Fritinancy

Feeling sad about "Mourning in America"

Back in February, during the Before Time, I wrote about a billboard created by the Lincoln Project, a group of prominent anti-Trump Republicans.

The New Hampshire billboard

 

I was not, to put it diplomatically, a fan.

Last week the Lincoln Project made a much bigger splash with a one-minute video, “Mourning in America,” posted online. This week the spot appeared in three key broadcast markets: Milwaukee, Wisconsin; Fort Meyers-Naples, Florida; and the state of Ohio.

The ad looks a lot slicker than the billboard. Its creators claim it took only “a matter of hours” to produce, cost only $5,000, and got 1.5 million views before the three-state release. That sounds like an impressive return on investment.

But the ad falls apart under scrutiny. Let’s take a look at its three rhetorical failings.

 

Words of the week: Gundamentalist, ammosexual

Gilroy. El Paso. Dayton.

In these three American cities, at least 32 children and adults were killed by three shooters in a single week, 23 of them within just 13 hours over the weekend of August 3 and 4. While attending a garlic festival. While shopping at Walmart. While socializing in a popular entertainment district.

 

The Onion has run this headline and story at least nine times.

 

I’m exhausted and angry—furious, actually—and can’t think of anything original to say about my compatriots’ sick obsession with firearms. So I’ll refer you to a couple of posts from the Fritinancy archives.

November linkfest

Dictionary.com’s word of the year for 2017 is complicit. The selection is based on the number of online lookups, which spiked in March, when SNL featured a perfume ad parody; and in April, when Ivanka Trump said she didn’t know “what it means to be complicit.”

 

 

Collins Dictionary, based in London and Glasgow, got a head start on the WOTY competition in early November, selecting fake news over runners-up such as unicorn, echo chamber, and gig economy. (Related: My November 2016 post on fake.)

Word of the week: Gish Gallop

In debate strategy, there are assertions, counter-assertions, framing, reframing, rebuttals, and undermining. Then there’s the Gish Gallop, also known as “proof by verbosity,” “baffle them with bullshit,” or, latterly, the “Trump Tirade. “

This fallacious tactic seeks to drown an opponent “in a flood of individually weak arguments.” (In the case of Donald J. Trump, with outright lies.) The technique is named for Duane Gish (1921-2013), who managed, despite having earned a PhD in biochemistry from UC Berkeley, to define himself as a Young Earth creationist. (He was at one time the vice president of the Institute for Creation Research.) The American anthropologist Eugenie Scott, who was for many years the director of the National Center for Science Education, coined the term “Gish Gallop” in the 1990s to describe the “presentation of misconception after misconception” in public forums. (From 2011, here’s an example of a climate-science Gish Gallop.) Scott did not engage in unstructured public “debates” with creationists, preferring instead written debates that allow “the opportunity for documentation and references, impractical in oral debates.”

Word of the week: Elite

It’s fitting that elite emerged as one of the buzzwords of the 2016 presidential election, because elite is the French word for “selection” or “choice.” The word entered English in the late 14th century, when it signified “a chosen person,” especially a bishop-elect; it died out a few decades later and was re-introduced more successfully in Byron’s “Don Juan” (1823).:

At once the ‘lie’ and the ‘elite’ of crowds;
Who pass like water filter’d in a tank,
All purged and pious from their native clouds

In the poem, lie is pronounced lee, and meant “scummy remnant” (as in the lees at the bottom of a wine barrel).

As the name of a typeface, Elite was first recorded in 1920.

Special Elite typeface, “created to mimic the Smith Corona Special Elite Type No NR6 and Remington Noiseless typewriter models.” Via 1001 Fonts.

Word of the week: Deplorables

Deplorables: Nounified, pluralized form of deplorable, an adjective meaning “lamentable, very sad, grievous, miserable, wretched” and usually used in reference to events, conditions, or circumstances. The adjective is derived from the Latin verb plorare, to weep or bewail.

The adjective deplorable first appeared in print in the early 1600s. The OED provides one citation for the plural noun deplorables: the journal of Sir Walter Scott, published in 1828: “An old fellow, mauld with rheumatism and other deplorables.” (Mauld is an alternate spelling of a regional usage of mauled that means “fatigued.”)

The OED and other dictionaries now have another noteworthy citation: the remarks of Democratic presidential candidate Hillary Clinton on September 9 at the LGBT for Hillary Gala in New York City. Here’s the relevant section:

 

We are living in a volatile political environment. You know, to just be grossly generalistic, you could put half of Trump's supporters into what I call the basket of deplorables. Right? The racist, sexist, homophobic, xenophobic, Islamaphobic -- you name it. And unfortunately there are people like that. And he has lifted them up. He has given voice to their websites that used to only have 11,000 people -- now 11 million. He tweets and retweets their offensive hateful mean-spirited rhetoric. Now, some of those folks -- they are irredeemable, but thankfully they are not America."

