"It was grave but not doleful, resolute but not belligerent, eloquent but not grandiloquent. Its acknowlegments were eclectic: Biblical allusions, a nod to Tom Paine, a shout-out to Jerome Kern.
"But it wasn’t especially memorable."
Linguist Geoff Nunberg explains why that's actually a good thing. And gives a quick and engaging lesson in rhetoric while he's at it. (You can also listen to Nunberg delivering a slightly shorter version of the essay on Fresh Air.)
Yesterday's frivolous blog post notwithstanding, I was deeply moved by the Inauguration and all that it portends. I found myself in tears throughout the day, and I welled up again this morning when I read this New York Times article about Barack Obama's amazing extended family.
A few reflections, and then I must turn to a small mountain of work and turn the comments over to you.
As you probably know, I'm a big fan of San Francisco Chronicle columnist Jon Carroll. He followed the Inauguration and devoted today's column to it. Among the passages that jumped out at me:
It is one of Obama's great strengths, I think, that he is also aware of the savagery that this country has produced, and he chooses not to dwell on it. What he is dealing with is too vast for malicious dealing. This is likely to irritate a lot of people, because politics is a blood sport, and we like to see our enemies confounded and shamed.
When I heard Elizabeth Alexander read her Inaugural poem, I admired her delivery but was disappointed by what struck me as its flat prosiness. (I wasn't alone.) But I find I'm enjoying reading it on the page.
ReadWriteWeb has created word clouds of Obama's Inaugural speech and of those of several of his predecessors, including Abraham Lincoln.
Here's what I heard in the speech, with its call for responsibility, individual and shared: echoes of a first-century Babylonian Jewish teacher, Rabbi Hillel. Now, I am not a religious person—in fact, I was thrilled that Obama acknowledged us nonbelievers in his address, a first for presidential speeches, I think. But you don't have to believe in a deity to live by Hillel's credo, which, like much Jewish dialogue, consists of a series of questions:
If I am not for myself, who will be for me?
If I am only for myself, what am I?
And if not now, when?
If President-elect Obama's inaugural address could be only six words long, what should those words be?
SMITH Magazine (famous for its anthology of six-word memoirs) and the National Constitution Center are co-sponsoring a contest to find "Six Words to Inspire a Nation," and everyone's invited to play:
In six words, give him guidance. Or offer ideas for his inaugural address. Or share six memorable words for January 20th and beyond.
In six words, a President can say a lot: "Malice toward none, charity for all," "Nothing to fear but fear itself," "Like a thousand points of light."
So give your speechwriting a try.
Post your entry here. Deadline is Jan. 5, 2009. The winner will receive a copy of the six-word memoir book, Not Quite What I Was Planning, and a one-year membership in the National Constitution Center.
(Hat tip: Freakonomics blog.)
If you're a speechwriter, or if your work requires you to write persuasive copy, I highly recommend that you read David Crystal's superb analysis of the acceptance speech Barack Obama gave last Tuesday. Crystal is a linguist and prolific author (100 books and counting!) who brings a scholarly British perspective to his observations.
Here's an excerpt:
As the speech started, I turned to my wife and said, 'He'll never do it!' What was I noticing? It was the opening if-clause, a 41-word cliff-hanger with three who-clause embeddings. Starting a major speech with a subordinate clause? And one of such length and syntactic complexity? I thought he would be lucky if he was able to round it off neatly after the first comma. Try it for yourself: get a sense of the strain on your memory by starting a sentence with a 19-word if-clause, and see what it feels like. But he didn't stop at 19 words. The first who-clause is followed by a second. Then a third. It was real daring. It's difficult for listeners to hold all that in mind. But it worked. And then the short 4-word punch-clause. And deserved applause.
And that's just the beginning. Obama used the full quiver of rhetorical devices: repetition, pairs, triptychs, and contrast (between general and personal, for example). And also this:
One of the things actors know is that, in a long speech, they have to leave themselves somewhere else to go. This is something I've learned from actor son Ben. If you put all your energy into the opening lines of a soliloquy, you'll find it trailing away into nothing before the end. Rather, start low and steadily build up. Or, divide the speech up into sections and introduce peaks and troughs. Or, divide it into sections and treat each section in a different way. Obama's speech goes for this last option. It has several sections, each very different in content, and it is the switch of content which motivates a switch of style and renews the audience's motivation to listen.
