Club that, comma!

The ancients were unfamiliar with lite beer, and they failed to come up with a technical term for an analogy that includes differences. Analogy is Greek for “proportional thought” or, in modern-speak, “template.” Santorum says that Obama is an analog for Romney—except that Romney is a watered-down, lo-cal version. An analogy with a difference.

In our book Word Hero,  we devised a new figure to cover that analagous base.

Like…Only Technique. A figure of thought that uses a simile or analogy and points out the differences. Romney is like Obama, only less filling. You’ll find more examples at our sister site.

Meanwhile, we wish Rick Santorum all the joy that 15 minutes of fame can bring.

Dogs: Skechers has a dog wearing running shoes. Who wants to run like a dog? Bud Light’s dog fetched Bud Light. And Volkswagen’s dog worked out and lost weight. What that has to do with the car, Figaro can’t say. Advertisers paid $3.5 million just to get 30 seconds of Bowl-time. The point should be to sell the product. The most effective means is by “virtue,” making consumers identify themselves with the product or its benefits. That means showing the product and either linking it to the values of the viewer, or showing the benefits. In that respect, this year’s dogs didn’t hunt.

Naked women: Figaro loved Teleflora’s ad, which featured supermodel Adriana Lima. The message is simple and direct: buy flowers, get laid. The Toyota Camry gets a couch made of naked women, an analogy to the car’s redesign. The car itself isn’t shown, probably because of its poor resemblance to naked women. Babes do sell product, but they’re generally not very virtuous.

Babies: A basketball made of Bridgestone tires lets a baby sleep. Nice idea, but Figaro isn’t into dribbling babies. Doritos has a baby slingshot into a bag of junk food. While it’s winning the online polls and associates Doritos with good American values like revenge and bungies, two wrongs make a very wrong. Then there’s Etrade, which once again does babies voiced-over with adults. A muddled message.

Politics: Yeah, there were overt political ads, but we’re talking about the non-political political ads. Politics in America is about tribes, about who’s in and who’s out, about what we Americans stand for and what we don’t. It’s about values. Aristotle said that politics should be about decisions and choices. But he was a Greek, and look what happened to that country. The fact that Mad Ave is selling cars, beer and soda politically shows how tribally saturated we’ve become.

The politics cover the political spectrum from left to right, with Clint Eastwood rasping away in the moderate center. On the far, far right, Chevy trucks survive the Rapture (it’s the Mayan Apocalypse in the ad; same thing). The survivors emerge and smugly eat Twinkies, then discover that their friend Dave had been driving a Ford. Dave is dead. Long live Twinkies.

Budweiser proves without a doubt that Prohibition caused the Depression. The damned government finally gets out of the way, the beer flows, and people have jobs and happiness again. Thank God for beer. Strangely enough, a co-op ad with GE proves that turbines make beer. Again, Figaro is mystified.

On the moderate scale, Clint Eastwood declares “halftime in America” for Chrysler. It’s a cliché, but done well, and it speaks honestly about political divisions. And Detroit actually looks kind of cool in that campaign. If Mitt Romney had done that ad, he’d be leading Obama in the polls. But Romney wouldn’t do that; Republicans are furious at Chrysler because they interpret the ad as a celebration of the government bailout. Which, by the way, goes unmentioned. Never mind that Eastwood is a Republican.

Moving to the left, the Arab Spring appears metaphorically in the form of X-Factor winner Melanie Amaro. She sings “Respect” while deposing Elton John. Figaro loved this ad for the wrong reason: An overweight young woman plugging a sugary drink constituted the most honest advertising of the evening.

Farther to the left, a woman head-butts John Stamos, who’s hogging her yogurt. Feminism dumbed down for men! Oh, wait: it’s women who buy that stuff. Feminism dumbed down for women!

And to the bizarrely left we have Met Life telling us that insurance shouldn’t just be for the intelligent and wealthy. Yes, a mega-insurance company representing the 99 percent. God, but Figaro loves America.

And the winner? Chrysler. Virtue at its best. It makes Figaro feel guilty driving a foreign car. Even one made in America.

