The actor David Drummond does it with a voice so melodious that he makes Figaro sound sexy and funny at the same time. As if I suddenly morphed into George Clooney. I tell you, this Drummond guy is that good.

Let us know your favorite—and least favorite—acronyms or abbrieves.

Still, we like “Forward.” It’s an example, more or less (though mostly less) of deliberative argument, which focuses on the future.  

We also love William F. Buckley’s definition of a conservative as someone who stands athwart history yelling “Stop.” While Obama supporters yell “Forward,” opponents will be looking at this administration’s policies yelling “Reverse!” 

But the election will be determined by those whose who haven’t yet shifted from neutral.

Dear Figaro,
Great site! I love the posts. I’d like to get better at rhetoric/debate/writing. I’ve started both books Thank you for Arguing and Word Hero. Do you have any suggestions on college courses or further higher level education? Thanks!
Josh

Dear Josh,
Thanks for the kind words. Your best bet for rhetoric at college is at state universities such as Iowa State and Berkeley. Rhetoric education continues to grow at the public colleges, while it lags sadly behind in the elite private colleges. Go online and see what courses the schools offer. You may see courses and programs labeled “rhetoric” that actually have little to do with classical rhetoric. If the program doesn’t offer courses with Aristotle, Cicero and Quintilian, don’t apply. They’re not the sum total of a rhetoric education, but you can’t have an education in rhetoric without these foundational thinkers. 

Oh, and avoid the Ivy League, which banished rhetoric many years ago and has yet to rediscover it. Does it seem strange that the most elite liberal arts schools fail to teach one of the original liberal arts? Does it seem weird that rhetoric, the art of leadership, remains missing even while Americans are questioning the expense and relevance of a liberal arts degree? It sure does to me.

But rhetoric likes to break the rules, so long as it can break them rhetorically. And breaking the rule against infinitive-splitting can make for great rhetoric. Witness this fun sentence from Wonkbook whiz kid Ezra Klein.

Rick Santorum [is] about to very publicly come to the conclusion that Mitt Romney is not as bad as he previously thought.

Santorum faces a classic awkward political moment. Having trashed Romney for months, and having faced a barrage of well-funded Super-Pac negative advertising, the erstwhile presidential candidate must soon endorse his opponent. So how does Ezra Klein make that awkward moment seem awkward? By using awkward grammar! 

A grammarian will want to edit Klein’s sentence, eliminating the “very publicly” in front of the verb. “To” and “come” count as one unified verb (an “infinitive”), and it’s just plain cruel to separate them. Or awkward, at least. Which is exactly why Klein does it.

Want your sentence to sound tortured? Try torturing an infinitive!

“Just because someone wears a hoodie does not make them a hoodlum,” said Congressman Bobby Rush, shortly before he got thrown off the House floor for wearing a hoodie. But, Geraldo Rivera says, a hoodie can make people think you’re a hoodlum, and in rhetoric, what people think determines the persuasive world. When in Rome, wear a toga. (Figaro does this every time he’s in Rome, and for some reason people keep mistaking it for a hoodie.)

Why are we talking style in a rhetoric blog? Because style is an essential quality of decorum, the art of fitting in with an audience. On the House floor, a hoodie seems indecorous. On the street, it certainly shouldn’t get somebody killed.

And when you’re pretending to be a journalist? Nice suit, Geraldo!

metonymy (meh-TAHN-ih-mee). From the Greek, meaning “name change.” One of the two belonging tropes, along with synecdoche. The metonymy takes a quality of something or someone and makes it stand for the whole.

Young Trayvor Martin was wearing a hoodie when he was shot to death by a neighborhood watch volunteer. Geraldo Rivera, the sinisterly mustachioed telecorrespondent, opined that the hoodie was as culpable in the boy’s death as the shooter.

And so was launched a whole bunch of solidaritousds pictures showing non-teenagers—from Jesus to the Miami Heat—with hoodies. The metonymy connects traits across widely disparate examples (including, in this case, a member of Congress who got booted off the floor for violating the House’s hat rules). 

As for the word hoodie itself, it’s a synecdoche, which takes a part of something—in this case, the hood, and makes it stand for the whole shebang.

Want more examples of these powerful tropes? Search for them in the box at right.

I think you hit a reset button for the fall campaign. Everything changes. It’s almost like an Etch A Sketch. You can kind of shake it up and restart all over again.

We love an analogy for its ability to attach thoughts to physical objects. The physicality makes an abstraction seem literal. A candidate’s move to the center becomes a fun toy. The problem here is that Romney’s planned and completely unsurprising future move to the center is the last thing the campaign wants to talk about right now. First, it has to win over a whole buncha ultraconservative primary voters.