"Figures" of Speech

As you may (or may not) have noticed, the Ignoramus Blog is back, for a time at least. As random as the forthcoming posts may seem, I am on a mission.

One of my favorite stimuli to writing is Arthur Quinn's Figures of Speech: 60 Ways to Turn a Phrase. The thought has long possessed me of working through all 60 figures of speech Quinn lists as a kind of exercise, a rhetorical workout.

This idea gained strength recently when I realized how deeply Ray Moose hates words. That's right: he hates them. As much as he can turn them to his advantage, as much as words can make lies as well as truth, the word itself is abominable to the Moose man. He would much rather we look at pictures.

Animals live in a world of sound, smell, and picture, steeped in the sensory. That's all to the good, but that's all there is to it. Humans, without leaving behind the sounds, the smells, and the pictures, go on to interpret their sensations by putting them into words. While a picture may be "worth a thousand words" in terms of conveying details, a picture with no word to give context isn't worth a damn. A wordless animal does not get anything from pictures.

We often hear this put as a limitation or even a defect: There is no such thing as a neutral description; no author is strictly speaking objective; every text has its bias. But suchlike laments read language backward: it is the glory of man that he rises above the sensory to interpret the sheer physical datum by his words.

In a sentence, then: words are from thought, while pictures are from the eyeball.

Ray would rather we did not think. He would like us all at the level of animals, sheep to be specific, steeped in sensation and oblivious to ideas. Ideas are the most powerful force in the cosmos, and Ray would just as soon have all the power in his own hands. So he bombards us with sensations--mega sounds, artificial flavors, manufactured smells, special effects--and most especially with pictures, since for us sight is the strongest and most arresting of the senses.

Ray's greatest victory has been our transition from a print-based culture to a TV-based culture. Whereas Americans once found all their knowledge in books and newspapers and pamphlets, now everything, absolutely everything, is conveyed by way of the TV. And the TV trains the brain to let go thought and submit to the endlessly stimulating pictures. At the end of the day you just can't eradicate words from human culture, since even TVs require words to govern their making, but you have to give Ray credit for having succeeded beyond what anyone would ever have thought possible. If you want to ignore Ray Moose, start by turning off the TV.

So my self imposed rhetorical bootcamp is inherently anti-Moose. I intend to work through the glossary at the back of Quinn's book, using each figure of speech according to its definition.

I begin with the first entry, "Abusio," also known as "Catachresis." This is the substitution of one word for another seemingly in order to use a word contrary to its meaning. For example, in my last post I referred to "slothful speed." Sloth is associated with slowness, so my point about the speed--that it was made possible by a lazy inattention to detail--was made more strikingly by a seemingly inappropriate word choice. Similarly, I believe Shakespeare refers somewhere to "blind mouths."

In my imagination, Abusio is a doleful four-year-old child, covered with bruises and welts to show how harshly the poor word has been treated; his clothes are oversized, indicating that he has been put in place of some other word that perhaps was more natural for this situation; he holds in his hands a copy of the Catechism, to remind me that his other name is "Catachresis."

Such an extreme figure for our first exercise! But Abusio highlights the true nature of the rhetorical figure: it is appropriately inappropriate. Once you have submitted to a language and its conventions, once you have learned where the boundaries are, then you can master it, and transgress for effect.

Your challenge: Can you spot the rhetorical figure of the day in each day's post? Let me know in the combox if you spot it.