It’s time for Dirty Rhetoric

A hundred-thousand voices screaming into an electronic echo-chamber. Welcome to modern communications. Your idea must be heard, but how?

We’re not the first to face this test. Our communications ancestors competed in the (literally) screaming markets of the ancient world. They developed a fix for the problem. A simple and elegant and beautiful fix. Whether you are writing or persuading or presenting, it’s time to bring it back.

That fix was a simple system of word-structures designed to take your message and lift it clear it of the noise.

Your message needs to be the one that’s heard. Your message has to stand-out. In the words of the Roman genius Cicero, a message needs to have ‘brilliant lights’. Lights to capture the eyes and imagination of an audience. To win you must wow. The Ancients left us a full tool-kit to do just that.

We’ve developed a simple system to put that toolkit right back into your hands. That toolkit is Dirty Rhetoric.

Dirty Rhetoric is a selection of 53 rhetorical techniques designed to light up your message. As the name implies – we’ve designed it to be quick and dirty – no rhetoric classes required. Just pick-a-card and boost your message.

I hope I’ve piqued your interest. Today we launch Dirty Rhetoric on KickStarter. Go here to find more information on how Dirty Rhetoric can help your message.

We have an exciting schedule of communications activities planned to help us launch Dirty Rhetoric, ranging from webinars through to ‘Peter’s Podcasts’ –  highlighting the uses of rhetoric in topical politics and product launches and maybe even the occasional pop-song.

I’d be delighted if you would join us for the ride. It promises to be fun!

Let’s break-out of that echo-chamber. It’s time to be heard!

Rhetoric Made Easy – Bringing Back the Magic

2000 years ago our Greek and Roman presenter-ancestors left us an awesome inheritance — the formulae for magic. They left us scrolls and manuscripts full of magical word-spells. Spells that help us to bond with an audience. Spells that create indelible soundbites. Spells that let us influence an audience’s perceptions of scale and logic and argument. And those spells have always been there for the taking! We know them in today’s world as “rhetoric”.

The snag? 2000 years of dust, detours and occasionally deliberate destruction had turned rhetoric into a tangled mess of ancient names and obscure descriptions.

Someone needed to re-write the spell-book and that’s just what we set out to do.

Partnering with Gavin McMahon and his sensationally creative team at New York’s leading transformational change and communications agency, fassforward consulting group, we’re now close to liberating the long-lost power of words — for presenters big and small.

And today, we’d like to show you for the very first time what it is that we’ve come up with.

It’s quick, it’s dirty, and our pilot sessions are showing that presenters, from Jersey to Johannesburg, just love it!

Want to know what we’ve got? Just click this link!

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

How to do Chiasmus

by Peter Paskale

“It’s not the men in your life that matters, it’s the life in your men“

One of Mae West’s celebrated phrases. Along with “Come up and see me some time“, to read these words is to hear the sinuous drawl in which they were delivered.

West was a Queen of the soundbite. She was also a Queen of chiasmus — a little rhetorical device that adds style to any presentation or piece of writing.

Mae West isn’t alone in her crush on chiasmus. Take a look at these:

• With my mind on my money and my money on my mind
• I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me
• I meant what I said and I said what I meant
• All for one and one for all

That’s with thanks, respectively, to Snoop Dogg, Winston Churchill, Horton the Elephant, and the Three Musketeers — and I’m willing to bet that this is the first time in recorded history those four names have ever appeared together on the same list.

Chiasmus is when two lines of text, or two adjacent phrases, are symmetrical — “I meant what I said – I said what I meant“. The human brain just loves things that are symmetrical. The more symmetrical a thing, the more we see it as intrinsically attractive. It even reaches to our assessment of human beauty — the more symmetrical someone’s face, the more beautiful we believe they are.

So symmetry captures the eye, or the ear, of an audience, just as a radio advert did to me yesterday when I heard the slogan of a tax advisor “working hard for hard workers“.

Building chiasmus into writing or speaking provides an instant style-boost, but the technique looks difficult. When you first try to create your own chiasmus, confusion creeps all over you. I know. I’ve been there. So, a few ideas to de-mystify the tool of chiasmus:

Chiasmus needs only to be roughly symmetrical
Chiasmus is essentially two phrases, side-by-side, where the second phrase loosely reverses the first. Loosely! It does not need to be a mirror-perfect reflection. So, whilst “Tea for two and two for tea” might be a letter-perfect model – it’s not one to copy.

Keep in mind something more like “‘Instead of landing on Plymouth Rock, Plymouth Rock would land on them.”

The reflection is loose. It’s flexible rather than perfect — in fact it’s perfectly flexible.

Chiasmus can agree, or disagree. It really doesn’t matter
Make a web-search for chiasmus and you’re going to meet JFK’s famous “Ask not what your country can do for you – ask what you can do for your country“, and this can lead you to believe that as well as mirroring each other, the two phrases must also counter each other.

Not true. The two sides of a chiasmus can agree or disagree — it doesn’t matter. “Old King Cole was a merry old soul, and a merry old soul was he“.

Imitation is the highest form of flattery
The best route to a confident chiasmus is to copy! Copy and mangle and do it with happy abandon.

