SIMPSON: I’m not doing this for my health.
Under the circumstances, “I’m not doing this out of good taste” would have made a better litotes. Still, showing up at a horror convention after being acquitted of a double murder certainly isn’t healthy.
A litotes can make you sound more reasonable than your opponent, especially in an age when everyone else on the planet uses hyperbole as his sole figure…I mean, when understatement isn’t exactly the current fad.
DAUGHTER: I’m going to school. Bye.
FATHER, WITHOUT A LITOTES: You’re not going anywhere dressed like that.
FATHER, WITH A LITOTES: You’re not exactly dressed for the part.
The litotes goes against the grain in these bloviated times, when most people assume that an argument must consist of insults and exaggeration. Still, turning up the volume isn’t such a bad thing at times. The ancients were big on “amplification”—figures that make an argument seem bigger than life. A particularly effective one orders your points so that they build to a climax. This figure, called (wait for it) climax, uses the last part of a clause to begin the next clause.
BEN FRANKLIN: A little neglect may breed great mischief…for want of a nail the shoe was lost; for want of a shoe the horse was lost; and for want of a horse the rider was lost.
The climax’s structure works like a pyramid, with each part overlapping the next. It can lend an ominous pathos to a highly logical bit of narration: this happened, which led to this, which led to this. The climax also makes a terrific plot summary.
Useful Figure
CLIMAX: Formal name: anadiplosis, meaning “climax.”
JOAQUIN PHOENIX IN Gladiator: They call for you: the general who became a slave; the slave who became a gladiator; the gladiator who defied an emperor. Striking story.
You can also use a climax for comparison, organizing things from least to most or vice versa. Humphrey Bogart chose most to least in The Caine Mutiny.
CAPTAIN QUEEG: Aboard my ship, excellent performance is standard. Standard performance is substandard. Substandard performance is not permitted to exist. That, I warn you.
TRY THIS IF YOU’RE THE BOSS
The climax can seem dramatic and quiet at the same time, making it an ideal business line. “Reach across departments and form teams. Teams boost creativity. Creativity boosts productivity. And productivity is what we are all about.”
The climax lends a rhythm that an audience gets into—even when it disagrees with your point. The listener mentally fills in each next piece. This works so well that it makes an efficient means of manipulation; a climax can lead an unwary audience step by step straight into the slippery slope fallacy. Supreme Court justice Clarence Thomas tried just that in a law school speech.
THOMAS: If you lie, you will cheat; if you cheat, you will steal; if you steal, you will kill.
As with any rhetorical tool, take good care of it, use it wisely, and try not to hurt anyone.
In Praise of “Like”
Persuasion Alert
NEOLOGIZER? That’s a neologism—I just made it up. I call the anthimeria “verbing” because that’s its most common use, but the figure applies to any novel change in a word’s use—noun to verb, verb to noun, noun to adjective. I like “neologizer.” It’s very neologous.
Now comes the fun part, which I saved for last. We have covered some basic techniques for coining figures and tropes. For the rest of the chapter, let’s break some rules. We will start by using a figure of speech to make up new words. This is dangerous in high school or a government agency, where verbal originality often gets duly punished. You might also face condemnation from people who consider novel usage a linguistic impurity. But the words will come, whether we want them to or not. Better you and I should invent them than some adolescent on the street or, worse, some adolescent behind a computer.
The figure I’m talking about is called verbing. Language conservatives who want to close our lexical borders hate this figure, because it’s a prodigious neologizer. Calvin in Calvin and Hobbes likes the anthimeria for subversive reasons. “Verbing weirds language,” he notes approvingly.
It certainly does. But our language can use some weirding. It freshens things up. Shakespeare certainly thought so. He used verbing to form “bet,” “compromise,” “drugged,” “negotiate,” “puking,” “secure,” “torture,” and “undress,” among many others, and he created even more words by changing verbs to nouns and nouns to adjectives. In an age when the average person had a vocabulary of 700 words (today’s college grad averages 3,000), Shakespeare’s exceeded 21,000. He worded up by weirding language. If weirding was a turn-on for him (to use a once-popular anthimeria), it positively ecstasizes me.
You can Shakespearicate with some ease simply by turning nouns into verbs or vice versa. I’m not sitting at a desk. I’m desking. Like any kind of wordplay, verbing can distract instead of persuade. But if you need to attentionize an audience, it makes a pretty good tool.
YOU: The next set of slides show our strategy in detail—so much detail that you might have trouble reading some of the charts. Don’t try to get through them all. I just put them in to give you the big picture. It’s a technique I call PowerPointillism.
Persuasion Alert
“PowerPointillism” may exist already, but I can’t find it on the Web. Believe me, I didn’t spend a lot of time thinking it up. Fellow execs would groan if I whipped it out at a meeting, but deep down they’d think me a witty chap. Even the most threadbare figure comes off as terribly clever when it seems to be spoken spontaneously.
