Especially notable is repetition, but not just by repeating things. The repetitions are a framework for space and place references, which are often metaphors, or for other references, and the repetitions evolve through the speech, and are used to circle back on some of the same themes so they are produced very effectively three or four times.  This is speech is a locomotive, and the repetitions are the track it is barreling down.

You can read the speech here. 

Look for the meter.:

I am happy to join
with you today
in what will go down
as the greatest demonstration
in the history of our nation

There are many,many other segments of this speech that come in a five-five-five or similar poetic meter.

Look for reference to classics/bible:

• Five score years ago, a great American… we’ve come to this hallowed spot. (from Pereclies Funerary Oration and the Gettysburg Address).
• wallow in the valley of despair
• Lots of others

Look for nearly hyperbolic adjectives with repetition:

Fatal to overlook the urgency. Fierce urgency. Urgency of now.

Look for rich metaphors being asked to do a lot of work:

• We’ve come to cash a check, a promissory note written byh the founders, America has defaulted on this note.
• Invigorating autumn of freedom and equality.
• Threshold of palace of justice
• Cup of bitterness and hatred
• Winds of police brutality

Look for building metaphors on metaphors:

America has defaulted on the check but the bank of justice is not bankrupt.

Look for poetic repetition:

• One hundred years later…
• We cannot be satisfied
• I have a dream dream dream
• Let freedom ring

Look for metaphor mixed with repetition and indirect reference, esp. using space/place:

Cannot walk alone
As we walk… we shall always march
We cannot turn back.

Further look at the “I have a dream” part

• “I have a dream that” = five beat rhythm
• “I have a dream that” repeated four times, then shifted: “I have a dream TODAY!” Twice
• Many of the “I have a dream” clauses re-visit earlier parts of the speech, stating the same idea again but in this elevated prose.

Look for use of place and space, including spatial shifts in phrases, and where the adjectives sit in the language:

In Dream section, place (and person) repeated: This nation, just Georgia, just Mississippi, Alabama, Every valley, every hill and mountain, etc.

Mountain of despair, Every valley and every hill and mountain, rough spaces made plain, crooked places made straight, etc. etc.

“Let freedom ring” repetition, repeating themes for THIRD time, making use of space and place AGAIN. by this time the listener is totally in the groove with respect to the framework of metaphors, the cadence of repetition, and the space/place framework.

Again, five beat repetition in “Let freedom ring from”

Rich juicy adjectives for each of the places mentioned (mighty, prodigious, curvaceous) replaced for a few beats with a built in strong adjective as part of the place name (Stone Mountain, Lookout Mountain) etc.

Reverse of ring repeat in first “last line. “

These last two things (have a name in rhetoric, I forgot it if I ever really knew it) bump the listener.

Denouement

Full of repeats, classic references, more place/space references, the whole shebang in one little paragraph followed by:

Powerful repeats (“free at last”) with a couplet of iambic pentameter to finish it off:

Thank god Almighty
We are free at last

Here is my message: Use training in “Framing,” “Race Class Narrative,” or similar ways to improve your communication abilities to become a better producer of messages in the same way an athlete uses strength and aerobic cross training to become a better athlete. Message training is to the hopeful messenger what running 5 miles a day and pumping iron three times a week is to an amateur softball player. You will get better.

Practicing softball itself is of course also a great way to be a better softball player. Messaging training by repeatedly applying techniques you are learning, to a test case, especially in a group with some guidance and some critique, can work wonders on your muscle memory, when the muscle is your brain and the sport is convincing people. Doing it well will become more automatic.

In addition to a discussion of messaging training, I have a few words on writing letters to the editor, and suggest a few items to read.

Why “message?”

Your job in developing messages is to take an internalized desire, having to do with policy or behavior or something, and turning that into words that will change the brain cells in others in a way that causes them to make better decisions, join up with your idea, vote a certain way, or start or stop doing a certain thing. Part of that is knowing what the point is, what you want to happen, and turning that into sensible articulate concepts or statements.

Think about what some of those points might be. I want there to be fewer guns around generally, and less dangerous ones. I want people who have been traditionally kept from voting to vote all the time. I want us to adopt electric cars and trucks, and to replace internal combustion engines. What do you want? If this was a workshop, you’d write some of your ideas down and share them with the person to your right. Or left. Or anywhere on the political spectrum, really.

The second part of that is rephrasing or reforming your message in a way that uses the tools of messaging, so all that hard work you did thinking of a concept actually makes a difference.

The current message improvement culture has three main approaches, which overlap, are not exclusive, and all three of which work and should be used.

Let’s take them in reverse order.

Rhetoric

Rhetoric is the time honored process of persuasive communication. The whole shebang of messaging can be called “rhetoric” but here I refer to intentional rhetorical technique. There are a gazillion rhetorical forms, most identified in great antiquity, because even then, people had been speaking for many thousands of years. When we use rhetorical forms, a certain magical thing happens. The reshaping of the brain cells in the recipient of our message that we are going for happens quicker, more strongly, or lasts longer. Often, the rhetorical form outlives the message. I can’t believe I ate the whole thing but I have no memory of what product I was supposed to buy because I did eat the whole thing. (Kidding: It was Alka Seltzer.)