Let’s take Horton the Elephant and see what we can build out of “I meant what I said and I said what I meant”:

• I like what I do and I do what I like
• If you read what you love, then you’ll love what you read
• See the friends you enjoy and you’ll enjoy the friends that you’re with

Keep a lid on it
Beware of inflicting a chiasmus-overdose on your audience. Limit it to just one per article or speech.

Have a go!
Chiasmus looks scary on first sight and that can stop us from experimenting with a fabulous tool for fabulous soundbites.

Don’t be afraid to start-out by copying chiasmus examples. It’s the best way to start and will guarantee that your speeches get noticed, which is important, because in the words of Mae West:

“I’d rather be looked over, than overlooked.“

Why Giving a Thanksgiving Toast is Like the Macy’s Parade

by Peter Paskale

Thanksgiving morning, and if you’re lucky enough not to be in the kitchen wrestling a turkey, then maybe you’re reclined in front of the TV and watching the floats glide down 6th Avenue.

Thanksgiving is one of the most uniquely American holidays. The day is heartwarming and kind. It’s a day when we eat and drink and watch old favorite movies and cheer in front of afternoon football. It’s a day when we come together as friends and families to celebrate, and to enjoy happy traditions.

One of those traditions however, is the Thanksgiving toast, and for the family member assigned the “honor” of making it, composing that toast can seem more than a little stressful.

Fear not. Whilst watching the Macy’s Parade, you witnessed a floating formula for the perfect Thanksgiving toast.

First, there needs to be a giant Snoopy – that’s something traditional. Then there needs to be a nod to whatever the latest hot children’s character is – that’s something contemporary. And above all, the whole thing needs to be wrapped around in a general feeling of childlike sentimentality – and that’s something heartwarming.

Something traditional. Something contemporary. And something heart-warming — the three essentials for your Thanksgiving toast.

First off – the traditional

This is the easy bit — it’s the most formulaic. There are three things you need to do.

Recall tradition

Express gratitude for the family and friends coming together to celebrate the holiday.

Mention those no longer with us

Are there any significant people who have departed this world in the past year? — GrandPa or GrandMa, Mom or Dad, or Great-Aunt Ethel. It might seem counter-intuitive to mention the dead when you’re aiming for happy, but Thanksgiving lunch is a meal where the dead are present. Those who would once have been at the table but are with you no longer, will be in everyone’s hearts. They need a mention, and the living need to hear those names.

Thank the chef

Move from the dead, straight back into the living. There’s going to be someone vaguely panting, with red-chafed hands and hair awry. Someone who has spent the whole morning stressing in the kitchen. Focus attention on this person, and look them firmly in the eye as you thank them for their labors.

Next – The Contemporary

This bit is slightly trickier. What are you giving thanks for? Everybody present will, hopefully, have something this year that they are proud of, or feel that they would like to mention. This is the moment for audience participation. In our family, we go around the table and everybody says a few words about what they, personally, have been grateful for this year.

Don’t however, just drop this question onto your unsuspecting audience. An awkward silence will be guaranteed to follow. You need to give them warning, so use words such as:

“There have been so many wonderful things this year. Let’s have everybody share just a few words about what they’re thankful for this Thanksgiving.”

As you say this, look to the person sitting beside you, and then cast your glance down the side of the table along which the statements are going to flow. Let the group know what they are meant to do. It’s also a good idea to have pre-informed that first person in the chain about what’s going to happen. That way they are ready to respond. As they are speaking, others will, in turn, be planning what they might like to say.

Finally – The HeartWarming

Two simple techniques create heart-warming:

Slow and smiling

When we become tense, as so many of us do when speaking in public, we gabble. Gabbling creates tension, and tension is the direct opposite of heartwarming. You need to slow your rate of speech just a little, and the best way to do that is to smile. If you’re smiling, then it becomes a physical impossibility to gabble. You’ll look like you’re enjoying the moment, and if the folks around the table believe that you are relaxed, then they’ll be relaxed too.

Lots of “us”. Lots of “we”. Lots of “our”.

It’s scary how often we use “I” and “my” when we’re speaking. Natural speech is more possessive than inclusive, and at Thanksgiving, it all needs to be about inclusive.

As far as you can – aim for pronouns that bring everyone together. Use “we” and “us” and “our”, whilst actively avoiding “I” and “my” and “you”.

This one small but important skill will inject more natural warmth into your speech than the finest and most soaring rhetoric.

Finally, three standard rules that apply — not just to this speech, but to any speech:

Plan what you’re going to say. Practice what you’re going to say. And keep it short! Less than 20 seconds, and it’s a little too short, but more than four minutes, and it needs some editing.

Remember those balloons in the Macy’s Parade. They’re light, and bright, and colourful. That’s what makes the parade such a much-loved tradition, and the same will be true for your Thanksgiving toast!

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.

Five architect’s jewels for your next presentation

by Peter Paskale

Dramatic business presentations don’t require drama. They’re better off without it. Drama is showy and blowy and overstated. It instantly puts the audience on their guard.

