Part I

We can invest feeling and emotion in what we say by using such figures of speech as the simile, metaphor, and hyperbole. These are not new forms of expression at all. As early as 2,000 years ago, in fact, the Greeks had already made such a fine art of their language by cultivating as many as 80 rhetorical devices—“the flowers of rhetoric,” they called them. The figures of speech, of course, derive their power by unexpectedly comparing a subject to things already familiar to us, while rhetorical devices can stir our emotions with the surprisingly felicitous ways they arrange words in a sentence or passage.

Let’s now take a closer look at wordplay, or the witty, clever, malicious, insidious, or cruel manipulation of words themselves as phonemes or carriers of meaning.

The most common form of wordplay, of course, is punning. This is the often humorous play on a word’s different meanings or on the similar meanings and sounds of different words—with the requisite mild touch of mischief or malice, of course. The more razor-sharp and wounding the pun is to the target, the better and more satisfying it is to the third-party listener. For instance, if a club chair, unable to stop a talkative but incoherent member from dominating a meeting, tells all and sundry, “Blessed are they who have nothing to say and who cannot be persuaded to say it,” how do we react? We feel good not only at the wounding of the target’s ego but at the insult—at the power of the words to inflict the wound.

But puns fall flat if the speaker and listener don’t have a common referent and depth of understanding of the language. Many of Shakespeare’s puns, for instance, mean little now except to the most studious ears. In Hamlet, for example, Hamlet accuses Ophelia of unfaithfulness and verbally savages her: “Be thou as chaste as ice, as pure as snow, thou shalt not escape calumny. Get thee to a nunnery, go.” Hamlet built his pun around the word “nunnery” to wound Ophelia’s self-esteem and give vent to his rage. Yet up to now, over 400 years later, scholars, dramatists, and English professors still argue over what Shakespeare had really meant when he used “nunnery.” Some take it at face value: a place where disgraced women can take refuge from the jeers of society. Some take it on the figurative level to mean “Get out of here!” Others interpret it on the relational level as “You disgust me!” Researchers of Shakespearean English, however, have found that “nunnery” was a contemptuous allusion to “brothel” or “whorehouse.” This verbal cruelty, of course, is all but lost to the modern reader of Hamlet.

Now see how contemporary puns can elicit mirth or laughter (or our anger, if we ourselves are their targets) without having to go through the same analysis that we have done above: “Cole’s Law: Thinly sliced cabbage.” “Does the name Pavlov ring a bell?” “My accountant always writes religious phrases down the left side of the page. That’s his prophet margin.” “Shin: A very sensitive device for finding furniture in the dark.” “I used to think I was indecisive ... but now I am not sure.” Don’t they all have a delicious ring?

People also use wordplay simply for the sound of it, as in these juxtapositions of similar-sounding phonemes: “Is a sea of sequoias aqueous?” (William Waite). “Reverse errors to persevere” rearranged to “Errors prosper over beer” (Mike Rios). Then there is recreational linguistics, or “letterplays,” where words are manipulated by transposing their letters or syllables; the wordplay literature is full of them.

But an even more hilarious form of wordplay is taking any word from the dictionary and altering it by adding, subtracting, or changing only one letter, then supplying a definition for the newborn word. The Washington Post, which runs a “Style Invitational” on this type of wordplay, drew out from readers the following gems in the 2003 edition of the contest: “Intaxication. Euphoria at getting a tax refund, which lasts until you realize it was your money to start with.” “Cashtration (n.): The act of buying a house, which renders the subject financially impotent for an indefinite period.” “Glibido: All talk and no action.” “Arachnoleptic fit (n.): The frantic dance performed just after you’ve accidentally walked through a spider web.” “Giraffiti: Vandalism spray-painted very, very high. “Sarchasm: The gulf between the author of sarcastic wit and the person who doesn’t get it.” “Caterpallor (n.): The color you turn after finding half a grub in the fruit you’re eating.” Marvelous, marvelous!

