Metaphors and rhetoric

[Eric]

Twenty-odd years ago I sat on a tiny committee dealing with the political manipulation of language. It examined the way that sometimes a word or phrase could be used in a propagandistic way.

If Gordon Brown is to win the next election, he (or his speech-writers) might think about eliminating the surfeit of metaphors and rhetoric from his speeches. Patrick Wintour, Political Editor of the Guardian, helpfully quotes a few metaphorico-rhetorical soundbites from Brown's speech in his article in Saturday's Guardian. Here are those, and a few more:

"polar opposites" - tautology

"age of aspiration" - clich?

"biggest wave of social mobility" - metaphor, involving the sea

"core vote" - metaphor, as apples have cores

"And I want to see an expanded middle class, not a squeezed middle class" - emotive metaphor involving tightening your belt versus the bloated middle class splurging out of their trousers

"genuine meritocracy" - what is a false meritocracy?

"... we will not only raise the glass ceiling, but break it" - another lovely rhetorical metaphor, a bit revolutionary this time, to appear to the revolting class of smashing people

"incentivise" - horrible word

"The Conservative plan is to squeeze the middle class hard..." - another bout of the metaphorical squeezing of waists, bear hugs all round

*

And so on. Give us a squeeze, Gordon! I'm not saying that metaphors should be entirely eliminated, or that Dave and Osbo are any better at crossing out the rhetoric and metaphors in their speech-writers' efforts, but when speeches contain too many metaphors and bland rhetoric, people begin to wonder what, in boiled down terms (metaphor), is actually being said.

If a novelist wrote like Gordon's speechwriters, he'd either be out of a job or win the Booker.

[hdw]

On more or less the same topic, there was an item on the Radio Four news programme this morning about the lack of oratory in the House of Commons these days. Neil Kinnock, former leader of the Labour Party, was reminiscing ruefully about how the media referred to him as the Welsh Windbag when he embarked on his rhetorical flourishes, and he thought the negative publicity he got for his oratory has dissuaded younger politicians from making barnstorming speeches.

Personally, I have never fallen for the 'great oratory' stuff. I suppose Churchill may have helped to raise spirits during WWII with some of his speeches, and Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech was striking, if void of real content, but by and large 'oratory' strikes me as largely rabble-rousing, a false and phoney way of whipping up (usually, negative) feeling, and I feel that the real work of politics is carried out unsensationally in committees and by MPs returning to their constituencies at the weekends to meet their constituents and help them with their problems.

Harry

[Eric]

The curious thing is that Gordon Brown is one of the least rhetorical personalities you could imagine. But his speechwriters - as no one writes their own speeches, even the Queen - must have been trying to pump iron into his blood.

I also have a vibrant hate of edgy terminology, so I was ever so pleased when Michael Portillo, on This Week, used the word "edgy" in its good old-fashioned meaning. The word "oversight" is also used in two diametrically opposed meanings, although I suppose that was the case with "to cleave" a long time ago.

[hdw]

Michael Portillo has re-invented himself as a TV presenter and is currently doing a "Great Train Journeys" series using a 19th-century Bradshaw. I enjoyed last night's programme, in which he went via Carluke in Lanarkshire, checking out the local soft fruit industry, and Edinburgh to Kirkcaldy in Fife - Gordon Brown's home town, and not far from mine - which was an exercise in nostalgia as he used to be taken there as a child to visit his maternal grandfather John Blyth, a wealthy linen manufacturer and art collector whose bequest to Kirkcaldy Museum and Art Gallery made it one of the best endowed provincial museums in Britain. I had Blyth ancestors in Kirkcaldy myself but don't think they were related.

Quite rightly, he treats himself to a suite in the Balmoral Hotel when in Edinburgh - why settle for 2nd best when the BBC licence-payer is picking up the tab - and there was a droll moment when he chatted to the tartan- and glengarry-bedecked doorman at the Balmoral, asked him where he was from, and got the heavily-accented reply, "Nearby Munich!"

Harry