The great speeches used rhetorical forms, enhancing the impact at the moment, making the messages more memorable. Joe Romm in his book on this topic called it being “clicky and sticky” (see below for links to books).

For example, repetition or enumeration comes naturally and shapes brain cells nicely. One of the most memorable and powerful speeches ever given was Churchill’s “fight on the beaches” ditty. He used meter (putting your words out in packages of similar cadence and size, like a poem might do), alliteration (reusing the same sound) and most notably, repetition.

We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be.

We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender …

This speech was brought to you by the letter F, S, and G, and powerful concept that “we shall fight.” (And, as you may learn if you investigate framing theory, this speech used a protection frame, and also keyed into the relatable concepts of fighting in the air, streets, and landing grounds, very much in the average British person’s mind as the Nazis were dropping bombs on them.)

Rhetorical form is sometimes scoffed at as “bumper sticker thinking” or cheap jingle-making. Fine. But Donald Trump became the President of the United States and is still in the business of ruining democracy and advancing fascism, and much of the energy that launched that Juggernaut came from rhetorical tropes developed, repeatedly tested, and frequently applied. Do not think “lock her up” came out of his butt. No. It came out of Steve Bannon’s butt along with a bunch of other crap, and survived testing by Cambridge Analytics, and then became the slogan of the Trumpian movement, along with a few other phrases.

Rhetorical form does not, I quickly add, imply one sentence slogans. Churchill readied the British people for war, Roosevelt psyched the American people back to the banks during the Great Depression, and Emmeline Pankhurst got women the vote, using rhetorical forms, and I only slightly exaggerate.

We wear no mark; we belong to every class; we permeate every class of the community from the highest to the lowest; and so you see in the woman’s civil war the dear men of my country are discovering it is absolutely impossible to deal with it: you cannot locate it, and you cannot stop it.

Enumeration (highest to lowest), repetition and alliteration (we wear we belong we etc. etc.) irony (dear men) and so on. Auxesis and crescendo (the sequence of statements about class being ever bigger and bolder). You can’t stop a speech like this.

Ask not what you can do for your sentences, ask what your sentences can do for you. Rhetorical mastery equals compelling writing and speech making, period. Without this, framing and RCN training are nothing.

(Did I mention that exaggeration is a time honored rhetorial device?)

Race Class Narrative as a sea of good

Race Class Narrative is an approach to writing that involves contextualizing your message as a push-back against systemic racist (and classist) repression. It involves identifying the racism (often by identifying and naming dog whisles) and identifying the bad guy (usually the utterer of the dog whistle).

This whopping helping of “j’accuse” is sandwiched between layers of value statements, usually a broad one at the top, and a more speicfic one at the bottom. It is usually served with a side of ask, as in, the message doesn’t just say something, it tells you what to do next.

The best way to grok the RCN is to take one or two of the free and frequent training sessions provided by various organizations. It is worth your time.

Framing

This concept is near and dear to me, because of its role in the study of meaning generation and semiotics, a subfield of Anthropology (from my perspective) that I studied in graduate school. Years later, I saw framing emerge as a proposed method of making more effective messages, and I objected to the way the theory was being used, and misunderstood. This led to a major on line controversy with PZ Myers and me on one side, and Chris Mooney and a guy named Nesbit on the other.

The blogging network PZ and I wrote on worked together with the Bell Museum of the University of Minnesota to have a “steel cage death match” between those two guys and us two guys. It was a widely publicized and well attended public four way debate held in Ford Hall in Minneapolis with a follow-up drunken seminar at the Kit Kat Klub.

During the debate, I batted last, like Nature, and I’m afraid I might have surprised some people. Instead of giving a cogent and unbeatable anti-framing followup, I declared that I had changed my mind, and though Nisbet was totally wrong about everything he ever said, Mooney was mostly right, and using framing to make better messages could be a thing if done right. Which they weren’t quite doing yet.

That was decades ago, and since then framing has undergone a number of cycles of populatarity and refinement. The method comes to us today, in our community, in the form of Connections Lab, with George and Lisa Green and their crew. So now we have framing training, not just framing as an idea.

Pre-messaging, framing was an obscure linguist concept that had to do with how meaning is correctly generated in a recipient. All messages (aka utterances, aka meaning generation, aka acts of semiosis) have a frame. A message has to have a frame to be understood, and the frame, in its simplist and most obvious form, is often an agreement between message sender and message recipient on what the topic of conversation is. This agreement is usually subconscious and contextual. A common language, a common dialect, and a shared lexicon can be part of the frame. Things that seem outside language, but that provide context, can be part of the frame.