I've read that Obama writes many of his speeches himself; his acceptance speech at the Democratic National Convention in August is one example. For his Election Night speech, however, he apparently had some help—from a 27-year-old Liberal Democrat (that's a party, not an ideology) in the U.K., among other contributors. But the language and tone of the speech felt entirely natural and authentic, which suggests that Obama himself had the final edit.
Text and video of the speech here.
(Hat tip: Wishydig.)
UPDATE: Here's a Wordle word cloud of Obama's acceptance speech. (Hat tip: Nancy Nall.)
About a week ago, a reader of this blog asked me to write something about the peculiar use of socialism in Republican rhetoric during this campaign season. I begged off, protesting that it was (as someone else put it) above my pay grade. Fortunately, linguist Geoff Nunberg has ridden to my rescue with an analysis of this word and related ones, such as reactionary and class warfare. Here's the long version of "The Ism Dismalest of All"; the audio version, recorded for NPR, will be available on the Fresh Air website later today.
And speaking of rhetoric, here's an interesting post by Anil Dash—the ultra-smart co-founder of Six Apart, which hosts this blog and many others—about "What Sarah Palin Is Saying" when she accuses Barack Obama of, for example, "palling around with terrorists." In describing Palin's strategy, Dash uses the term code-switching, which is linguistics jargon for the use of multiple languages or dialects when addressing different audiences:
Where John McCain used the phrase "straight talk" in his 2000 campaign to represent the idea of telling the unvarnished truth, without regard to the actual grammar of the statements themselves, Palin has changed the meaning of the phrase slightly. In her formulation, "straight talk" is not so much about the clarity of the points being made, but rather a signifier of the dialect in which she is offering up her talking points. (In related news, a friend of mine picks up extra cash reading fortune-telling cards for tourists at San Francisco's Pier 39. That's right: I pal around with Tarotists.)
Roy Peter Clark analyzes the rhetorical effectiveness of Barack Obama's speech on race in America:
Much has been said about the power and brilliance of Barack Obama's March 18 speech on race, even by some of his detractors. The focus has been on the orator's willingness to say things in public about race that are rarely spoken at all, even in private, and his expressed desire to move the country to a new and better place. There has also been attention to the immediate purpose of the speech, which was to reassure white voters that they had nothing to fear from the congregant of a fiery African-American pastor, the Rev. Jeremiah Wright.
Amid all the commentary, I have yet to see an X-Ray reading of the text that would make visible the rhetorical strategies that the orator and authors used so effectively. When received in the ear, these effects breeze through us like a harmonious song. When inspected with the eye, these moves become more apparent, like reading a piece of sheet music for a difficult song and finally recognizing the chord changes.
Clark examines "four related rhetorical strategies" that account for the speech's success:
Regardless of what you think of Obama the candidate, you can learn a lot from his oratory and from Clark's thoughtful parsing. And regardless of whether you write speeches, annual reports, or novels, your writing will be stronger if you write to be heard as well as read.
Here's a link to the text of Obama's speech, accompanied by a video of his delivery.
P.S. Roy Peter Clark is one of my favorite virtual mentors. His book, Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for Every Writer, is indispensable (and fun to read!).
Just in time for Sunday's 79th Annual Academy Awards show, National Public Radio presents its first annual Oscar contest winners. Listeners were asked to write a speech for a best-acting nominee in character. So we have Meryl Streep accepting as Miranda Priestly in The Devil Wears Prada (winner in the Best Devil-May-Care Attitude category), Judi Dench as Barbara Covett in Notes on a Scandal (Least Diplomatic), Mark Wahlberg as Dignan in Departed (Best Clean "Departed" Speech--and the lengths to which it goes to be clean are truly prodigious), and Jennifer Hudson singing her acceptance as Effie in Dreamgirls. (Be sure to listen to winning speechwriter Cleola Ratliff belting it out.)
