Words Apart

Why did Kerry Katona get fired from Iceland after her cocaine scandal, but grainy pictures of Kate Moss hoovering up lines meant the supermodel garnered several new high-profile campaigns afterwards? As Sam Leith, author of You Talkin’ To Me: Rhetoric From Aristotle To Obama, explains, it’s all to do with ethos, or to put in it modern parlance, brand identity.

“Kerry Katona was chosen for Iceland because she was wholesome, not too posh, approachable, a mum, and she’d won I’m A Celebrity. She was the idealised version of what Iceland wanted their ‘mums’ to be like. Of course, when she was caught snorting coke, it instantly cut across the ethos appeal that Iceland were trying to project.
“In contrast with Kate Moss, it didn’t do her career any harm at all because the ethos appeal of the fashion world is not to wholesome mums. It’s an industry where eating disorder-suffering, underweight models who inject heroin into their eyeballs are regarded as edgy, so snorting cocaine wasn’t damaging to her image – she was a bad girl.
“Advertising draws on exactly the same rhetorical resources as political speech. The ethos appeal is just as important. A spokesperson is the face of a product, as a politician is the face of the party.”
Rhetoric is the art of persuasion. For 15 centuries it was a central part of education – you had to be able to recognise the techniques and have them at your command. The study of rhetoric may have fallen out of fashion but we are surrounded by it. It’s in political speeches, advertising, and yes, it’s littered across this copy of Hot Press too.
“You don’t have to look very hard to find rhetorical language in everyday life – it’s there,” says Leith, whose book includes examples from The Simpsons and Argos as well as more obvious sources, such as Shakespeare and Abraham Lincoln.
Ethos is one of the three appeals of rhetoric. Who you are is just as important as what you say. We’ll pay attention when Brian O’Driscoll gives us his thoughts on rugby, but we’d be less inclined to listen if he said he had the answers to Ireland’s economy.
The other two appeals are logos and pathos. Logos is constructing a reasonable sounding argument while pathos is an appeal to the emotions. Get all three right and the audience will hang on every word you say. Obama’s election campaign is a case in point.
“In 2008 when Obama came on the scene it was like – bing! Here’s this guy who is really consciously using classical rhetoric and techniques in his speeches. He positioned himself using linguistic and stylistic echoes of Abraham Lincoln and Martin Luther King. I found him pretty thrilling, as did a lot of people.”
Although Obama is a gifted public speaker who knows how to use what’s known as “high style” rhetoric, his rival John McCain used plenty of rhetorical language too. His straight-talking speeches were just a different form of rhetoric. Known as “plain style”, McCain’s rhetoric was less obvious, and in that particular case, less effective.
There are a number of ways that politicians seek to persuade us. One important trick is learning to set the terms of the debate, says Leith.
“A lot of what works in rhetoric is the sneaky stuff. You might be in a situation where there are three options, but if you set it out as a choice between two – ‘either you back me or you sack me’ – you’ve set the terms of the debate.”
Another thing to watch out for in political speech is which tense the speaker privileges.
“Controlling the tense is quite often a way of shifting the ground. If your economy has just collapsed, the Taoiseach might argue, ‘This is not time to dwell on the past, we need to concentrate on the future’. If you’re making a balls-up of things at the moment, you harp on about your past achievements. But you almost always look better if you’re presenting hope for some nebulous future. It seems dynamic and forward-looking instead of stolid and set in your ways.”
When most of us think of rhetoric, particularly political rhetoric, we tend to think of it as nothing more than linguistic hustling. Alistair Campbell, the Labour spin-doctor, is the obvious example.
“New Labour learnt a lot from Clinton – the whole thing about trying to find a way beyond left and right. That’s another classic rhetoric manoeuvre – presenting your opponents as locked in an old binary while you’ve invented a new thing that’s completely different.
“With New Labour it was done so consciously and technically. It wasn’t like spin hadn’t happened before, but they thought harder than previous administrations had about media cycles because we were entering the age of 24-hour news cycles and the internet. They talked about spin-doctors and sound bites in a quite naked way. That was bad spin. You don’t want to see the mechanics. The vocabulary became so public. It made them seem insincere.”
Leith is at pains to point out that while rhetoric can be used to hoodwink, it is not, in itself, a bad thing. After all, he says, it’s given us Western civilisation.
“I don’t think that’s overstating it, at least not by much. The central institutions of Western civilisation are the law courts and the parliament and they are put in place by language. The institutional framework – the law and participatory democracy – is about rhetoric. Even in despotism it is, finally, rhetoric and language that are the means of control. I mean, Kim Jong-il cannot personally beat up all his opponents. He has to maintain himself in such a way that people are afraid of him and his word is law.”
We tend to think of speeches as dull and tiresome, but if they are, that is a failure on the part of the speaker. The three goals of rhetoric are to teach, persuade and delight.
“Before we had Xboxes, people used to listen to speeches for pleasure. You’d go down and watch what was happening in the law courts. For thousands of years, people have thought both analytically and with pleasure about how rhetoric works and yet in the last 150 years this huge body of knowledge has all but vanished. We’re arguably more surrounded by rhetoric than ever before. It’s like we’re all driving cars but nobody studies mechanics.”

You Talkin’ To Me: Rhetoric From Aristotle To Obama is out now through Profile Books.