To fully appreciate and enjoy these verbal pyrotechniques, of course, we must continually widen not only our grammar but our semantic grasp of English. Few can enjoy English-language wordplay at all unless they have already graduated from using English simply as a rickety pushcart for conveying information. (October 13, 2003)

Part II

Ever wondered how some people have moved us or inspired us to do great things their way, or mesmerized us, put blinders on our eyes, then made us do irrational things that we would never have dreamed of doing had we not been under their spell?

If so, then the speakers—unless they had recited great poetry—must have been using chiasmus. This figure of speech towers above all the other rhetorical devices in its ability to lower our built-in defenses and arouse our emotions. We could very well call chiasmus the linguistic incarnation of charisma—that rare and elusive power of certain people to inspire fierce loyalty and devotion among their followers.

The use of chiasmus dates back to antiquity. In the 6th century B.C., the extremely wealthy Lydian king Croesus went on record using it: “In peace sons bury their fathers, but in war fathers bury their sons.” Such wisdom in only 13 words! Is it possible that he became fabulously wealthy because he was so adept at chiasmus and—by implication—at compelling people’s obedience? Or did he become so good at coining chiasmus because his wealth had allowed him the leisure to craft it?

Now take a look at this familiar line from U.S. president John F. Kennedy’s 1961 inaugural address, on which so many English-language elocution students had labored investing their own vocal energies over the years: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country.” Just 17 words, but they give us the feeling of an immensely satisfying four-hour lecture on good citizenship. Then see chiasmus at work in this charming line by the English physician and author Havelock Ellis: “Charm is a woman’s strength; strength is a man’s charm.” And, one more time, hark to this timeless sage advice from Genesis 9:6: “Whoever sheds the blood of man, by man shall his blood be shed.”

By now you must have already discovered for yourself the fundamental structure and mechanism of chiasmus:  it reverses the order of words in two parallel phrases. Take this chiasmus by the legendary Hollywood actress Mae West: “I’d rather be looked over than overlooked.” “Looked over” is “overlooked” in reverse, making the speaker wickedly but deliciously imply that she enjoys being ogled at. Or take this arresting advertising slogan of a Philippine insurance company: “If someone depends on you, you can depend on Insular Life.” By some linguistic alchemy, the parallel word reversals arouse our senses, disarming us so we readily accept their claim as true. Chiasmus has this power because it heightens the sense of drama in language by surprise. It is no wonder that it holds the distinction of being mankind’s all-time vehicle for expressing great truths and, conversely, also great untruths.

Most types of chiasmus reverse the words of familiar sayings in a felicitously parallel way, as in the French proverb, “Love makes time pass, time makes love pass.” For chiasmus to succeed, however, the two insights offered by the word reversals should both be true and survive subsequent scrutiny. (They could also be untrue, and therein lies the danger in chiasmus in the hands of demagogues and charlatans.)

But chiasmus need not be an exact reversal of a familiar saying. Take what the English writer Richard Brinksley said on beholding for the first time the woman whom he was to later marry: “Why don’t you come into my garden? I would like my roses to see you.” This implied chiasmus cleverly reverses this usual invitation of proud homemakers: “I’d like you to see my roses.” And chiasmus also nicely takes the form of questions, as in this line from Antigone by the 5th century Greek dramatist Sophocles: “What greater ornament to a son than a father’s glory, or to a father than a son’s honorable conduct?"

