Often a good title is an ironic play on words, like John Sayles perfectly named “At the Anarchist’s Convention.”
Working out titles for books, a film, a song or various shorter pieces is one of the pleasures of writing. A title is a kind of flag. It identifies a specific effort to capture a subject or the attitude of its author. It ought to be suggestive of what a reader or listener can expect to find. And it is sometimes meant to be a hook, baiting a reticent audience to take a chance.
A conventional view among some writers and publishers is that a good title is approximately three words. Think of To Kill a Mockingbird, The Odd Couple, The Grapes of Wrath, The Cherry Orchard,Angels in America, East of Eden, or Rebel Without a Cause. The three-word rule was on my mind in choosing The Perfect Response. It seemed like a good fit for my humble book on public rhetoric, and later, this blog. And then there are the gentle ironies of titles that suggest pages promising insights created by unusual alignments. For example, there’s John Berendt’s Midnight In the Garden of Good and Evil or Robert Pirsig’sZen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance. Ideas that appear to be alien to each other often make interesting titles, though I was surely too pleased with myself for using “Case Studies in Constructive Confrontation” as a book’s subtitle. But my mother–probably the lone reader of the book–liked it.
Often a good title is an ironic and funny play on words, perhaps a non-sequitur like the title of a John Sayles short story, At the Anarchist’s Convention. Book titles don’t get any better than this. Can anarchists pull off an organized event? Jerry Stiller’s humorous reading below leaves no doubts; the can’t.
The names of hair salons have mastered this playful kind of humor. Apparently there’s a Sunny and Shearsand a Hey, I’m Dyeing Over Here sitting somewhere among shops with more prosaic names.
Some titles have a grace that matches their essence, like John Hartford’s Gentle on my Mind, which is now usually sung as a tribute to Glen Campbell. There’s also Pete Seeger’s beautiful tribute, To the Old Brown Earth, sung at memorial service of a friend, and below, by young singers from Milwaukee.
In a very different genre, but creating a broader smile, is Mark Chesnutt’s country ditty, Bubba Shot the Jukebox, which can be heard in his albumLongnecks & Short Stories. (1992).
Titles are almost always interesting welcome mats, inviting us in. They are reminders of how much we owe to the playfulness and associations created through language.
There are Buicks bigger than hearses to be won if you can guess the rhetorical devices behind the doors. Identify the device, and the prize is yours. . .
Or not.
I’ve never been the kind of rhetorician that savors labeling odd rhetorical maneuvers with their Latin names. “Figures of speech” can verge on the arcane. And lists of them can reach into the dozens. I can’t say this kind of pedantry stopped my professors, who relished letting a Latinate name roll of the tongue: a kind of verbal jewel placed before us to admire. We students were supposed to be impressed, as if a chemistry teacher had just put two clear liquids together to produce a black solid. Indeed, an academic field may benefit from some mystifying language.
Or not. Perhaps we do not need yet another specialty that insists on its multisyllabic terms that stand for what can be described in plain English. But like every other language person, I admit to having my favorites. After all, figures of speech do have social functions. There are some devices that are so cunning or memorable that they merit their own display case. Recognizing them provides a thrill that may be totally unjustified. But there it is. Rhetoricians are a different lot.
There are some devices that are so cunning or memorable that they merit their own display case.
Synecdoche:The use single element to stand in for the whole. It’s an old and sometimes respectable rhetorical tactic to use one person or thing as a stand-in for a much larger class. Think of images of firefighters in the smoke of the World Trade Center, or a Dorothea Lange photograph of a dust-bowl family. Similarly, if we say “Abraham Lincoln captured the zeitgeist of his time” we would be giving the Civil War era a much-needed moral facelift. His earthly practicality and fleeting idealism reflected the tensions of the time. To be sure, the assertion is pretty reductive. But a synecdoche has the advantage of making big ideas more apparent by reducing them to a single vessel. Among other things, this device is what makes television news possible.
Affirmation by Denial:This is usually a statement in which a questionable claim is repeated, but then innocently disavowed. The wily speaker or writer doing this usually thinks he can have it both ways: repeating a slander or untruth as an innocent piece of information, then stepping out of the way and feigning a degree of neutrality. Candidate Donald Trump pulled this shift on President Obama all the time, raising the specter of birtherism, and then putting some daylight between himself and the bogus assertion. And we could do the same for him: “Some people think the President might have mental health issues. I’m not saying that, but I hear it a lot.” Better that a person simply take ownership of an idea, if they choose to raise it.
Anaphora:The repetition of a word or phrase for emphasis. Oral rhetoric especially favors anaphora. There is something inherently pleasing about a verbal structure built around parallel repetitive elements. It’s the basis of most pop music, in addition to memorable speeches that have entered the American canon. Consider one of the most famous examples uttered by Martin Luther King in August of 1963: “I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi . . . will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice. I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character. I have a dream today!”
Oxymoron:The use of two words or phrases in apparent contradiction to each other: for example, “jumbo shrimp,” “civil war,” “military intelligence,” “educational television,” “congressional leadership” or “militant pacifist.” Actually, an oxymoron can arise from the mixing of any two ideas that seem to be unlikely partners. The best of these can offer what Kenneth Burke called “perspective by incongruity.” A pairing of two dissimilar terms make a new reality. But the simplest effects may be comic, as in this famous reference to a lover’s easily muddled thinking, from Act 1 of Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.
Why, then, O brawling love! O loving hate! O anything, of nothing first create! O heavy lightness! Serious vanity! Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms! Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health! Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is! This love feel I, that feel no love in this. Dost thou not laugh?
Enthymeme: The presence of this device is indicated by what is not said. Aristotle seemed to be the first to notice that the art of addressing an audience includes the skill to understand when they will provide their own experiences as evidence. Hence, the enthymeme: a claim where what is left unsaid will be supplied from the reservoir of the audience’s own knowledge. This has many virtues, the most profound of which is that audiences are effectively induced into being co-participants in their own persuasion.
When the 1968 presidential campaign of Lyndon Johnson ran a particular attack ad against GOP candidate Barry Goldwater, Goldwater’s name was never mentioned. The images were enough to identify the Arizona Republican’s scary thoughts about the possible use of “tactical” nuclear weapons in Vietnam. The so-called “Daisy ad” created by Tony Schwartz help assure a Johnson landslide, even though it only appeared on television a few times. As Schwartz later noted, the ad recruited viewers as a “workforce,” completing associations triggered by the images.
Often a good title is an ironic play on words, like John Sayles perfectly named “At the Anarchist’s Convention.”
