Political Speech

The English language, according to Orwell, is used to hide meaning or to prevent actual thought. This is especially true in political language where euphemisms are thrown about endlessly to conjure up prerendered political images of either fear or patriotism.

As I was looking through the different presidential campaign websites (including the third-party sites) I picked an example that I could analzye further using Orwell's criteria for bad English. My choice does not reflect any political leaning, so don't read too much into this analysis politically.

The speech I chose was given by John McCain on Sept. 24 in Freeland, Michigan.
"Remarks by John McCain in Michigan"
http://http://www.johnmccain.com/Informing/News/Speeches/f1c65918-422e-48d3-9e37-50120a9bb5c5.htm

1) The first rule to break involves the use of tired cliches and metaphors. Political speech in general is riddled with this type of language. Here are a few examples from this speech:
a) "the perfect economic storm." - the phrase "perfect storm" has been used so much that it has lost all meaning. Furthermore, it is an attempt to create fear through political imagery.
b) " black hole of bad debt," - while not terribly overused, this phrase in context is not very meaningful. Money paid to the governments is going to go somewhere; it will not disapear into oblivion as the phrase suggests. This phrase creates fear again by implying that taxpayer money will simply vanish.
c) "History will be our judge," - I can't tell you how many times I have heard phrase. This is also phrased as a threat, suggesting that we take action responsibly for future generations.

2)Operators or verbal false limbs allow for the quick substitution of pre-made phrases for more exact, descriptive words.
a) "directly contributed to..."
b) "We are talking about..."
There were actually very few examples in this speech, because the tone of the speech was action. Passive phrases do not really help this cause. The above two examples, however, seem like filler.

3) Pretentious diction is often used to strengthen an argument by injecting it with intellectual clout. I find in the "new" style of American politics that tends to reach out the "common" person, that prenentious words are limited. Here are a few examples anyway:
a) "transparency"
b) "unprecedented" : probably on the top ten list of most used political words. In fact it was used three times in this short speech alone!
c) "outrageous"
d) "dimensions" : according to Orwell, probably used to give the phrase a "scientific" authority.

4) Meaningless words act as filler within political speeches and often times they are part of the above mentioned cliches.
a) "could rebuild the crumbling infrastructure in every town, county, and state in this country." The word crumbling here is meaningless because it doesn't specifically describe the problem that the infrastructure faces. It is an "invisible" disaster.
b) "there must be greater accountability included in the bill." 'Accountability' is another often used political word that at the very least is ambiguous. Who exactly is being held accountable? What are the consequences?

This was a short speech, so there were limited examples of Orwell's rules, but enough existed to illustrate Orwell's point about political speech. Whether or not you agree with Orwell's conclusions about the decay of the English language, it is interesting to actively pursue the peculiarities of political rhetoric.

Humor and You

Reading about speech play made me realize how often we take for granted the absurdities that arise when we try to communicate with each other. The idea that a single utterance can have hundreds or perhaps even thousands of meanings simply boggles my mind. When you stop and think about it, however, every thing we say involves some mental grasping and some imagination. Since language is a symbolic system, we can't help but give different meanings to things, and often this is where speech play comes to play (so to speak).

Obviously humor is central to the idea of speech play, and much like the meanings of words, humor itself can be interpreted differently. There are the things that are intentionally funny and then there are the times when we say or hear something that was never meant to be funny. Comedy is fascinating because of the issue of aspect. What is funny to one person is not funny to everyone because the symbolic meaning of the joke could have no context in one person's life. I watched a lot of comics this week in preparation for this post (and also because I tend to that in my spare time anyway) and I figured I would post a couple of things and analyze them a bit.

The first video I looked at was from Jim Gaffigan, one of my favorite comedians:

His humor is based around the idea of taboo. By taboo I don't mean that his jokes are necessarily dirty, or about "classically" taboo subjects, but his humor comes from saying things we just wouldn't normally say. By pointing out the absurdity of using one phrase to symbolically suggest one thing instead of another, he gets the audience to understand the sometimes arbitrary rules of meaning in our language. A good example of this is from the very beginning of the video: "If you eat a whole pizza you say, 'Wow. You were hungry." If you eat a whole cake people are like, 'You got a problem.'"

My second example of humor is one that shows how important personal aspect is to meaning. If you were at the game on Saturday standing near a Wolverine fan (God help them), you probably noticed that this next event probably didn't make them smile (I'm sure the score didn't help either).


This wasn't the exact pun that Officer Tim McCarthy used this week (I believe it was something like "When it is wet outside it is important for the driver to remain dry"), but few things can get a Notre Dame student section going like a good/horrible pun about safe driving. If thousands of raucous, inebriated students shushing each other to hear a public service announcement about the perils of alcohol isn't funny, I don't know what is. And that is why personal aspect is so vital to meaning, and imperative when approaching everything from a conversation to a simple knock knock joke.

Embedding

This certainly has been an eventful week, and everytime I think I'm starting to understand this blogging thing something strange happens. Like posting to my original blog instead of this one and then losing it all (again). So a bit belated, but here are the posts I've composed about speech play and humor in general.

For anyone that is interested here is a video on Youtube about how to embed Youtube videos on your blog. The only difference is that the "embed" box is on the right instead of on the bottom like in the video. Hope this helps.

Speech Events in Football

Watching football on tv, for someone with a slight to medium grasp of the English language, can sometimes be a painful experience. Commentators are usually a combination of verbose "old-school" journalists and barely literate ex-players who have taken one too many shots to the head. Needless to say the favorite code used by commentators (as Hymes describes it) are cliches. "Football speak" is full of them. It is literally impossible to watch a televised football game without hearing a multitude of horrible similies and metaphors. It's almost as if the speakers do not recognize the linguistic context of the situation. We as the audience are in a position of power because we do not just hear the commentators like we would if the game were only broadcast on radio, but rather we see the action first hand and are able to judge the commentators based on how well they tell us about what we are already watching. It sounds kind of ridiculous. Football commentary is, therefore, primarily referential, but I can't help but feeling that the commentators are really trying to build rapport with the audience, creating some sort of false phatic communion.