Usage abhors a vacuum, and verbing can fill it. For years, grammarians frowned at the use of “contact” as a verb, as in, “I’ll have my admin contact your admin.” But words often enter common usage out of need, not ignorance. “Contact” is shorter than “get in touch,” and more general than “call,” “text,” “write,” “meet with,” or “bother.” If you don’t care how the secretaries talk to each other (assuming anyone still has an admin), have them achieve contact.
“Impact” gets similar frowns, some of them deserved, when it is used as a verb. A meteor impacts the earth. A defensive lineman impacts the quarterback. I’d even accept a tax increase impacting the economy—running smack up against the gross domestic product. But when people overuse “impact” as a stand-in for “harm,” I get impatient. “Ebola impacted West Africa the hardest.” This is metaphornication at its worst. A virus could impact something minuscule, perhaps, just as sperm impact eggs. But I’m sorry, microscopic viruses do not impact Africa.
Verbing has a subspecies (called, technically, parelcon): a word that gets stripped of its meaning and used as a filler. “Y’know” (we’ll call that a word) is an example, and a bad one. “Y’know” means, um, y’know. I mean, it means “um.”
The word “so,” when used unnecessarily, is another misuse of an anthimeria:
HE: So when are you coming?
SHE: Well, so I was going to come tonight.
HE: So are you bringing Lamar?
SHE: So who’s asking?
This is empty, fruitless talk that only reaps all its “so’s.”
Not So Useful Figure
THE “LIKE” FIGURE: Redundancy. Formal name: parelcon.
In most cases, “like” commits the same crime. Even the brightest college students toss in “like” liberally, like a heart patient oversalting his fries. It’s unhealthy. It impacts language wellness. But we shouldn’t banish the place-filling “like” altogether. In fact, let’s call it the rhetorical “like.” Used judiciously, the rhetorical “like” serves many subtle purposes. You may not appreciate this next example, but bear with me:
SHE: I told him I was dating Joaquin, and he was like, “You’re what?”
&nbs
p; In this case, “like” serves as a disclaimer of accuracy. (“The following quotation is an approximation, and only an approximation, of my ex-boyfriend’s rhetorical ejaculation.”) Young people often use “like” in this fashion to be ironic. It means, “He said that but not really.” It also expresses ironic distance. (“The views expressed by my ex-boyfriend are not necessarily those held by me.”) So, let’s stretch things a little.
HE: So are you, like, freaking or something?
This makes even my teeth hurt a little. But the “like” does serve a purpose—a couple, actually. It inserts a pause, like a rest in music, to place more emphasis on the sentence’s key word, “freaking.” And it gives “freaking” a broader connotation, as in, “Are you something in the nature of freaking?”
So: even meaningless words have meaning. Place fillers tend to change from generation to generation. “Y’know” was my generation’s, and “like” is the filler of choice for the generation coming of age today. Why the evolution? Maybe my generation was (rightly) uncertain about its ability to communicate. “Y’know” meant, “Are you with me? Do you get what I’m saying?” “Like,” on the other hand, reflects a group too timid to stand firmly on one side of anything. This generation is an ambiguous one, which, from a rhetorical standpoint, may not be so bad. But if you want a consensus, irony eventually has to give way to commitment. Otherwise it’s, like, so wishy-washy.
The Tools
Useful Figure
ASYNDETON: Eliminates the conjunctions between phrases for poetic or emotional effect.
Useful Figure
METALLAGE: Takes a word or phrase and uses it as an object within a sentence (“I’ve heard enough nos for today”).
William Shakespeare seems not to have enjoyed the endless list of figures he had to memorize at the Stratford grammar school. His plays contain a number of unflattering references to the likes of “Taffeta phrases, silken terms precise, / Three-pil’d hyperboles, spruce affectation, / Figures pedantical” (Love’s Labour’s Lost). Yet Shakespeare stitched figures into speech better than anyone else, ever. His reluctant education in rhetoric lent rhythm and color to his compositions. While he ridiculed his education, he served as education’s ideal.
You’ll see a larger list of figures in the back of this book, and exercises for them in the Argument Lab, but the point of this chapter is not to get all Stratford Grammar on you with figures to memorize. Now that you see the ways that preplanned devices can work in speech, you will find yourself noticing figures all around you and, I hope, begin to freshen your own language with them.
Twist a cliché. Clichés make the world go round, and your job is to screw up their orbit. Ways to undermine clichés include taking them literally and reducing them to absurdity, attaching a surprise ending, and swapping words.
Change word order. Besides doing this with clichés, you can coin my favorite figure, the chiasmus, which creates a crisscross sentence.
Weigh both sides. This category of figure sums up opposing positions and compares or contrasts them. The either/or figure (dialysis) offers a choice, usually with an obvious answer. The contrasting figure (antithesis), on the other hand, can be more evenhanded. These side-by-side figures sum up an argument on your own terms, allowing you to define the issue.
Edit out loud. By correcting yourself midsentence, you can amplify an argument while seeming fair and accurate. Another editing figure is the redefiner (correctio), which repeats the opponent’s language and corrects it.
Turn the volume down. The ironic understatement called litotes can make you seem cooler than your opponent.