And then there's Helen Mirren as QE2, winner in the Most Diplomatic category, as channeled so very regally by Kim Stanford of York, PA:
To those of you who selected me, your Queen, as the recipient of this honour, I offer my gratitude. I should never have expected to be so honoured in my lifetime. Indeed, it is an honour that I could have easily forgone. I would have preferred that my performance during that disastrous week be forgotten, but to my surprise, someone believed a film should be made about it.
If only a certain person had not been so impetuous, none of this would have been necessary. Still, what's done is done and we must move on. I would like to dedicate this award to my family, my Corgis, my devoted servants, and, of course, you, my people. Without your concern, your sound bites on the telly, your holding up a mirror to myself, none of this would have been possible. Thank you. I will keep this with my most treasured possessions.
There's nothing like hearing your favorite film or television actor attempt to improvise an award-acceptance speech to make you appreciate the scriptwriter's art. On screen, all actors are stunningly articulate (except when they're charmingly inarticulate); on the awards podium, nearly all of them are boring, banal, and repetitive. (Exceptions: Meryl Streep and most traditionally schooled British actors.) This year, writes Caryn James in today's New York Times, the problem is even more ... well, dramatic: in the three awards shows televised so far this season, the same four actors have won in their respective acting categories and have given more or less the same bad acceptance speech every time. James writes:
As the awards season lumbers toward the Oscars, you can almost envision what might happen when the Academy Awards are finally given out on Feb. 25. Forest Whitaker will fumble for words and mumble; Eddie Murphy will robotically deliver his list of industry thanks; Jennifer Hudson will work in a hokey use of the word “dream”; and Helen Mirren will pay tribute to the actual queen.
Whoa! Cut! If you've ever thought, "I could write a better acceptance speech than that," here's your opportunity. Enter National Public Radio's first Oscar Speech contest and show 'em how it ought to be done. The rules are simple: Write a 200-word speech in character (and in good taste) for any of the nominees for Best Actor, Best Actress, Best Supporting Actor, or Best Supporting Actress. Deadline: 11:59 p.m. PST, February 17, 2007. As is the quaint custom in public-radio land, there will be no prizes, but the winners (as judged by NPR's digital media staff) will record their speeches over the phone; the best ones will be posted online. Here's a sample to get you motivated; the speaker (as if you needed to be told), is Sacha Baron Cohen in character as Borat:
Jagshemash! Wa wa oi oi. I kiss all of you. Especially you. (Points to sister.) She is No. 3 prostitute in all of Kazakhstan? Only four people in Kazakhstan watch ceremony right now, and 18 stand on top of roof with foil taped to groin to get signal. But this is glorious day for people of Kazakhstan. Only two from my country does America honor in this respect — I, Borat, and the how-you-say audio engineer from the 1987 silent film "Kazakh Potassium Company Employee Training Guide Part Eleven."
You could do worse this Election Day than spend some time with this presidential tag cloud, a weighted visual representation of the frequency of certain keywords, or "tags," uttered in U.S. presidents' speeches (State of the Union, inaugural, and others). The larger the word, the more frequently it was used. Use the slider above the president's name to navigate back through time.
I was interested in one particular word: "god." In recent years, U.S. chief executives have referred so frequently and publicly to a supreme being that they sometimes sound like circuit preachers. But it wasn't always so. In an 1815 speech about the "sphere of religion," Thomas Jefferson never once used the word "god." Indeed, the first presidential mention of "god" I found was in Abraham Lincoln's 1862 "Plea for Compensated Emancipation," and it appears in the smallest type size. (Disclaimer: reviewing each speech's tag cloud requires exquisite mouse control; I may have missed one or two speeches. But it's pretty clear that Washington, Adams, and Jefferson saw little need to bring the deity into their public oratory.) Andrew Johnson and Ulysses S. Grant referred occasionally to a "god," but then the supreme being took a leave of absence for several decades, not to reappear until Woodrow Wilson's 1917 War Message. The Twenties and Thirties were relatively godless, presidential-speechwise, until FDR. And ever since Ronald Reagan, mentioning "god" has been obligatory for presidents and presidential candidates (not to mention senators, county supervisors, and dogcatchers). Indeed, Michael Kinsley observed a few years ago, "the national sign-off" has become "God bless you, and God bless America" (in Kinsley's shorthand, "GBY/GBA.")
Don't forget to vote.
Via BoingBoing.