So, if I say, “I’m going on a fishing expedition” and I’m a prosecutor standing in front of the grand jury room wearing a nine thousand dollar Italian suit, you know I’m going to go in that room and ask questions of a witness that may or may not lead to an indictment of someobody, depending on what the answers are, and I dont’ know for sure what those answers will be. If I say “I’m going on a fishing expedition” and I’m wearing my fishing vest with the creel case and there are lures stuck to my hat and I’m about to climb into my Lunds 202 Pro V GL outboard docked on Leech Lake, you know my intent is to catch some walleye.

The suit/boat and other features of the context “key the frame” so the term “fishing expedition” is understood. The keying of frames is a way of shifting meaning, or playing around with ambiguities in meaning. You see examples of this all the time in humor. There is an example in the first few paragraphs of this thing you are reading, in reference to the political spectrum. See what I did there? I shifted the frame on you, and made you slip on a rhetorical banana.

We also see the power of framing in the mistakes we make. Framing is often from context, and can include auxiliary information. One day I left work and walked to the multi floor parking lot where I always parked on the third floor. I took the elevator to the third floor and walked directly to my blue Volvo 740. When I put the key in the door, it did not work. I then noticed that someone had switched the car seat in the back to a different brand, and I wondered why that would happen. I then noticed that the trash laying around on the floor and seats of the car was different trash than I usually had in the car, and wondered how that could happen. Eventually, it occurred to me that this was not my car, but only after several layers of framing — the parking lot, the third floor, the model of car, the color of car, all framing the inference that this was my car — the assumption that this is my car unraveled, and against a good deal of frame-induced inertia. Often, we most clearly see a frame when the frame is either broken, or somehow, it breaks us.

In framing a message, the point is to make the recipient receptive to your message in a positive way. So, if I’m wearing all black and I’m drinking a latte chai leaning against the counter in a grungy coffee shop and I say, “I’d like you to vote for Jane because she wants us to have great broadband” and you are a farmer in Freeborn County, Minnesota. You won’t give me the time of day and this “Jane” character can go to heck. If, on the other hand, I’m wearing my plaid farmer suit sitting on a tractor hooked up to a potato harvester, and I say “Vote for Jane, she wants us to have great broadband” you’ll like Jane because you want great broadband, but you’ll hear and accept my message because I’m already on your side. (Or at least, not a member of what to you is an unsavory counter culture.)

Framing is like laying down a road bed before you put down the pavement. It is like providing an excellent, entertaining, informative, likable guide on a safari. Good framing induces comfort. The people who get a better framed message will be comfortable with the message, will more deeply and accurately internalize the meaning. The reshaping of other people’s brain cells is a difficult and dangerous thing that can go wrong. How often do you tell someone something and they totally miss the point? Your intentional control of the framing that is going to happen anyway helps avoid that. How often do you tell someone something and they get it, but irrationally fail to agree with you because of discomfort in the way the message was sent and received? Or, the discomfort is simply in the mismatch between your message and what they see as reality?

An example of that last point because it is both key and not totally obvious: Assume that I want you to vote for a referendum to spend money on education. A framing analyst would instantly note that most Americans believe we live in a world of scarcity, so we can’t pay for things. Indeed, scarcity is a right wing frame that is used to scare people off of “liberal” ideas and to underscore the falsehood of “tax and spend” Democrats. Any referendum starts out as a firm “no” for a majority of voters because this scarcity frame is wildly successful.

A well framed message supporting spending on education may follow or be part of a message that demonstrates that we actually live in a society with plenty. This is not the same as the message that compares a school building with the cost of a smart bomb, which is bad framing because it links education with bombs or pits education against national defense. Nor is it like a frame that paints education as a superior thing to like over some other thing, which is bad framing because it reminds the recipient that we are all in the business of judging each other’s moral standing. Rather, it changes the mind of the recipient to be more comfortable with talking about spending money, without pushing the recipient away. If done right, it might even play on the message recipient’s sense of fairness.

Framing training like Connnections Lab does is not exclusively about framing, but about great messaging, with framing theory as a key guiding, er, framework. And, again, it is training your brain, not handing you a recipe card.

When you write a letter to the editor…

Rule number one is to write the damn letter.

Rule number two is to write your own letter. Don’t send in someone else’s letter, don’t write a letter for someone else. Yes, collaborate, yes, help with editing, yes, pass around bullet points that might be helpful. But do your own letter, put your own name on it.

Rule number three: Write your message in your own voice, and using your own approach. No one should look at your message and see the imprint of an organized entity, or a different writer.

When we look at messaging that was designed and promulgated by entities such as the Kochtupus (via Bradley Foundation, ALEC, Center of the American Experiment, etc) it is blindingly obvious that the letter writer (or speaker at the school board) is parroting a canned message. No matter how well that message was originally constructed, it is ruined by virtue of its assembly line manufacturing. This is a flaw in the current right wing strategy, a chink in their armor. We can do better, if we don’t produce assembly line messages.