If chiasmus is this pleasurable, does it mean that we should spend a lot of time composing it ourselves to impress people? Not at all! Chiasmus is meant to be used very sparingly, to be reserved only for those very special moments when saying them can truly spell a make-or-break difference in our lives, like preparing for battle, wooing the hearts and minds of people, ruing abject failure, or celebrating great success. In our everyday lives, it is enough for us to spot a good chiasmus so we can savor its wisdom, and to have the wisdom to know when we are simply being conned with fallacy or propaganda masquerading as great truth. (October 16, 2003)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, October 13 and 16, 2003 © 2003 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Click here to discuss/comment

In an essay that I wrote about the language of the Philippine national election campaign in 2004, I briefly discussed the classic advertising acronym AIDA, which I said was an opera of sorts in four acts: A for “Attention,” I for “Interest,” D for “Desire,” and a different A for “Action.” It struck me at the time that like advertising people and propagandists, all communicators in general—and that, of course, includes fiction and nonfiction writers and writers for the mass media as well—must  do their own unique performance of AIDA to get their message across and get people to think things their way. And that, of course, wouldn’t happen at all if they didn’t perform the very first of the four acts of the writing opera: the “Attention” cue, or getting the reader interested to read them in the first place.

I am thus tempted to begin discussing AIDA’s first A by saying that writers should come up with a creative opening that will hold readers by their lapels and never let go, but that would really be begging the point. Creativity is an elusive thing. It worked for the American novelist Herman Melville when he began his classic Moby Dick with this disarming three-word opening, “Call me Ishmael.” It worked for the Austrian writer Franz Kafka with this intriguing opening of The Metamorphosis, “As Gregor Samsa awoke one morning from uneasy dreams he found himself transformed in his bed into a gigantic insect.” And it worked for American legal-thriller writer Scott Turow in this compelling first paragraph of his novel Personal Injuries, “He knew it was wrong, and that he was going to get caught. He said he knew this day was coming.”

But what’s creative and interesting to us may either be too simple and too inconsequential to some, or too complex and too high-flown to others. There really is no single, fixed formula for it. The only mandatory thing is that whatever the chosen approach and style, the writer must be keenly aware of his or her primal obligation to keep the reader reading from beginning to finish.

I remember very well a consummate master of the “Attention” cue, but he was actually not a nonfiction or fiction writer; he was a noted Filipino industrial designer who used to ply the lecture circuit many years ago. His subject during a seminar-workshop I attended one hot summer afternoon was—if my memory serves me well—advertising communication, with focus on AIDA. We were just through with lunch after a hectic morning schedule, so most of us in the audience were naturally fagged and inattentive.

At that point, there came this bemoustached, bespectacled gentleman in his mid-forties carrying a tall stack of books, lecture notes, marking pens, boxes of marbles and paper clips—all those many little things you’d expect an intense university professor to haul into a classroom. He bellowed “Good afternoon!” to us, then promptly stumbled halfway to the lectern on the farther side of the room. As he made an effort to check his fall, all the things he was carrying flew helter-skelter over to us in the audience. That startled everyone, of course, so everybody’s impulse was to help the seemingly hapless and goofy lecturer gather his things. We were scampering all over the place picking them up, while he quietly took his time to regain his lost dignity and compose himself behind the lectern.

And when we had retrieved most of his things and had returned them to him, the sly fox spoke to us as if nothing untoward at all had happened: “Well, thank you, ladies and gentlemen! And now that I have your attention, I think you are now all ready for my lecture.” As might be expected, despite the ungodly timeslot, he and his talk turned out to be the most interesting and illuminating part of that seminar-workshop.

Of course I’m not saying that we should emulate that lecturer’s guts in pulling off such a messy attention-getting caper; I find it too high-handed and I simply can’t imagine myself doing it in any situation. Still, I think it drives home my point very well. Whether we are selling a presidential candidate, hawking a consumer product, writing a feature story or newspaper column, perhaps writing literary fiction, we simply can’t escape the need to get the reader’s attention. If we can’t get it, the whole writing effort is wasted. That’s where performing our little “Attention” act from AIDA comes in. Call it showmanship, call it skill, call it art, call it creativity, call it by any other name—but do it, and give it the best you can. (April 19, 2004)

From the weekly column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times, April 19, 2004 © 2004 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved.

Click here to discuss/comment