Speaking tips from Taylor Swift

Photo credit: Sarah Barlow / Billboard.com

Taylor Swift’s new album ‘1989’ contains three ideas to stir-up your writing and your speaking.

Listen to the songs and you’ll notice that Swift doesn’t just sing those lyrics – she acts them. There are nuances and inflections that she milks with the precision of an actress. That scope for drama, and irony, and occasional comedy tells us there are things going on inside the words of the songs that are worth a closer look.

Swift uses metaphor and simile but what makes her lyrics interesting are three unusual techniques designed to make things sound weird — to mix things up.

Clashing Contexts

“‘Cause darling I’m a nightmare, dressed like a day-dream”

It’s my favorite lines from ‘Blank Space’. How often do you see the words nightmare and daydream so close together. They’re a clash. They don’t belong in the same sentence.

Here’s another one, this time from ‘I Wish You Would’:

“Band-aids don’t fix bullet-holes”

Little tiny band-aids — good for covering a paper-cut — but worthless when set beside a bullet-hole!

And finally, another personal favorite, once again from ‘Blank Space’:

‘We’ll take this way too far,

It’ll leave you breathless

Or with a nasty scar’

Those first two lines contain gushing, emotional language – ‘way too far’ and ‘breathless’. You would expect the words that are used to describe that scar to be just as rushing. Words like ‘livid’ or ‘vicious’ or ‘lethal’. But no – it’s a ‘nasty’ scar.

That’s how you describe an injury to a small boy! “Ohhhh… what a nasty cut. Where’s that bandaid?”

Mixing phrases up creates surprise in your audience, and surprise always grabs attention.

Flipping Cliches

Cliches are tired, over-used phrases and pop songs are packed with them. You can tell it’s a cliche if you offer someone the first few words and find that they can complete the phrase.

For example, complete the two following cliches: ‘Built to…….’  and ‘Fade………’.

You probably came up with some variant on ‘Built to last’ and ‘Fade away’. Taylor’s versions through give us ‘….built to fall apart.’ and ‘Fade into view.’ She’s taking cliches and giving them unexpected endings. Those endings spike our interest.

It’s a simple technique to copy. Find a list of cliches online and play with the endings.

For example, could a lazy person be described as ‘Up at the crack of lunchtime’?

Cliches delivered straight, are boring. Cliches modified are fun!

Confusing Senses

Swift’s final musical twist takes our senses and churns them up. It has us hearing colors, or seeing sounds, as in:

‘….screaming color’ and ‘Kaleidoscope of loud heartbeats’.

It’s called synesthesia, and takes a little getting used to but is worth the effort. The next time you want to describe a sound for example, ask yourself what color the sound might have been. If you want to describe a smell, ask what yourself texture it had. If describing a texture then wonder what flavor you would associate with it. When you play with your senses, you play with your descriptive power.

Over the months to come as tracks from ‘1989’ continue to be released you’re guaranteed to hear people humming the tunes. If you enjoy playing with words and ways to arrange them, spend some time with Taylor Swift.

 

Re-printed from my article of February 13th, 2015, in the Huffington Post

Oxymoron – the birthplace of brilliant

Jeanine McDonnell, daughter of former Virginia Governor Bob McDonnell, says that her mother has a “mild obsession” with another man.

Mild lives in detergent adverts. Obsession gets draped around designer perfume. Put the two words together however and you get something that’s… well… kind of interesting. It’s refined and yet ever so slightly dirty. It’s an oxymoron, and in politics, oxymorons get a bad wrap.

Politicians will cry “oxymoron” in the same way that English footballers cry “foul” – usually as a cheap way to distract the referee.  The president, for example, was excoriated from the right for the oxymoron of “Leading from behind”, while Sarah Palin took a rough-ride from the left when she mentioned “Conservative feminism”.

Look past the mockery though and maybe there are some interesting ideas being deliberately driven into the shadows by that accusation of the “O” word.

What would a Conservative Feminist actually be like? And how about if stopped to give “Leading from behind” a little of the consideration that John Boehner clearly doesn’t want us to?

Is the cry of “Oxymoron” meant to embarrass us into burying ideas before they’ve even taken their first steps?

Oxymorons aren’t fouls. They’re verbal spice. Oxymorons gave us the most delicious phrase in the English language – “sweet and sour’, which became especially flavourful when combined with the oxymoronic “jumbo shrimp”. Does double the oxymoron equal double the delicious? Definitely maybe.

Oxymorons ever so slightly screw with accepted realities. They slam the right combination of the wrong words together in such a way that can open up whole new lines of thought. Entrenched political interests usually dislike new thoughts, and maybe that’s why oxymorons launch witch-hunts.

Let’s take the phrase “religious freedom”. To a non-believer this is a clear oxymoron – the prescribing of life based on religious dogma is far from freedom. To a believer however, life lived by religious code is not only the direct path to freedom in this world, but also in the next.

Oxymorons tamper with established meanings in a way that can deliciously subversive and that’s why proscriptivists of all stripes hold them in such contempt.

So, long live Conservative Feminism, and here’s to Leading From Behind. Oxymoron is the glorious birthplace of brand-new concepts. The next time you hear somebody levelling the political charge of “OXYMORON”, then find out what it is they’re attacking, and give that very concept some extra thought.

You might find that they’re trying to distract you from something rather interesting.