Do use the messaging training we have access to. The Race Class Narrative Deli Sandwich is a great way of constructing messages, but if you follow the recipe and that’s all you do, you will have a Big Mac. If, on the other hand, you practice the RCN approach and internalize it, your own voice and your own approach will refine and become better. Then, writing messages in your own voice and using your own approach is made better by your RCN work. Instead of a Big Mac, you will have a luscious three-decker deli sandwich.

Understanding the point of framing will help you structure your messages and your logical arguments, and especially, it will help you recognize counter-productive framing in your own rhetoric. The framing approach is less recipe based than the RCN method, so it is more natural when applied. But remember, the word “framing” does not mean “tricking the audience” or even shaping the message. Framing is how we set up our messages so the context of interpretation is made (usually) more comfortable and acceptable by the target audience. It can also be used to make a message more clear and less ambiguous, so misfires are less frequent. It isn’t so much message shaping as it is message delivery and refinement.

Becoming a messaging expert, or let’s just say, improving your message, is not possible by taking a couple of introductory meetings with RCN trainers or a group like Connections. A colleague of mine started out working with framing and other messaging experts to develop a message for a particular organization. He would tell you that he very quickly improved in his understanding of how to put a message together. Then, he moved to a phase of being able to recognize badly framed messaging. Then he realized what he needed to do to refine the method more. In the middle of this process of development, he presented a draft of his message to a large audience, and there was not a dry eye in the house (in a good way, that was the intent).

Then, he went back and refined. And when I say “he” I mean a small group of about four individuals. This whole thing went on for three years. Sometime over the next year, the message will be deployed. It will be fantastic, and it will be so good because the team included framing experts.

That is not a terribly extreme case.

On the other hand, I’ve observed in workshops individuals trying out framing techniques, or RCN techniques, and going from being an average communicator as all humans naturally are to having a much better approach, and truly appreciating what is learned on the very first day. It can make a huge difference over the short term.

The mistake we don’t want to make is this: Hearing a single lecture on messaging by someone who read a book, or attending a single workshop, then believing it possible to pivot to your own group and guide a set of volunteers to develop excellent messaging. I promise that the best message creator in your group BEFORE that influx of a little training will still be the best message creator in your group afterwards, simply because prior experience and talent in writing is going to beat a three hour tour through RCN, Framing, or any messaging strategy, every time.

One more item: A mistake I see made all the time. Folks show up for training, but it is clear from what they are saying that they are not listening to the training and how it challenges what they are already thinking. They are not changing. They reinforce their bad habits. This is why we give tests in school. If you don’t learn, don’t change, you don’t do well on tests. It is very inadvisable for RCN or framing teachers to be hard on their clients and prove to them that they are not learning, that they have to get their heads out of their butts to really change. They need to be nice, they are glad you showed up, they figure you will eventually get it.

But I can be a jerk about it and lose absolutely nothing in the way of credentials or friends, because that is what my friends expect of me and that is what I am credentialed to do. I am an anthropologist, hear me whine. So I’m telling you: check in with yourself. Did you leave the training session thinking you had some stuff wrong, and thinking you know new stuff? If not, do it again, in a different frame of mind. As it were.

Your reading assignment

Pursuant to the matter of messaging, I hereby recommend a few items. These are not necessarily new, but they are current. Newness is not the key to success. One of the best references in how we communicate with words is well over 2,000 years old.

Made to Stick: Why Some Ideas Survive and Others Die by Chip Heath.

Mark Twain once observed, “A lie can get halfway around the world before the truth can even get its boots on.” His observation rings true: Urban legends, conspiracy theories, and bogus news stories circulate effortlessly. Meanwhile, people with important ideas—entrepreneurs, teachers, politicians, and journalists—struggle to make them “stick.”

In Made to Stick, Chip and Dan Heath reveal the anatomy of ideas that stick and explain ways to make ideas stickier, such as applying the human scale principle, using the Velcro Theory of Memory, and creating curiosity gaps. Along the way, we discover that sticky messages of all kinds—from the infamous “kidney theft ring” hoax to a coach’s lessons on sportsmanship to a vision for a new product at Sony—draw their power from the same six traits.

How To Go Viral and Reach Millions: Top Persuasion Secrets from Social Media Superstars, Jesus, Shakespeare, Oprah, and Even Donald Trump by Joe Romm*.

How To Go Viral And Reach Millions is the first book to reveal all the latest secrets for consistently generating viral online content—words, images, or videos that are seen and shared by hundreds of thousands and eventually even millions of people, something Romm and his colleagues in three different organizations achieve routinely.

The ALL NEW Don’t Think of an Elephant!: Know Your Values and Frame the Debate by George Lakoff.*

Ten years after writing the definitive, international bestselling book on political debate and messaging, George Lakoff returns with new strategies about how to frame today’s essential issues.

In this updated and expanded edition, Lakoff, urges progressives to go beyond the typical laundry list of facts, policies, and programs and present a clear moral vision to the country?one that is traditionally American and can become a guidepost for developing compassionate, effective policy that upholds citizens’ well-being and freedom. (NB: “All New” here does not mean all new now. It was all new a few years ago.)

