Dear Fig.,

Is a lie a figure of speech as Stephanie Mencimer implies in her piece for Rolling Stone?

Love,

Mrs. Fig.

Dear Mrs. Fig.,

It’s so nice to exchange sweet nothings over a public website. In this case you refer to Glenn Beck’s claim that he “held the first inaugural address written in his own hand by George Washington.”

The National Archives promptly replied that no one, not even a Constitution-adoring patriot, is permitted to touch the sacred documents. Glenn Beck most certainly did not make physical contact with Washington’s first inaugural address.

But does his claim constitute a lie? According to Figaro’s Oxford English Dictionary, to “behold” an object implies that one is holding that object in one’s eye.  This is a definite trope—a metonymy, to be exact.

Therefore, Figaro declares Mr. Beck’s little stretcher to be figurative (or, more accurately, tropical) and not a literal lie.

On the other hand, if Mrs. Figaro plans to take this conclusion badly, we declare Mr. Beck to be a lying two-faced bastard.

All our love,

Fig.

“That’s what Goebbels did. That’s what Goebbels did. The truth didn’t matter.”

Glenn Beck, complaining about ABC News coverage of his Washington rally

Godwin’s Law, the theory that online arguments inevitably end up using Hitler rhetorically. A form of hyperbole, the trope of exaggeration.

Mike Godwin had his tongue in his cheek when he first invoked his law in 1989: “As an online discussion grows longer, the probability of a comparison involving Nazis or Hitler approaches 1.” No matter what the subject—gardening, fashion, even tea parties—Hitler will raise his evil analogous head.

Godwin, an attorney and expert on Internet law, added that mention of Hitler stops the conversation. But Beck and his fellow hysterics actually seem to reverse this corollary. They start with Hitler and go on from there. According to the Washington Post, Nazism had cropped up 202 times on Beck’s Fox News show by mid-July.

The Nazi references constitute a hyperbolic analogy, a way of tarring the enemy with a horrid comparison. Hyperbole and analogy are both tropes—non-literal language that says one thing while conveying an additional meaning.

Figaro loves tropes (see “The Four Most Dangerous Figures”). They make the rhetorical world go round. But when we take tropes literally, when citizens believe there’s a faint Hitler ’stache growing under the presidential schnozz, then we’ve got real propaganda going on.

Just what Goebbels did.

We all remember it keenly: water pouring through broken levees; mothers holding their children above the waterline; people stranded on rooftops begging for help; bodies lying in the streets of a great American city.

President Barack Obama in a speech about New Orleans

pragmatographia (prag-ma-toe-GRAF-ia), the action sequence. A form of enargeia (en-AR-ja), the special effects of rhetoric. From the Greek, meaning “action writing.”

President Bush’s inaction over Katrina spoke louder than words, proving the conservative claim that you can’t rely on government. Obama’s latest speech tries to show that government actually can work. But first he wants to recall the disaster and its shameful aftermath.  “There’s no need to dwell on what you experienced and what the world witnessed,” he says, and then he proceeds to dwell on the experience with a neat pragmatographia, the action sequence of oratory.

You can find the pragmatographia in Shakespeare whenever breathless characters describe what took place offstage, while the magic of technology lets film directors do the same thing with  a short sequence of scenes called a montage. 

A good pragmatographia builds to a climax, and so does Obama’s. It starts with women holding up their babies, jumps in time to desperate victims on rooftops, and concludes with scandalous corpses.

Want to try the figure yourself? Consider using an individual or very specific scene for your climax—not corpses but a single awful body. An individual conveys more emotion than a mass of people. And, despite its name, emotion is what the pragmatographia is all about.

 http://www.nytimes.com/2010/08/29/magazine/29FOB-medium-t.html

 Dear Figaro,

A friend just sent me this query: One of our architect’s little girls is visiting the office today and is reading a book where the characters’ names represent them (like Mrs. Little is tiny and Mr. Quatro teaches fourth grade). I know there’s a for it but can’t remember it. Can you help?

I think it’s just a pun, but she’s not so sure. What say you?

Thank you!

Bonsmots

Dear Bonnie,

The Littles and Quatros of this world constitute a periphrasis (per IF rah sis), the figure that swaps a description for a proper name. That’s Greek for “speak around.” While most periphrases are more than one word (e.g., He Who Must Not Be Named), the descriptive one-word nickname counts as well. 

