Column: Rhyme, reason, and rhetoric

One of the toughest things about working for Physics Today is that I’m constantly coming to grips with just how much I don’t know. For every issue, I cover a new result in a different subfield of the physical sciences, chosen for its outstanding interest and importance from among all the papers published that month. I get a lot of help from experts—if you’ve ever answered one of my emails, thank you—but I often wonder whether I’ve overlooked something important because I didn’t know enough to ask about it in the first place.

In sorting through and learning about cutting-edge science, I at least have my years of education to build on. For the other half of my job, writing about that science in a way that (I hope) is clear and compelling, I have much less formal training. All my degrees are in physics and related science, not English, journalism, or communications. I know there are entire scholarly disciplines concerned with how to put words together to achieve a particular effect, and I know that I know very little about any of them.

Miller’s Diary

Physics Today editor Johanna Miller reflects on the latest Search & Discovery section of the magazine, the editorial process, and life in general.

As a step toward remedying that deficit, I just read Mark Forsyth’s excellent book The Elements of Eloquence , an entertaining if cursory romp through some of the so-called figures of classical rhetoric—little wordsmithing tricks first described by the ancient Greeks for creating powerful and memorable turns of phrase. For each of the figures, from alliteration to zeugma, Forsyth lays out what it is, what it does, and how it’s been used, knowingly or unknowingly, in familiar English-language works, whether by William Shakespeare, Winston Churchill, or “a contemporary American writer with the peculiar name of Snoop Doggy Dogg.”

Rhetoric encompasses the entire art of persuasion, not just the formulas for catchy one-liners, and it used to be taught routinely to schoolchildren. But over the past century or two, it’s fallen under some suspicion, to the point where even the word itself has become synonymous with emptiness and insincerity. If words alone can carry the day, the critics say, then a master rhetorician can convince an ignorant audience of something that neither of them knows the first thing about.

That argument (which isn’t even new; Plato articulated something like it back in 380-ish BCE) seems to find favor especially among the scientifically minded. We are, after all, in the business of dealing with objective facts. Shouldn’t we trust those facts to stand on their own? Isn’t there something a little unseemly about the whole study of rhetoric?

Well, no.

At least it’s no more unseemly than the study of any other inconvenient truth about the world. It’s obviously the case, whether we like it or not, that some forms of speech and writing are more compelling than others, and that style does win out over substance, often. To my scientifically oriented mind, it’s worth looking into what “style” is and how it works. Science, after all, is also in the business of breaking phenomena down into their constituent parts, analyzing the function of each, and putting them back together into something useful. From that angle, I think, rhetoric fits right in. I certainly don’t subscribe to the idea that everything worth knowing was known by Aristotle, but he and his contemporaries do seem to have been on to something here.

For example, one of the more ubiquitous rhetorical figures is the tricolon. It’s not a complicated construction—just a list of three things, like “the good, the bad, and the ugly” or “we cannot dedicate, we cannot consecrate, we cannot hallow this ground.” You probably use tricolons (or “tricola,” if you’re a purist) all the time without thinking about it. Even if you don’t, you can’t avoid reading and hearing them in lofty speeches, catchy slogans, or jokes about three quirky individuals walking into a bar.

Why three and not some other number? I don’t know if we can deduce the reason from first principles (although I understand that scholars have some ideas), and I don’t know if we even need to, but there’s certainly something about groups of three that leaves an imprint on our collective consciousness. It’s an idea that goes back to antiquity and is just as valid today.

In fact, as Forsyth points out, some of the most memorable tricolons of all time are actually the result of longer lists being misremembered: In his famous speech to Parliament, Churchill offered up his “blood, toil, tears and sweat"; and Thomas Hobbes described life in its natural state as “solitary, poor, nasty, brutish, and short.” We see and remember tricolons even when they’re not there. If that’s not the sign of a powerful figure of speech that’s worth understanding, I don’t know what is.