*Most of these links are tied to my Amazon Associates account, so if you go there and buy the book I become wealthy. If there are a lot of you.

And of course, many of us watch the show to see the crashes.

Without further ado, a glossary. Add more to the comments if you’ve got em.

“But what makes it so good, better than when I cook it,” an in-law said.

“I’m not sure. Maybe it is cutting the end of the roast off before putting it in the oven?” said the granddaughter who had done the roasting that Sunday.

“Yeah, grandma,” said the other granddaughter, causing grandma to sort of wake up and pay attention for a moment. “Why does cutting the end of the beef off before roasting it make it taste so good?”

After a few minutes of mental processing, Grandma told them, “You don’t have to cut the end of the roast off. I just did that back in the old days because our roasting pan was too small. Got a bigger pan, don’t do that no more,” and went back to sleep.

Ritualized language is where a phrase or term is used in a certain context, then becomes commonly used in a certain context, then the term or phrase starts to eat other terms or phrases and becomes more widely used to the extent that it is not really linguistically or definitionally correct anymore, but is still used. I suspect the word “nominal” came to mean “normal” because it became ritualized in a certain context then spread. It is often the ugly words that spread this way, maybe because they have no other way to become widely used.

There was no “active shooter” yesterday. There can only be an “active shooter” right now. The term “active shooter” means there is a person with a gun in their hand and they are pulling the trigger, or just did, and likely will again. It does not mean that a person shot a gun at some time in the past.

So, the phrase “There is an active shooter at Walmart” means, to a police officer, that when you get to the Walmart you have your own gun out, vest on, and you sneak around the corners and are prepared to duck, and you have backup. Or whatever. The next day, one can say “there was a shooting at Walmart,” or “there was a person shooting at a gun at Walmart.” Technically you can say there as an “active shooter situation” at Walmart but then, you would be guilty of uttering pure ugly language. Leave the term “active shooter” alone for what it was created. It is a present tense phrase.

But what kind of mistake is that, to use the term “active shooter” in a phrase like “there was an active shooter” when you really should have said “there was a shooter.” Besides bad usage, it is an example of ritualized langauge. The term “active shooter” is used enough in our day to day parlance, and is association with strong emotion (in this case fear or stress), so it gets stuck to the inside of our skulls, near where the words come out, and when the utterance “there was a shooter” is on its way to your mouth, “active shooter” jumps onto those words, beats them up, and takes their place.

An equally egregious, or even worse, example of ritualized language pertaining to gunfire is adding the word “situation” to the sentence, like this one from a report in The Hill a few weeks back:

At 4:22 a.m. on Sunday, an officer near the woman’s home heard gunfire and 911 calls were received reporting an active shooter situation.

This reminds me of a story my friend Bob used to tell, back in the early post Vietnam days. He was a Green Beret in the mountains somewhere in or near Vietnam with the CIA, when the enemy started to shell their position. They dived under a table in the small dwelling they were hanging out in. After a few minutes the shelling had stopped, and the CIA agent said, “This looks like a get out from under the table situation.” In modern American parlance, the term “situation” is added to “active shooter” unnecessarily, ugily, and unhelpfully. When we refer to a past event, and remove “active” since it no longer is, we would get “there was a situation in which a person was shooting.” That is a situation up with which we readers of news items should not put.

Shelter in place is another term that has become embedded in the sticky parts of our heads, becoming ritualized language, and used incorrectly fairly often. “Stay where you are” is often said as “shelter in place” when you are being asked not so much to shelter (like squatting in the bathtub or under the stairs in the basement). Don’t go over there and don’t come over here. Just stay there. Have a snack or watch some TV, but stay there. Technically “shelter in place” means to seek safety within the building you already are in. Staying where you are may be quite different.

A very recent example happened at Walter Reed National Military Medical Center. There was a bomb threat and people were told to “shelter in place.” What kind of sheltering do you do in a building that is about to blow up? No kind of sheltering. You evacuate the building that is about to blow up. But if there are people in nearby buildings that you would rather not have wandering around and possibly going to the potentially exploding building, you tell all those people to stay put. A “shelter in place” order may be the convenient way to tell them that, if you have such a thing built into your system, which I guarantee the military does. But they are not really sheltering in place, they are staying put. Nobody had to squat in the bathtub or hide under the stairs. Other examples:

Shelter in place was also a term used in the early days of the Covid-19 pandemic.

Shelter-in-place order for Georgia until April 13

Governor Orders ‘Shelter In Place’ For Lauderdale as Virus Affects 76 Counties

This is sheltering in a way, but a long way from hiding during an active shooter situation. As it were.

