Influence

Part 3 of 12  ·  Mechanics

The Weaponized Word

Language as an instrument: framing, loaded words, propaganda grammar, euphemism, and the rhetorical moves that make a bad argument hard to answer.

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1 The Three Proofs: Aristotle’s Blueprint for Every Manipulation That FollowedAristotle’s ‘Rhetoric’ (c. 350 BCE), Book I, where he divides the ‘artistic proofs’ of persuasion into ethos (speaker…
2 Name-Calling and Glittering Generalities: The 1937 Taxonomy of PropagandaThe Institute for Propaganda Analysis, founded 1937 in New York by Clyde R. Miller and funded by Edward Filene, which published…
3 Six Hundred Will Die: The Asian Disease Problem and the Physics of FramingAmos Tversky and Daniel Kahneman’s ‘Asian disease problem’, published in Science, vol. 211 (30 January 1981), 'The Framing of…
4 Crime Is a Virus, Crime Is a Beast: Metaphor as Covert Policy ArgumentPaul Thibodeau and Lera Boroditsky’s Stanford experiments published in PLOS ONE (2011), in which a single metaphor word…
5 How Fast Was the Smash? Verbs That Rewrite MemoryElizabeth Loftus and John Palmer’s 1974 study ‘Reconstruction of Automobile Destruction’, University of Washington, in which the…
6 Did You See The Broken Headlight? Presupposition and the Loaded QuestionElizabeth Loftus and Guido Zanni’s 1975 experiment on definite versus indefinite articles (‘the’ vs ‘a’ broken headlight),…
7 Repeat It Until It’s True: The Illusory Truth EffectLynn Hasher, David Goldstein and Thomas Toppino’s 1977 experiment at Temple University, in which repeated plausible statements…
8 The Big Lie: Scale as a Credibility DeviceAdolf Hitler’s discussion of the ‘grosse Luge’ in Mein Kampf (1925) and Joseph Goebbels' propaganda doctrine of relentless…
9 Firehose of Falsehood: Volume and Speed as WeaponsChristopher Paul and Miriam Matthews‘ RAND Corporation report ’The Russian Firehose of Falsehood Propaganda Model' (RAND PE-198,…
10 The Gish Gallop: Winning by Making Refutation ImpossibleCreationist Duane Gish’s public debates against evolutionary biologists in the 1970s-1980s, from which the term ‘Gish gallop’ was…
11 And You Are Lynching Negroes: Whataboutism as Moral AnaestheticThe Soviet propaganda catchphrase ‘A u vas negrov linchuyut’ (‘And you are lynching Negroes’), used from the 1930s onward and…
12 Either With Us or Against Us: The Manufactured False DilemmaPresident George W. Bush’s address to a Joint Session of Congress, 20 September 2001: 'Either you are with us, or you are with…
13 Building the Straw Man: Refuting the Argument Nobody MadeScott Aikin and John Casey’s taxonomy of straw, weak and hollow man fallacies, published in Argumentation (2011), which…
14 Thought-Terminating Cliches: Lifton’s Loaded LanguageRobert Jay Lifton’s ‘Thought Reform and the Psychology of Totalism’ (1961), based on interviews with survivors of Chinese…
15 Newspeak: Shrinking the Language to Shrink the ThoughtGeorge Orwell’s appendix ‘The Principles of Newspeak’ in Nineteen Eighty-Four (1949), describing the deliberate destruction of…
16 Collateral Damage: Doublespeak and the Anaesthetised AtrocityWilliam Lutz’s work on doublespeak, including the National Council of Teachers of English Doublespeak Awards, and Pentagon Gulf…
17 LTI: Victor Klemperer’s Notebook on the Language of the Third ReichVictor Klemperer’s ‘LTI — Lingua Tertii Imperii: Notizbuch eines Philologen’ (1947), the diary-based philological study kept by…
18 Special Treatment: Bureaucratic Euphemism at WannseeThe Wannsee Conference, 20 January 1942, and the Nazi administrative vocabulary of ‘Endloesung’ (Final Solution),…
19 Cockroaches on the Radio: RTLM and the Grammar of GenocideRadio Television Libre des Mille Collines broadcasts in Rwanda, 1993-1994, which repeatedly labelled Tutsi ‘inyenzi’…
20 The Dog Whistle: Lee Atwater’s 1981 ConfessionRepublican strategist Lee Atwater’s anonymous 1981 interview with political scientist Alexander P. Lamis, published in full by…
21 Death Tax, Climate Change: Frank Luntz and Industrial-Scale Word TestingFrank Luntz’s leaked 2002 memorandum to the Bush White House, ‘The Environment: A Cleaner, Safer, Healthier America’, advising…
22 Moving the Window: Joseph Overton’s Range of the SayableJoseph P. Overton’s model of the window of political possibility, developed in the mid-1990s at the Mackinac Center for Public…
23 DARVO: Deny, Attack, Reverse Victim and OffenderJennifer J. Freyd’s 1997 formulation of DARVO at the University of Oregon, and the experimental tests by Sarah Harsey and Freyd…
24 Neuro-Linguistic Programming: The Persuasion Cult That Failed ReplicationRichard Bandler and John Grinder’s development of NLP at UC Santa Cruz in the 1970s, and the critical reviews — including…
25 The Milton Model: Vagueness as a Trance InductionMilton H. Erickson’s indirect hypnotic language, codified by Bandler and Grinder as the ‘Milton model’ of artfully vague patterns…
26 Mistakes Were Made: The Agentless Passive as Blame TechnologyThe political non-apology formula ‘mistakes were made’, traced by William Safire’s Political Dictionary through Nixon-era usage,…
27 I Have a Dream: Anaphora and the Physiology of Collective CadenceMartin Luther King Jr.‘s address at the March on Washington, 28 August 1963, whose repeated ’I have a dream‘ and ’let freedom…
28 The Rhetorical Question: Forcing the Target to Argue Your CaseRichard Petty, John Cacioppo and Martin Heesacker’s 1981 experiment 'Effects of rhetorical questions on persuasion: A cognitive…
29 Function Words Betray You: Pennebaker’s Pronoun ForensicsJames W. Pennebaker’s computerised text analysis programme LIWC and his book ‘The Secret Life of Pronouns’ (2011), showing that…
30 A Diamond Is Forever: The Slogan That Created a DesireFrances Gerety’s 1947 line ‘A Diamond Is Forever’, written for De Beers at the N.W. Ayer & Son agency in Philadelphia, later…