An economy built to last, where hard work pays off, and responsibility is rewarded.

While Figaro hates the clumsy rhythm and passive voice, he likes the trope. It uses the auto industry’s success as a model for what the rest of the economy can do. Thanks in part to government intervention (never mind that disaster in Japan), GM is back on top as the world’s number-one car company. Chrysler is accelerating, the industry is creating a growing number of jobs… And the feds provided the jumper cable.

Figaro would like to see Obama make the connection more overtly, saying something like, “What we did for the auto industry, we are doing for the whole economy.” Not socialism. Jump-starting. Building the economy Ford tough. Taking the economy from zero to, um, more than zero in under a decade!

Still, the trope works. Why? Because it focuses on the future, the long term, and the modest progress made so far. The Republicans know this, which is why their “prebuttal” and rebuttal work hard to shift the focus from the future to the present misery. The election will come down to a Reaganesque “Are you better off now than you were four years ago?” versus Obama’s slow build for the future.

Obama has the steeper road. The economy is already like a rock—a barely movable object. The Republicans’ present carries more emotional weight than the Democrats’ future. Besides, Obama described the future four years ago, and it’s now a bald-tired present.

Which is why Obama pulled out his second trope, the playing field. The present is shabby, he argues, because some players aren’t playing fair.

We can either settle for a country where a shrinking number of people do really well while a growing number of Americans barely get by, or we can restore an economy where everyone gets a fair shot, and everyone does their fair share, and everyone plays by the same set of rules.

At last, the Democrats are catching on: Forget the figures. It’s the tropes, stupid.

No, actually, these are the people. These are the people; you’re the interrupters. We believe in the Constitution. We believe in the right to speech. And you believe in interrupting. Take a hike.

Mitt Romney in Ormond Beach, Florida, quoted in the L.A. Times 

syncrisis (SIN-crih-sis), the contraster. From the Greek, meaning “compare with.” Weighs two points side by side with similar clauses: “These are the people; you’re the interrupters.” 

As Figaro explains in his first book, tribal rhetoric focuses on values and the present—unlike deliberative rhetoric, which deals with the future. The most tribal-tastic tribal rhetoric of them all defines “the people”—that is, who’s in and who’s out of the tribe. Romney supporters are people. People, according to Romney, are a species who believe in the Constitution. Interrupters aren’t people. (Corporations are people, too; they obviously don’t interrupt.)

But wait, it gets better. The 99 percenters started chanting “USA! USA!” and the People took up the chant. For a moment both the People and the Interrupters chanted their tribal slogan together.

No one got persuaded, nothing got decided, and soon everybody took a hike.

The moderator, CNN reporter John King, began by asking about a former wife’s revelation that Gingrich asked for an open marriage. Gingrich responded by attacking King.

I am appalled that you would begin
a presidential debate on a topic like that.

King replied that Gingrich mentioned Monica Lewinsky in every speech during the Clinton scandal. But it didn’t matter. CNN, and the “mainstream media” in general, make an easy target for the Republican Party’s right wing.

And, as we’ve pointed out before, virtue makes for one of the most powerful rhetorical tools—one that Obama lacks, by the way.

One of the three aspects of ethos, or character, virtue makes people believe you share their values and live by those values. So how does a serial marriage-vow-breaker employ virtue? By calling the accusation a sin. Whether you think King’s question was sleazy doesn’t matter. What matters is whether South Carolina voters thought it was sleazy. And, judging by the reaction of the audience, they did. Sleazier, presumably, than Gingrich’s marital antics.

Virtue is a topic of demonstrative rhetoric, the language of preachers. It deals with right and wrong, with sinners and those sinned against. It’s the most tribal form of rhetoric, and the kind of rhetoric you hear most in politics today. Which is unfortunate.

Aristotle designated deliberative rhetoric, the language of choices, as the rhetoric of politics. But public discourse today deals with tribes and values, not problems and decisions. That’s one big reason why Congress just sits there, appalled.

Figaro especially loves the word “appalled.” It means, literally, “turned pale.” Coming from the whitest of all candidates, that word is just perfect.