Dog Whistle. A dog whistle is a phrase or term someone uses that sounds like one thing to most people, and if you look it up in the dictionary that will be the meaning, but to a subset of people means something different (but related). If you get trained in “race-class narrative” communication, you will learn that part of the process of making positive change is to identify the racist dog whistles politicians or Fox News commentators and the like use, then you call them out to point out the racism. So when someone like Tucker Carlson mentions that a crime wave (that may or may not have ever happened) originated in an inner city, he is explicitly blaming it on black people even though he does not mention black people. The term “inner city” is almost always a dog whistle meaning African Americans.

I’ve seen the term “dog whistle” being used to simply mean a term or phrase is racist. That is the term “dog whistle” being ritualized, being linked with a different meaning than originally. This is an example of how ritualized language can not only be bad writing (in this case, if the term becomes hackneyed) and the definition expanding (to mean any racist term or phrase even if it is explicit and not hidden to some). It is also an example of how a term being ritualized can ruin it. Dog whistle was a great term. If it gets ritualized and diluted in this matter, it won’t be. This is why can can’t have nice phrases.

I recently saw a tweet that showed a picture of a person using the hand signal for White Power. The tweet said “Racist dog whistle?” No, using a hand signal for white power is probably not a dog whistle in October 2021. It might have been five years ago when nobody knew what it was. Not any more. That is an example of a dog whistle suddenly making a lot of noise. It is just a regular whistle. This is not an example of ritualized language, but it might be an example of the process of a term becoming ritualized.

How about this? An immigration policy designed to not let immigrants enter a country, and at the same time, kill or mame as many of them as possible, to scare others away. That was recently referred to as a dog whistle (on Twitter) but it is nothing like subtle, indirect, or interpreted differently by different groups of people. Here, “dog whistle” simply means “bad thing.” Or a politician says “Islam is barbaric,” and somebody calls that a dog whistle. Nope. Another tweeter uses the term “dog whistle” to deride a person making very direct insulting remarks about Canada. Again, “dog whistle” as “being a jerk.” Also not a dog whistle: six injection hypodermics arranged as a swastika.

I’ve started collecting examples of ritualized language. Maybe you can help. Submit possible examples below in the comments.

A ritualized term or phrase is one that is commonly used to mean a certain thing, but where the use of that specific phrasing is pushed into the rhetoric at the expense of either accuracy or good phrasing. Usually, as noted, the phrase came into widespread use under conditions that make people pay attention. Aphorisms may sometimes be examples, but usually not. Filler words are probably not good examples, but they may be ritualized.

If you are a racist, and I say you are a racist, then my statement is ad hominem. Note that the statement may be technically correct. I’m saying something about you, and you really are a racist, so my statement is correct. On the other hand, if you are not a racist, and I say you are a racist, that is an incorrect ad hominem statement. My statement is incorrect. Either way, I have not committed an “ad hominem fallacy.” I’ve simply made a statement about you, that may or may not have been correct.

So, what the heck is the meaning of the term “ad hominem fallacy” you may ask? (Note that the term “ad hominem” itself, or “ad hom” for short, has come to imply “ad hominem fallacy.”) In the above example, you might think that if I call you a racist and you are, that I have not committed a fallacy, but if you are a racist, I’ve not. In neither of the above examples, have I committed the ad hominem fallacy.

If I sent you to this post to read it, it is more likely because I think you’ve committed the fallacy of the ad hominem fallacy. This is a meta-fallacy. You have claimed that an ad hominem fallacy has occurred because someone has called someone a racist (or some other nasty thing, I’m using “racist” as an example here, obviously) whether the accusation is right or wrong. But your reference to the ad hominem fallacy is in fact a fallacy because none of that relates to what an ad hominem fallacy actually is.

An ad hominem fallacy is when you are arguing over an issue, like are cats better than dogs, and you go after the person you are arguing with and attack them as a person as part of your argument. That is not the same as the question of whether the person is in fact worthy of this attack.

Let me give you an example.

Me: Cats are better than dogs.

Hitler: No, dogs are better than cats.

Me: No. You are, in fact, Hitler, and Hitler is a total jerk, so therefore, cats are better than dogs.

Here, I am wrong in two ways. First, you can’t say that cats are better than dogs. Or visa versa. Second, I’m arguing that the other guy in this argument is wrong because he is a jerk. I was committing an ad hominem fallacy.

However, I am right about one thing. Hitler is a jerk. So, let’s play it out again from a slightly different angle.

Me: Cats are better than dogs.

Hitler: No, dogs are better than cats.

Me: Hitler, you are a complete jerk, did you know that?

Hitler: So I’ve been told.

Me: In any event, you are wrong. Cats are better than dogs.

Hitler: Really, you can’t say one is better than the other.

Me: You know, you are right about that. You are still a jerk.

Hitler: So I’ve been told.

An ad hominem fallacy is when you use a personal attack on a person in order to devalue or dismiss an argument they are making. It is NOT when you make a statement about the person, which may or may not be a personal attack, in and of itself. I maintain Hitler is a jerk, and I don’t care about cats vs dogs. Maybe I’m right, maybe I’m wrong, but while that is an attack on the man, it is not a logical fallacy. If I say his opinion about dogs vs cats is wrong because he is a jerk, THAT is an ad hominem fallacy.