Fig.

Dear Figaro,

On his blog “wakingupnow” Rob Tish has coined the term “argument-ex-contradictio”, describing the behaviour of making several mutually contradictory statements that are worded to sound superficially as if they support each other. He gives a good example in this blog-post:http://wakingupnow.com/blog/the-argument-ex-contradictio. They efficiency of the method would come from the fact that the opponents cannot really mount a counter-argument, since the original argument has no clear line to attack… each counter-argument would somehow seem to be already refudiated by one of the contradictory factoids presented in the original “argument”.

I knew at once the sort of rhetoric he means, and I was wondering is there is already some term in use to describe this infuriating bahviour.

Martin

Dear Martin,

Rob’s Latin leaves something to be desired, and I’m not sure that a string of self-contradictory ill-logic deserves any label but “mess.” To rebut it, there certainly is a clear line of attack; just about any line, in fact. The commentator Rob refers to says this, for instance: “Uganda’s anti-gay bill formally extends the death penalty to homosexuals who commit pre-existing capital crimes.” A simple rebuttal would ask, “How can the death penalty be ‘extended’ to a group already covered by it?” 

But the commentator’s technique, if there is any, lies not in any abuse of logic but in his refusal to engage at all. Rob’s attempts to learn more about the issue led to his being de-friended on the commentator’s Facebook page. And here’s the rub: most political argument isn’t about logic at all. It’s about tribes. Get your own tribe more riled up than the enemy’s tribe, and you’ll win the battle. 

The problem, in short, isn’t logic at all. It’s our increasingly tribal culture.

Fig.

I see a maggot looking back at me and I’m thinking, “These are anaerobic, flesh-eating larvae that the flight attendants don’t have to sit with.”

Donna Adamo, passenger on a maggot-infested US Airways flight

epiphoneme (eh-PIH-fo-neem), the memorable summary. From the Greek epiphonema, meaning “proclaim upon.”

Continuing with epiphonemes: we’re seeing them everywhere. A great epiphoneme says, “It all boils down to this.” In this case, it boils down to the rotten meat a dopey passenger stored in an overhead bin. You can’t blame the airline (full disclosure: Figaro consults for Southwest Airlines), but poor US Airways had to put up with a raft of “mother@%#*ing maggots on a mother@%#*ing plane” jokes.

The best epiphoneme goes right to the edge of hyperbole, and possibly an eensy bit beyond. Technically, maggots do not have the optic equipment to stare at people, and they would not eat the flesh of passengers unless the plane were held on the tarmac long enough for corpses in coach to rot. Adamo nonetheless makes a very strong proclamation: maggots are not one of the finer airline amenities.

Incentives…
determine outcomes.

Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer, in Slate

epiphoneme (eh-PIH-fo-neem), the memorable summary. From the Greek epiphonema, meaning “proclaim upon.”

Want to predict how a business or institution will behave? Follow the incentives. Former New York Governor Eliot Spitzer claims that incentives caused the BP oil spill and the financial meltdown; in each case, government assumed the risks while removing regulatory oversight and limiting legal liability. So, following the path of least resistance to profit, the guilty companies took chances that would have seemed insane 20 years ago.

This is complicated stuff, and it demands a simple summary. Spitzer provides one—sort of—in the form of an epiphoneme, a snappy sum-up that can stand on its own. Charles Darwin provided one of the greatest epiphonemes of all time here. Alas, Spitzer proved he is no Darwin by writing, “Incentives matter. In fact, they determine outcomes.”

Figaro stepped in where Slate’s editors feared to tread. If they had pushed the man just a little, Slate might even have produced an epiphoneme they could call Spitzer’s Law: Incentives determine behavior.

But then, some people may have wondered just what incentivized Spitzer to pay $15,000 for certain, um, outcomes.

“Small people” is a metonymy, a trope that takes a part or characteristic of something and uses it to define the whole. Small people’s position in society is itty-bitty, a characteristic that’s used to define the people themselves.

“The little guy,” on the other hand, is a synecdoche—one person used to describe a type or group of people. Of course, the “little” part of the guy is a metonymy as well…

Whew. It’s getting tropical around here. In general, if you something isn’t literally true—the “small people” in America seem to get larger every day—then it’s probably either a trope or a lie.  And what are the other tropes? You’ve certainly heard of ‘em:  metaphor and irony.