The voiceover employs a dirimens copulatio, the but-wait there’s more figure. (Here’s an explanation and pronunciation.) You see the device a lot on infomercials: But that’s not all! This thing not only slices and dices, it speaks French! 

Quibblers might say that the clip actually proves that Mitt actually can’t speak French. He mouths third-grade Frog with an accent that’s positively gauche.

Others might say that Massachusetts—you know, that place with one of the lowest unemployment rates, highest education levels, most innovative health care, and most annoying accent—isn’t something to be entirely embarrassed about. 

But Figaro knows for a fact that some of those Massholes actually know foreign languages. Which makes anyone from that state completely unqualified to be president.

So why do we love the ad? Because of the Frenchy music in the background! It’s so bad that it makes it impossible to see Kerry—um, we mean Romney—without thinking of a bagette. First-rate ethos work, Newtons!

malapropism (MAL-a-prop-ism) or acyrologia(a-keer-o-LO-gia), the fortunate mix-up.

The malapropism is an eponym named for the addlebrained literary character, Mrs. Malaprop.  But credit the Greeks for coining the figure two and a half millennia before.  The acyrologia (“unauthorized speech”) swaps a word with a like-sounding but fortuitously wrong substitute.

The ideal screwup achieves a higher addled wisdom. Props to you, Ms. M! But it’lll take you many years to achieve the addled wisdom-ness of Yogi Berra. 

shibboleth (SHIB-oh-lith), the password. From the Hebrew, meaning “grain stalk.” 

The word comes from the Hebrew Bible—Judges 12:5-6—in a scene that describes the aftermath of a battle between two tribes. The tribe from Gilead beat the one from Ephraim, then blocked the retreating survivors from crossing the Jordan back to their homeland. Anyone claiming to be a Gileadite was given a test: pronounce the word “shibboleth.” If he said “sibboleth,” that proved he was an  Ephraimite, and he was killed on the spot.

According to the scripture, 42,000 Ephraimites were slaughtered over a mispronunciation. Sounds like something Figaro’s terrifying fourth-grade grammar teacher would write.

In fact, grammar itself counts as a kind of systematic shibboleth. There’s no such thing as “correct” grammar. There’s just upper-class grammar and everything else.

And just by saying that, Figaro has proved himself a grass-combing Ephraimite. He’s preparing himself for the slaughter.

Why? Because of the poetry. It’s Obama’s chief rhetorical problem. And that problem lies behind the Democrats’ messaging woes.

This isn’t about class warfare.
This is about the nation’s welfare.

Speech by Obama on the economy, in Osawatomie, Kansas

antithesis (an-TIH-the-sis), the not-that-but-this figure. From the Greek, meaning “opposing ideas.” Also…

symploce (SIM-plo-see), the beginning-and-end word repeater. From the Greek, meaning “braid together.” Also…

paronomasia (pa-ra-no-MAY-sia), the near-pun. From the Greek, meaning “rename alongside.”

Political speeches exist to contrast ideas, which is why you’ll see a lot of antitheses in presidential campaigns. They’re wrong, we’re right. My ideas work, theirs suck.  A great way to spice up this contrast is with balanced sentences that weigh the ideas side by side. If those sentences sound highly similar, the weighing seems more pronounced. This is not warfare, it’s about welfare.  And the paranomasia punctuates that constrast even more. Warfare, not welfare. Pretty snappy, right?

But this is where the Democrats, and Obama in particular, are too clever by half. They fall in love with their own poetry. If the speechwriters had allowed a Republican into the room, they would have realized that “welfare” isn’t a word beloved of many Americans. In fact, the term implies that Obama’s message isn’t about the economy at all; it’s about the transfer of wealth.

The basic message is sound, and Obama will be right to stick to it: when the fairness gap gets too wide, the whole economy risks falling into it. But instead of figures, the Democrats need to learn to use images. Tropes. Like the metaphor Figaro just used.

If the Democrats can stop being poets and start painting pictures, they’ll win. If not, they’ll lose. It’s that critical.