I sent you here because I think you got that wrong, and I wrote this post because I’m weary of that common fallacy, about a fallacy, being toted out in the middle of arguments.

Sex, Lies, and Power

When I was a graduate student, and later, teaching, at a Great East Coast University*, one of my adivsors was the famous Irven DeVore. We taught a very large introductory biology class nicknamed “Sex” but also known as “Human Behavioral Biology,” or, in the school’s tradition of naming all important courses after World War II bombers, “B-29.”

The fact was not lost on DeVore that we intended to enthrall, or at least, lock in the room four times a week, batches of 500 or so individuals who were training up to grasp in their hot little hands the very levers of power. Our job was to teach them what human behavior was all about. Clearly, that was an awesome task. And, DeVore reckoned that the best way to responsibly carry out this task was to inform the students what was actually going on, so they would be less likely to miss the point.

“You are all destine to eventually grasp the very levers of power,” he would tell them. “And here, we are undertaking the awesome task of learning about human behavior. During this course, there will be occasions when we will simplify the subject matter, in order to make important points. In effect, we’ll tell the occasional white lie to arrive eventually at a greater truth.”

There would be a pause.

“It is not lost on me and should not be on you, that now and then we are casting false pearls before real swine.”

Another pause. One in 15 students would then giggle. A different 1 in fifteen students would sneer. The rest would not emote, but they would dutifully write down the words.

What’s a meta for, anyway?

After my own fledging as a tosser of pearls, I departed from DeVore’s philosophy. I replaced white lies with truthful placeholders. Instead of “All genes code for proteins,” it would be “All proteins are coded for by genes, and that is the job of many but not all genes.” That was an easy one, and the placeholder there is the implication that there are other genes that do other things. A more difficult case might be “On balance, wealthy individuals have more offspring than poor ones, but half the time you measure this it will seem untrue. But, most of those times, you are measuring it wrong, and you can learn all about that in a 3000 level course we offer on Thursday afternoons.”

A white lie, in education, is a simplification that is demonstrably untrue, but used in cases where getting at the full truth involves more advanced material than appropriate for the course, or in some cases, just takes up too much time and doesn’t get you much in return.

In a sense, analogies are white lies, but with an even higher purpose.

The reason to analogize, or create a metaphor, is not to gloss over details, but rather, to bring the conversation to a more advanced understanding of something. A good metaphor causes an “aha” moment and a nudging of thinking in the direction of truth. It is not explicitly a lie, but an analogy is always in fact part lie. Usually the lies stay in the background and can be ignored, but if a given analogy is worked too long or too hard, you can almost never avoid stumbling over them.

For example, varying amounts of water running through pipes of varying sizes at varying speeds is a very good analogy for electricity when you are teaching the very basics of voltage and amperage. But this metaphor breaks the moment you realize that electricity doesn’t really slow down or speed up like water does. It breaks even more when you realize that alternating current lives outside the wire (pipe) a good bit of the time, and can actually be transmitted across vast distance of space and then picked up by another wire. Your lawn sprinkler is not a great analogy for a radio.

This aspect of analogies is often lost, perhaps sometimes willfully, though I think usually unconsciously, and can lead to arguments. This is not an uncommon way people are either wrong on the internet, or we identify wrongness in others. Or, inappropriately accuse others of being wrong.

Quantum Leap

I find this more often true in the physical sciences. For example, the use of the “quantum leap” as a metaphor is considered by most unacceptable. In physics, at the quantum level (at a very very small scale), it turns out that things (matter/energy, or particle/wave doohickeys) can not move through space or time, or energy levels, at just any old increment. There is a minimum. (See Planck’s Constant.) It is almost like everything exists in a giant four dimensional egg carton (the three dimensions of space, and a fourth of time) and everything is an egg that has to go in one of the spots eggs go in, never in between.**

In this world, the term “quantum leap” would simply mean the egg goes from one egg holding space to another, with absolutely no inbetweenness happening.

In the metaphorical use, a quantum leap means you go from one place or state to another without any inbetweenness. In some remote areas of the world where even today roads are not built, local transport was always on foot, then suddenly, it could be via bush plane. More specifically, the movement of important people or highly valuable goods went from walking to flying. That is a quantum leap in transportation.

In the TV show Quantum Leap, scientist Sam Beckett intends to “leap” across time using a fancy machine. Things go differently than planned, and one of the things that ends up happening is that he leaps across space and time but also into different individuals (I think, I never watched the show). People, especially physicists, complain about this use of the phrase “quantum leap” because a true quantum phenomenon is a quantum phenomenon because it is happening at this very very small scale where space, time, and energy increments are at the absolute minimum.

However, it is not a mistake to use the quantum metaphor for this TV show. The leap is there. The leap without the inbetween is a feature of the story. At quantum size scales, everything leaps. Here, the metaphor is used to refer to that same sort of leaping, also known as saltation.