Award-winning Canadian architect Sanjit Manku recently described a project that he’d undertaken on behalf of the French jeweller and perfumer Van Cleef & Arpels. His description pulls us gently into a lost-world of couture and design. We start to believe that we’re actually there, amongst a  glamorous global elite. Manku, as you’ll see in the video, uses two tools to achieve this. One of them comprises, to be sure, some impressive post-production work on the video itself, but the second is a good basic use of some concealed jewels of presentation technique.

Manku uses five of these techniques. For future presentations, think of yourself as the central jewel in the middle, and of these techniques as being the setting-stones that can make you shine.

Don’t shout it from the rooftops

Never shout. Manku uses a quiet delivery that draws us into his words and into his world.

The louder your voice, the more an audience will lean away from you. Experiment with reducing your volume just slightly, and you’ll notice how audiences lean-in, and become more focussed.

Use repetition

“Something that we love to do and that we love to explore in our own work.”

“..always evolving….always about creativity……. always about making something”

Repetition techniques are the foundation of public-speaking. On one level, it’s always good to repeat your main themes, but on another level, little micro-repetitions create rhythm and soundbites.

For example – “…government of the people, by the people, and for the people” came to be Lincoln’s most famous quote because of that repetition on the phrase  ‘the people”.

Criss-cross your terms

“…the lives of some of the women who have touched Van Cleef, and how the artists of Van Cleef have touched other people’s lives”

The heart of this phrase is ‘people who have touched Van Cleef and how Van Cleef has touched other people’. It’s the same structure that you might recognise from ‘I work to live – I don’t live to work’.

The phrase picks up its memorability from the cross-over. If I was to create one right here and now, I might say something like “I write for enjoyment, and I hope that you are enjoying my writing”.

Can you create something similar for your next presentation?

Say what something’s not

“…..they’re not objects – they’re emotional pieces.”

“…we hope that we don’t make walls or ceilings or objects either….”

The technical term is apophasis, and it’s when you define the topic by defining what its not. This is especially useful if you need to re-frame somebody’s view of the world. For example: “You’re not looking for the product that is the fastest nor the strongest nor even the most powerful – you’re looking for the optimal balance between all three.”

Overdo the ands and ors

In that previous example, we heard about “walls or ceilings or objects”. There’s one more ‘or’ in that sentence than is quite normal, and it’s a deliberate technique called polysyndeton. By replacing the commas in your lists with lots of ands or ors, then you make the list seem bigger – more powerful.

So, instead of telling your client that you’re going to “improve speed, power, and performance”, tell that that you’re going to “improve speed and power and performance”.

Powerful presentations don’t blast away at the audience like miners dynamiting a cliff. Great presentations finesse the audience, and that depends on the occasional phrases you choose, and the volume at which you use them.

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.

Janet Yellen’s Double-Bluff of Darkness

by Peter Watts Paskale

Speaking slowly and clearly is the best way to help someone to understand you, right?

Wrong. Speaking slowly and clearly, and especially speaking slowly and clearly in a monotone, is the best way to throw someone’s concentration off. And that’s the technique Federal Reserve Chairman, Janet Yellen used this week when attempting to throw Senator Elizabeth Warren off-balance during a financial hearing.

What the Fed Chairman was attempting to bury was the fact that the Federal Reserve is struggling in its duty to audit the disaster-contingency plans of major banks, their so-called “living wills”.

Listen to Chairman Yellen’s responses to Senator Warren’s questions and you’ll hear long multi-syllable words. She never misses the chance to use a complex phrase when a simpler one would have done just fine. You’ll also hear lengthy pauses – there’s a hint of “I’ll say this slowly so that you can all keep up”. We’re seeing a double-bluff approach to slipping something past the audience. One part of the bluff uses language designed to confuse, while the second attempts to make the audience feel dumb about not understanding.

The technical term is “skotison”. It comes from an ancient Greek word that means to darken something, or to obscure, and it’s a perfectly honorable part of a public-speakers weaponry.

It’s the same approach that you’ll have heard described as – “If you can’t dazzle them with brilliance, baffle them with bullshit”, and the technique that delivered Donald Rumsfeld’s immortal “known knowns…. known unknowns… and unknown unknowns…” By the time the press had finished disentangling the syntax, Rumsfeld had invaded Iraq.

Elizabeth Warren however, responded in the only way that you can to a skotison – she challenged it:

“I’m sorry Chairman, I’m just a little bit confused….”

The skotison strategy relies on the assumption that your opponent will be either too proud or too intimidated to admit to their confusion. Elizabeth Warren however, is neither, and proudly admits that the argument has lost her completely. It’s interesting to wonder what the effect might have been had the Washington press corps shown the same instincts at that Rumsfeld press conference.

The more senior an individual, the more we can reasonably expect them to know how to make themselves clear. If therefore we find ourselves confused, there’s a high probability that it’s because the other party intended us to be so.

It’s one of the oldest rhetorical tricks in the book. If your opponent is using the skotison double-bluff, then remember the fable of the Emperor’s new clothes, state “Hang-on a moment, I’m a little confused”, and it will be miraculously revealed that your opponent has no argument.