Turn the volume up. The climax uses overlapping words in successive phrases to effect a rhetorical crescendo.
Invent new words. This is easily done by verbing (anthimeria)—turning a noun into a verb or vice versa. The “like” figure (parelcon) also transforms the usage of words, most often by stripping them of meaning and using them as a rhetorical version of the musical rest note.
21. Change Reality
BAG FULL OF EYEBALLS
Discover the mind-bending power of tropes
Well, I mean to say, when a girl suddenly asks you out of a blue sky if you don’t sometimes feel that the stars are God’s daisy-chain, you begin to think a bit.
—P. G. WODEHOUSE
You know how to use figures and tropes to change the mood and spice up your language. Now it’s time for the real magic. Tropes do more than give poems their oomph, turn campaigns into journeys and illnesses into military battles. Done properly, they can transport your audience into an alternative universe of your own creation. And here’s the best part (or the worst part, if you feel squeamish about manipulating people): you can yank them into your made-up universe without their even knowing it. So let’s get started. We have work to do. After all, universes weren’t built in a day.
First, let’s look at the full range of tropes. We covered a few in Chapter 20:
Metaphor, the pretend trope. My car is a beast. (It’s really a car but I’m going to metaphorically pretend it’s an animal.)
Synecdoche, the scaling trope. The White House issued a statement. (Buildings don’t talk, duh.)
Metonymy, the sharing trope. He took to the bottle. Instead of saying, “He became an alcoholic,” we make the bottle stand for the alcohol inside it, and the alcohol stand for the disease.
Metonymy and synecdoche are tricky things, but you gain great mysterious power when you master them. We’ll explore both in this chapter.
Metaphor, synecdoche, and metonymy are the big three tropes. But I argue for a few more:
Hyperbole, the inflating trope. He wasn’t just big, he was the size of a planet. You couldn’t just hang around him; you orbited him. While in the last chapter I called hyperbole a figure of thought, it also acts as a trope. Like the other tropes, hyperbole bends reality to your will. Unlike the sneaky synecdoche and metonymy, the hyperbole is pretty noticeable. Still, you see people fall for politicians’ use of it. Donald Trump started out as a walking hyperbole. (My calling him that, fairly or otherwise, qualifies as a metonymy. Don’t worry—we’ll get to that later.)
Profanity, the god-defying trope. Curse words are magic words. They can call down the anger of the gods and raise a parent’s blood pressure faster than a meal at McDonald’s.
And, finally:
Irony, the acting trope. Nice try, pal. (It was a terrible try. And you’re not my pal.) You could also call irony the head-faking trope: you lean one way while veering in the other. You’ll see more about irony in a bit.
Let me pack a conference room full of tropes and set you down in the middle. Hold on to your head. It might start spinning a bit.
Metonymy: Drink the Picture
I slammed a Red Bull, downing the whole can. Liquid courage. Time to make my pitch to the C-suite. The receptionist gives me the stink-eye, which I guess means it’s showtime. My slides are already thrown up on the screen and a roomful of suits are raising their faces like they’re hoping to get a PowerPoint tan. Feeling pumped and glad for the face time, I dive right in. “Ladies, gentlemen, the social strategy I’m presenting today is more than just collecting eyeballs. More than dashboard-friendly analytics and clickbait content. More than a crowdsourced consumer-journey play. It’s a marketing revolution!”
* * *
—
Your first thought might be, “Is this about tropes or sheer dumb jargon?” That’s a reasonable question. Actually, most jargon comes from tropes. They add drama to otherwise unutterably dull matters like Facebook likes and cliché-packed headlines. They turn unimaginative brand campaigns into consumer journeys. (Yes, that’s a real marketing term.) For our purposes, they show tropes hard at work. Let’s tear that irritating little presentation ap
art. What do we find? A whole treasure chest of metonymies.
Persuasion Alert
Tropes hard at work is a figure of thought, PERSONIFICATION. It turns inanimate objects and expressions into living, hardworking people. You could say that personification is a trope itself: a kind of metaphor.
* * *
—
Wait, what’s a metonymy again? It’s a trope that takes a characteristic, container, action, sign, or material—among other things—and makes it stand for a bigger reality. Yes, it’s complicated, and few people understand it. But that very abstruseness gives the metonymy its secretive power. So bear with me. First, watch the many ways I use it in the conference room. Then we’ll see how you can use it for other, less obnoxious purposes.
Slammed a Red Bull: That’s a pair of metonymies packed into one phrase. “Slammed” imitates the act of slamming myself in the face. A metonymy can take an imitation of an act and make it stand for the act itself. For example, if someone hands you a bottle and says, “Have a toot,” he’s offering you both a drink and a metonymy. When you take a toot, you look like you’re using the bottle as a wind instrument. Only you’re just drinking. Weird. But metonymies are strange things. Just think of what it means to drink a Red Bull. Metonymy turns an exquisitely crafted picture (bull, colored red) into a slammable liquid.
Thank You for Arguing (Revised and Updated) Page 29