If you think the metaphor is only correct if it is applied to objects with particle-wave duality and at scales where the you can see and feel Planck’s length, then maybe you don’t know what a metaphor is.

A Metaphor is like a your checklist of things to fix in your house this weekend. Not completely checked off.

Think of a metaphor as a list of attributes. Like this:

• It is very small, at size scales of 6.4 X 10^-34 or so.
• Things go across space in increments of that unit size, not continuously.
• Things go across time in increments, not continuously.
• Things go across energy levels in increments, not continuously.

Then, you check off one item on that list, maybe two, because you are using those attributes in your sentence. Sam Beckett leaps across time and space, he does not glide gracefully through time and space like the rest of us. That sort of thing.

If, at the end of your sentence, you’ve found that you have checked off all of the attributes, and if your attribute list is pretty complete, then you have not invoked a metaphor. You have merely stated a truth. You are not using features of a thing to expound about another thing. You have simply expounded about a thing, remaining in a single meaning-generating dimension. Your metaphor has collapsed on itself and become itself. You said nothing interesting. You might make a good Wikipedia writer.

A fact used in a metaphor is like Schrödinger’s cat. You never know if it is real or not real until you use it. Then, it is either a bit of truth because that part of the metaphor is transferred between the frame of the metaphor and the frame of the object of discussion, or it is a bit of a lie because it is the part of the frame of the metaphor that you are leaving behind.

In the case of Sam Beckett, the nano-nano scale of quantum mechanics is not a feature of the TV show’s main character. His saltational behavior is. He leaps, quantumly, across time and space.

Oh, and in case you didn’t know, when Schrödinger originally invoked his his famous dead-not-dead cat, he did so to underscore the abject absurdity of certain aspects of quantum mechanics. Others took this absurd joke and ran with it, asserting that it was part of actual reality, not a joke about reality. This is a case where a metaphor has bitten the writer in the ass, and so, it is appropriate that it is a cat because they are capable of biting in both real and metaphorical worlds. Also, note that Planck’s constant was originally conceived as a white lie as well, a kludge to help make the math work. Later, Planck and others realized that the apparent mathematical necessity of rounding everything off to an interval worked to solve matter-energy problems at that level not because it was a cute trick of math, but because it was a deep truth of reality. That is a little like deciding to count all your expenses and income in sums ending in two, and suddenly all the money in your wallet has become two dollar bills. Since two dollar bill is a metaphor, that leaves you with a pocket full of metaphors.

*Which shall be unnamed, because when I tell people I went to Harvard, they get mad at me, presumably, because they did not.

**Don’t take my description of quantum mechanics to the bank. But that’s roughly my understanding.

Tourists visiting Bemidji this summer may pick up a few words of a “foreign” language.

That’s because the first city on the Mississippi River way north in Minnesota may be the only town off a reservation trying to incorporate the area’s indigenous Ojibwe language into daily life.

All over town Ojibwe language signs are posted right alongside English language labels, and for a just cause. The signage is part of a broader effort to preserve the language spoken by an estimated 60,000 persons across areas of the northern United States and into Canada as well as to bridge cultural divides between whites and American Indians.

Words such as “boozhoo,’’ an Ojibwe word for “welcome” and many other Native American terms crop up around town, in an appliance store, the local hospital, the convention center, a local coffee shop, and this spring in the public schools. …

A recent study in PLoS looks at a heretofore under investigated area, word/character use in Chinese.

Following recent work by New, Brysbaert, and colleagues in English, French and Dutch, we assembled a database of word and character frequencies based on a corpus of film and television subtitles (46.8 million characters, 33.5 million words). In line with what has been found in the other languages, the new word and character frequencies explain significantly more of the variance in Chinese word naming and lexical decision performance than measures based on written texts.

So, the leading edge is where the mixing happens. The study concludes that subtitle-based word frequencies do a good job of estimating daily language explsure and exemplify the patterns of variance in word processing. Furthermore, this work generated a database that …

… is the first to include information about the contextual diversity of the words and to provide good frequency estimates for multi-character words and the different syntactic roles in which the words are used. The word frequencies are freely available for research purposes.

The most surprising result of this study is probably the degree to which the word frequency data did NOT represent a biased or strange subset of the language. It was thought that since movies treat certain situations more frequently than others, tend to be thematically “American” and because subtitles are not exactly what is being said on screen, and for other reasons, this would be a interesting but complementary (or at least different) word set. But …

It was only when we saw how well these word frequencies were doing to predict word processing times for thousands of words … that we started to appreciate their potential. Despite their shortcomings, subtitle frequencies are a very good indication of how long participants need to recognize words. They also better predict which words will be known to the participants and which not.

If you are inclined, you can read this study (in English) at PLoS.

Cai, Q., & Brysbaert, M. (2010). SUBTLEX-CH: Chinese Word and Character Frequencies Based on Film Subtitles PLoS ONE, 5 (6) DOI: 10.1371/journal.pone.0010729