How to Speak Brit: The
Quintessential Guide to the King’s English, Cockney Slang, and Other Flummoxing
British Phrases. By Christopher J. Moore. Gotham Books. $20.
Shortcut: How Analogies Reveal
Connections, Spark Innovation, and Sell Our Greatest Ideas. By John
Pollack. Gotham Books. $27.
Incomplete rather than
“quintessential,” Christopher J. Moore’s How
to Speak Brit is nevertheless enjoyable enough, and fact-packed enough, to
be both informative and a lot of fun. The book professes to show English
speakers (American version) how “real” English speakers (British version) talk,
why they use particular phrases in specific ways, and where some idioms come
from. It largely fails in the last of these endeavors, with Moore quite often
saying no one is sure where this word or that, this phrase or that, comes from.
But in other respects, this short book (a mere 120 pages) has a good deal of highly
engaging information. There are numerous explanations of British words and
phrases that Americans are unlikely to know, such as “send someone to Coventry”
(ostracize or ignore the person), “gone for a Burton” (World War II phrase used
of an airman who had been killed or was missing in action), “pottering”
(Americans would say “puttering,” the reference in Britain being specifically
to doing little things in one’s garden), “curate’s egg” (something that is good
in parts but not as a whole), and “lollipop man” (“crossing guard” in the
United States). Oddly, though, there are also a number of entries of words and
phrases that Moore seems to think are uniquely British but that will be quite
familiar in the U.S.: “Dickensian,” “binge-drinking,” “goody two shoes,” “lame
duck,” “by hook or by crook,” “raining cats and dogs,” and many more. When
Moore does present the history or derivation of a word or phrase, the
information is often fascinating: “yob” (hooligan), for example, is “boy”
spelled backward, while “whinge” (complain or moan) derives from “whine” but
refers to the content of the complaint rather than its sound. There is a lot
left out of How to Speak Brit – for
example, the very brief entry on Cockney rhyming slang, under the entry “dog
and bone,” is a tremendous disservice to some highly colorful language,
compounded by the fact that Moore does not really explain how the system works
or why. But this is a book to enjoy for what it is rather than one to criticize
for what it is not. There is something purely delightful in reading about
shandy (beer mixed with lemonade or ginger beer), toff (someone with more money
than sense), and argy-bargy (a playful word for a disagreement) – far better to
enjoy what is here than to bemoan what is left out.
There is less amusement and
more seriousness in the use of language as discussed by former Bill Clinton
speechwriter John Pollack in Shortcut.
Pollack here analyzes analogies, those figures of speech in which something is
compared to something else with, ideally, a subtle use of framing to make a
difficult subject seem easy or a complex one simple. Pollack, of course, draws
largely on politics to make his points; for instance, he discusses President
George W. Bush’s comment on criticism of the U.S. war in Iraq, “America will
never seek a permission slip to defend the security of our people.” Pollack
correctly argues that this analogy to childhood rules and requirements subtly
indicates that the United States will not be treated like a disobedient child
by the international community – raising American listeners’ ire even though,
in reality, war and school permission slips have nothing to do with each other.
The point of analogies, in fact, is that they make things seem to be parallel even when they are not: good analogies can
certainly make difficult subjects understandable, but poor or manipulative ones
(like some of those created by Pollack himself) can be designed to move public
opinion with more subtlety than propaganda but no more truthfulness. Analogies,
Pollack writes, meet five criteria: using what is familiar to explain what is
not; highlighting the similarities between things while passing over or
obscuring differences; identifying useful abstractions; telling a coherent
story; and resonating emotionally – a particular requirement for analogies in
the political context. “Analogies encourage and sometimes even force our
thoughts in certain directions,” says Pollack, and of course this has value far
beyond politics – in advertising, for example. Pollack’s discussions of ads and
of attempts to change public perception in other ways – by making football
games seem less like war in order to draw more female fans, for example – are
trenchant and well considered. Other elements of Shortcut go farther afield, though, with somewhat less success,
such as his discussion of the Wright Brothers on the basis that flight is
analogous to riding a bicycle – a point that could have been made more effectively
at less length. Still, Pollack brings up intriguing elements regarding
analogies, such as Thomas Edison’s citation of them as one of the three
essential qualities for an inventor (the first being persistence, the second
imagination, and the third “a logical mind that sees analogies”) and Albert
Einstein’s remark that elemental laws cannot be discovered through logic but
only through “a feeling for the order lying behind the appearance.” The
usefulness of thinking by using analogies becomes clear in a variety of
anecdotes in Shortcut, such as the
discussion of Swiss engineer George de Mistral’s analogical development of
Velcro after finding his socks covered in tiny burrs. This particular analogy
was not exactly a shortcut, since the development took 15 years; but in other
cases, the effect of analogies is nearly immediate, and this can be true when
analogies compete. Pollack points this out when comparing Ford’s notoriously
unsuccessful Edsel being described in positive terms by The New York Times as having taillights with “the graceful
wingspread of a sea gull” but by others as having a front grille that looked
like a toilet seat – the latter analogy being the one that captured the
public’s imagination and doomed the car. Pollack is, unsurprisingly, rather too
forgiving of the use (and misuse) of analogies in politics, although he does
note that these comparisons can be taken to vicious extremes, as when Adolf
Hitler referred to Jews as “a virus” and compared his treatment of them to “the
same sort of battle waged…by Pasteur and [German physician Heinrich] Koch.” Shortcut is scarcely a complete
exploration of thinking and persuading by analogy, but it is a well-written and
often entertaining one, even though it comes to the rather wishy-washy
conclusion that “while a good shortcut is a great thing, a bad one can lead us
astray.” True. And it is worth remembering that the author was, for a time, in
the business of explicitly creating analogies designed to lead people, if not
astray, at least in a particular direction. Indeed, he remains in an analogous
business – as a communications consultant for politicians and Fortune 500
companies.
No comments:
Post a Comment