claiming that Dad has no right to judge her. Didn’t she see him pop a cookie into his mouth when he came home from work? And is his customary pre-dinner whiskey good for him?
You can see why relevance is the last position you want to take. It carries big risks. But you normally won’t have to fall back that far. Most of the time, defining the issue wins the day. Definition is such a great tool, actually, that you may want to use it even when the facts are on your side.
Now Switch Tenses
After you choose your commonplaces and define the issue in a way that directly concerns the largest audience, switch the tense. As you’ll see in a bit, commonplaces deal with values, and values get expressed in the present tense. To make a decision, your audience needs to turn to the future. This isn’t hard; just deal with the specific issue. Say you want abortions to be safe and rare. Now what? If you are a politician, you might want to support a ban on third-trimester abortions while allowing the morning-after pill. On the other hand, a pro-life politician might advocate abstinence. Both positions deal with specifics of the issue, with concrete steps, and they take place in the future.
Advocates who give rhetoric its due—working the commonplaces, defining the issue in the broadest context, and switching from values to the future—increase their batting average. The country benefits as well. Out of sheer political self-interest, the advocates find themselves on the middle ground. Suddenly an intractable, emotional, values-laden issue like abortion begins to look politically arguable. Making abortions rare is to the nation’s advantage, as Aristotle would say. Now, what are the most effective (and politically popular) ways to make abortions rare? The answers might give the extremes of both sides a lot to swallow; on the left, pro-choicers would have to agree that abortion is a repugnant form of contraception, while on the right, pro-lifers would have to allow some abortions.
Of course, they don’t have to. They can stick to their guns. And remain unpersuasive.
Get into the habit of reframing issues, and you may find something interesting happen to your own brain. Instead of just reframing disagreements or persuasive opportunities, you could start reframing your life.
When our kids were young, we used to take them hiking up the highest peaks in New Hampshire. If the weather turned foul, Dorothy Senior and I would say, “It’s not our day on the mountain.” We taught the kids that turning around wasn’t a failure or a disappointment, it was a sign of their skill in the outdoors.
I used reframing on myself a year ago when I slipped on some ice and badly broke my leg. It happened at the beginning of ski season, my favorite time of year. Here lay a great opportunity to feel sorry for myself. But instead I reframed it as an excuse to let people be nice to me. And they were. My family came to my aid, cooking constantly, bringing me stuff, giving massages….When I started traveling again on business, I had to use crutches and wheelchairs in the airports, and I took stock of how nice people would be to me. Ski season turned into a season of love. People were unbelievably nice. Dorothy Senior says of that time, “You were the most bearable you’ve ever been.”
The greatest reframing I’ve ever witnessed, though, was by a friend who was diagnosed with terminal cancer. Jeff had had a successful career as an aide in the U.S. Senate, a corporate attorney, and a law school dean. He treated his lymphoma the way he dealt with his toughest cases: as something to solve. People often use the metaphor of a fight when it comes to cancer and other deadly diseases. In Jeff’s case, he realized the fight had come to an end. The doctors had run out of treatments. So he reframed his illness. He turned it from a battle to a beautiful last chapter in his life. His grandchildren moved in, friends came to say goodbye, he wrote letters and ordered Christmas presents knowing he wouldn’t be around to see them unwrapped. Several days before he died, he told his wife, “These weeks have been the happiest of my life.”
There’s a big moral to that story. Life itself is an argument, a conversation full of choices and disagreements. We often find ourselves accepting the frames our parents, our tribe, our leaders, and our whole society give us. Success, family, religion, education, even health all have particular frames. Rhetoric can liberate us from those frames, let them see outside the ones we inherit, and build our own. Not feeling entirely free? Reframe freedom. Does it mean being able to do whatever you want? Or does it mean freeing yourself from obeying rules you haven’t really thought about?
Once you start thinking outside every frame, you’re really ready to argue. Now: Let’s get logical.
The Tools
Defining an argument’s terms and issues is like doing the reverse of a psychologist’s word association test. You want to attach favorable words and connotations to people and concepts, and then place the whole argument within the bounds of your own rhetorical turf.
Here are the specific techniques for labeling:
Term changing. Don’t accept the terms your opponent uses. Insert your own.
Redefinition. Accept your opponent’s terms while changing their connotation.
Definition jujitsu. If your opponent’s terms actually favor you, use them to attack.
Definition judo. Use terms that contrast with your opponent’s, creating a context that makes them look bad.
Here are the framing techniques:
First, find audience commonplac
e words that favor you.
Next, define the issue in the broadest context—one that appeals to the values of the widest audience.
Then deal with the specific problem or choice, making sure you speak in the future tense.
The definition tools fall under the strategy of stance, the position you take at the beginning of an argument. If the facts don’t work for you, define (or redefine) the issue. If that won’t work, belittle the importance of what’s being debated. If that fails, claim the whole argument is irrelevant. In sum, stance comes down (in descending order) to this:
Facts
Definition
Quality
Relevance
13. Control the Argument
HOMER SIMPSON’S CANONS OF LOGIC
Logos, inside out
A fool may talk, but a wise man speaks. —BEN JONSON
Enough with the care and feeding of your audience. You made it think you’re a Boy Scout, insinuated yourself into its mood, put it in a trusting state, offered it the rich rewards of its own advantage, and plucked the beliefs and desires from its mind. Now let’s use that audience to your own advantage. It’s time to apply some logos and achieve our own goals.
The commonplace gives us our starting point. Homer Simpson employs a pair of them—the value of safe streets and his audience’s presumed affection for the weak and nerdy—in a speech he gives to a group of Australians.
Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 16