How to handle an ambush? With respect

In fairness to Representative King, he was trapped. Two determined DREAMers, Erika Andiola and Cesar Vargas, had him cornered – completely hemmed-in, half-way through a hamburger.

 

 

It was a political ambush, and in deciding to stand and fight, King had lost before he’d even started. The whole idea of a political ambush is that it’s lose-lose for the ambushed. You either try to justify your opinions in an unjustifiable context, or you high-tail it out of there. King’s dining companion, Senator Rand Paul, very astutely did just that. Correctly identifying the approaching iceberg, Paul crammed his burger down his throat and scuttled for the lifeboats.

What made this event newsworthy however, was King’s apparent contempt for the two people in front of him, and here’s where he compounded his troubles by going on the offensive — offensively.

Early in the video, as Andiola makes her case as a DREAMer, King states to her “You’re very good at English, you understand what I’m saying.” Shortly afterwards he repeats this, as if trying to emphasize that maybe she didn’t get it first time around:

“You understand the English language, correct?”

Of course she understands the English language. So the question has to be asked, why did the Congressman feel the need to state the bleeding obvious, and to state it twice?

The answer is that he was attempting to do two things at once – both of which were ugly. The first was to belittle his opponent through false praise: “You’re very good at English.” All such statements come with a suppressed ending that contains the words “….for a….”.

So, let’s run the full statement, and it would sound something like “You’re very good at English for a……….” Many endings could be dropped into that box, but maybe for the best guess, we should turn to how Andiola herself felt the need to reply on the video:

“I was raised in the United States….”

The second goal of Representative King was dog-whistle politics – encoding a message so that, hopefully, your own side sees what’s going on but nobody else does. Initially this worked – within minutes a crowd forms around Andiola and Vargas yelling “Go home”. Unfortunately, just as for Paul Ryan back in March, the trick went wrong, thanks to the wonders of the internet and viral videos. Not only did Rep. King’s side notice, but we all noticed!

For political communications, two major points leaps out of this experience:

1. Rand Paul got it right. This was an ambush, and a good ambush is designed to be no-win for the victim, so the only way out is the way that is least damaging – retreat. If however, that route is blocked to you, maybe for example by the fact that your dinner companion is already desperately scrambling for the life-boat, then rule two comes into play – be respectful.
2. Be utterly respectful. Do not sneer, do not attempt coded dog-whistles, do not belittle. At one stage King almost achieved a come-back via a neat segue onto the topic of presidential decrees, but at the last minute he couldn’t resist what at the time must have felt like the easier route: He sneered, he dog-whistled, and he belittled.

That’s what put the fire into the story.

In the end though, this is also a story about the well put-together ambush. Recent election cycles have seen politicians retreat farther and father away from genuine engagement with voters. Town-hall questions are no longer genuine questions — they are hand-selected mini-speeches designed to burnish the talking-points of the candidate.

Politicians have only themselves to blame for ambush-interviews — if they won’t give voters genuine access in more conventional settings, then the politically active will force access in less conventional, burger-based settings, and those settings are genuinely going to be no-win.

The Straw Man Fallacy

by Peter Paskale

As the big bad wolf will gladly confirm, it’s way easier to blow-down a house of straw.

And so it is with arguments. An argument made of straw is easier to demolish than one that’s made of stone. Why would anybody therefore want to build themselves such a poor and flimsy straw-bale argument?

Precisely because they want to blow it down. All by themselves.

It’s such an accepted strategy within communications that is even has a name – The Straw-Man Fallacy, and it’s why NRA commentator Dom Raso is claiming gun rights should be extended to blind people.

Mr Raso is an awesome speaker. He’s also highly credible, and that’s important for the success of a Straw Man Fallacy, because the straw-man involves tricking your audience.

Mr Raso’s argument is that blind people are being denied their Second Amendment rights to carry guns, and on the basis of his evidence, and putting my own views on guns to one side, I would have to say that I agree with him. To deny blind people the same rights  as the rest of us would be discrimination unfairly based on a physical disability. This however, is where the straw-man comes in, because the Gun Control Act of 1968 makes no mention of blind people.

While the Act does list various groups who are prohibited from carrying guns, blind people are most definitely not amongst them.

Mr Raso therefore, has powerfully won an argument against a case that doesn’t exist, and that doesn’t exist for the very reasons that he cites in his video. It’s all rather odd and circular, but done for a reason, because creating a Straw Man Fallacy is only stage one of a larger communications strategy:

Step One: The straw-man

Let’s say that blind people represent group A. Mr Raso’s straw-man has now led you, the audience, to inaccurately believe that blind people are unfairly discriminated against under the Gun Control Act.

Step Two: The demolition

Our speaker now builds a powerful case for why that is wrong. He creates a compelling argument, against an illusionary target of his own creation.

Step Three: The extension

If Mr. Raso can prove that Argument A demonstrates unfair prejudice, then we as an audience become pre-inclined to believe that maybe groups B & C are also being prejudiced against.

Step Four: The precedent

While Argument A was an illusory straw-man, groups B & C will be real. The successful straw-man however, will have created a precedent under which it can now be successfully argued that groups B & C, who are genuinely listed under the Gun Control Act, should also be able to carry fire-arms.

Maybe I’m being Machiavellian again, but usually when a speaker invokes a straw-man fallacy, it’s step one. Showing how easily you can blow down the house of straw is only a prelude to panicking the occupants of the house of stones into quitting the building with  less of a fight.

Mr. Raso makes a fabulous case, and I believe this is the prelude to something bigger.