(Generalistic is not in standard dictionaries, but once again, Clinton“s is far from its first use.)

Clinton went on to describe “the other basket … of people who feel that the government has let them down, the economy has let them down, nobody cares about them, nobody worries about what happens to their lives and their futures, and they're just desperate for change.”

Word of the week: Sarcasm

Sarcasm: A cutting remark intended to express contempt or ridicule. From late Greek sarkasmos: a sneer, jest, taunt, or mockery. Its original meaning was “tear flesh”; its root is sarco-, a Latinized form of a Greek root meaning “flesh.” Compare sarcophagus (limestone used for coffins; literally “flesh-eating”) and sarcoma (a fleshy tumor).

Sarcasm was defined and debated last week after the Republican presidential nominee – who had insisted multiple times at an August 10 rally in Florida, and in an August 11 radio interview with Hugh Hewitt, that President Obama is “the founder” of ISIS and Hillary Clinton the group’s “co-founder” or, alternately, “most valuable player” – shout-tweeted that the remarks were “sarcasm.”

 

Ratings challenged @CNN reports so seriously that I call President Obama (and Clinton) "the founder" of ISIS, & MVP. THEY DON'T GET SARCASM?

— Donald J. Trump (@realDonaldTrump) August 12, 2016

Word of the week: Apophasis

Apophasis: Saying something by denying that you’ll say it; the “I’m-not-saying-I’m-just saying” rhetorical device. From the Greek roots apo- (away from, off) and -phatikos (to speak): “to deny.” Entered English in a 1656 rhetoric text, when it was defined as “a kind of irony.” Pronounced (ə-pŏf′ə-sĭs). Apophasis is also known as praeteritio (“passing over”).

Squirmishing with Sarah

On Tuesday, Sarah Palin, wearing a hypnotically sparkly garment that sartorial conservatives might have impugned as inappropriate for a daytime event, delivered a 20-minute endorsement of real estate developer and former Democrat Donald J. Trump, who, as you may have heard, is running for president as a Republican in order to Make America Great Again. As the New York Times put it, in an excess of understatement, “Ms. Palin has always been a singular force on the campaign trail. But in her her years away from politics, the former Alaska governor and Senator John McCain’s Republican vice-presidential pick in 2008 seems to have spawned a whole new series of idiosyncratic expressions and unusual locutions.”

I’ll say. Here are some of the responses Ms. Palin’s “expressions and locutions” have inspired.

Word of the Week: Enallage

Enallage: Substitution of one grammatical form for another that violates a grammatical rule. Pronounced almost exactly like analogy, but from a different Greek source, ἐναλλαγή, which means “change.” (Analogy can be traced back to ἀναλογία, which means mathematical proportion or correspondence.)

I learned enallage only recently, but it turns out I was very familiar with examples of it. Mark Forsyth (@InkyFool on Twitter) dropped the word into a recent New York Times column about the rhetoric behind successful slogans. Here’s the relevant passage:

The other day I told a friend I was writing an article on corporate slogans. He immediately told me that the one he hated, absolutely hated, was “Think different” because it should be “think differently.”

He’s right, grammatically. But the fact that he’s nursing a grudge over an ad slogan Apple hasn’t run for a dozen years proves just how memorable it was.

Same for a long-popular British slogan, “Beanz Meanz Heinz,” which grammar would have insisted on as “Beanz Mean Heinz.”

For that matter “Got milk?” is substandard speech. So is Subway’s “Eat fresh.” Probably the most memorable ad in Britain in the last few years uses the one-word tagline “Simples” — uttered by an anthroporphic Russian meerkat on behalf of an insurance website, comparethemarket.com.

It’s a trick called enallage: a slight deliberate grammatical mistake that makes a sentence stand out.

“We was robbed.” “Mistah Kurtz — he dead.” “Thunderbirds are go.” All of these stick in our minds because they’re just wrong — wrong enough to be right.

Forsyth—author of The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase—also discusses alliteration (“Famously Fresh” – Planters); diacope (“a verbal sandwich of two words or phrases with something else tucked in the middle,” as in the U.S. Army’s long-running “Be all you can be”); chiasmus (“I am stuck on Band-Aid*, ’cause Band-Aid’s stuck on me”); and tricolon (“Buy It. Sell It. Love It.” – eBay); and paradox (“The world’s local bank” – HSBC).

For more on enallage in slogans, see my Visual Thesaurus column “‘Bad’ Grammar in Advertising: License to Annoy?” (no longer paywalled).

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* Always singular, although usually remembered as “I’m stuck on Band-Aids.” For pedantic legal reasons, the jingle inserted “brand” after “Band-Aid,” which ruins the symmetry.