Tropes weaponize everything.

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So why do I love them? And what exactly is a trope?

I took this Halloweeny picture yesterday after drafting this post.

It’s my writing cabin. It’s also my retreat, my bolt-hole, and my mancave (but women have caves, too, don’t they?). The pumpkins were placed there by my wife, who’s my mainstay, my anchor, my safe harbor from the storms of life.

These cabin and spousal manifestations are all tropes, the most powerful tools for bending souls…

NOTE: I copied this post from my Substack newsletter, Aristotle’s Guide to Soul Bending. To get twice-weekly emails on rhetoric and writing, you can subscribe for free.

Years ago, I spent some weeks studying the speeches of Democrats and Republicans to see whether I could detect distinct types of rhetoric. I found that Democrats tended to sound like John F. Kennedy, with lots of rounded periods and poetic figures of speech (“Ask not what your country can do for you…”). Republicans, on the other hand, spoke in plain, short, just-the-facts-ma’am sentences. (“You need to have boots on the ground.”) When political scientists measured audience responses to the major speeches, they found that people thought the Republicans to be more direct, more believable. That was before Trump blew up politics, of course.

Were the pre-Trump Republicans being less rhetorical? Were their speeches truly unadorned? Hardly. The Democrats used lots of figures of speech and figures of thought—clever words, singular usage, or unusual patterns of language. The Republicans, on the other hand, favored tropes. Did that make them less crafty? Well, let’s look at some good old American expressions.

  • When prosecutors “weaponize” justice, they’re not packing their briefs with explosives. Their opponents are deploying a hyperbolic, large-caliber metaphor.

  • A guy with auburn hair whom everyone calls Red is not the color red. (That’s a metonymy.)

  • The announcers on Saturday Night Live’s Weekend Update are not real journalists. (Irony.)

  • When the White House announces a policy, the actual building doesn’t say a thing; that would be creepy. (Synecdoche.)

  • A corporation is only a pretend person. (Personification.)

  • I hope it never literally rains cats and dogs. And a worker doing backbreaking labor isn’t necessarily fracturing his vertebra. (Metaphors.)

  • If I say my wife’s been giving me the stink-eye for hitting the bottle, that does not mean her eyeball gives off a detectable odor or that I’ve been committing acts of violence against glass containers. (Metonymies.)

Nor are we lying when we say these things. We’re slinging tropes; not literally slinging them, just (metaphorically) tossing them about. Which begs the question (not literally begs; tropes don’t beg, and in any case I’m abusing the begging the question fallacy):

What exactly is a trope?

The word comes from tropos, Greek for “a turning.” We call the Tropics the Tropics because those parts of the globe turn to follow the sun. In botany, a heliotrope is a plant with a sunny disposition that turns to follow the light.

Tropes, on the other hand, don’t turn. Instead, they turn us. Tropes are literally psychotropic; they “bend souls,” as the ancient Romans would say. Tropes twist our notion of reality. They play pretend, with scale or representation or character.

The queen of tropes, the one that gets the most airtime, is the metaphor. If you and your honey (meaning your significant other, not your container of bee excrement) gaze at the stars and you ask your lover whether he thinks the stars are God’s daisy chain, you’re throwing up a sparkly metaphor. Your lover knows that stars are massive balls of gas and not at all like the common daisy, Bellis perennis. Yet as your lover gazes up dutifully, his soul may turn a bit. Synapses fire, connecting the patterns of light with a chain of flowers. Which is why the word metaphor comes from the Greek, meaning “transfer” or “carry over.”

No harm done, except possibly to the evening’s chances of getting to third base, a metaphorical carnal achievement level that definitely should not involve bats and balls.

Other tropes are more obscure. Because we don’t know them, they can take on enormous secret powers. We’ll see their more brilliant and nefarious uses in future posts.

If you think I’m committing a hyperbole, well, hold your fire (not literally refrain from shooting, though I mean that too). Tropes compose our imagination, they constitute the living core of persuasion, and they allow us to conceive the future. They also make us do horrible things with our diet, spend billions on torturing people at the end of their lives, and make us ignore existential threats. Just one of them, personification, lies behind the AI chatbots that are helping some people and tragically hurting others.

In other words, tropes created humanity, and they just might destroy it. Seriously.

By the way: hyperbole is a trope, according to, well, me, among even more ancient experts. More on that later.

Do you still think it’s possible to speak plain, unadorned language without falling down the trope rabbit hole? (Yeah, that’s a metaphor.) Stay tuned. We’re in for a wild ride. Not a real ride, and not really wild, and none of us will actually be in anything nor does this letter require you to be for “it,” whatever that is…

You know what I’m talking about.

The college essay shouldn't be wasted on college.

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I’ve begun a Substack newsletter about rhetoric, called Aristotle’s Guide to Soul Bending. In my latest post, I talk about the college essay, and how writing it could change your life—even if you’re not applying to college.

You’ll find it here, along with a YouTube video I did specially for students.

You’ll find the Substack post here, and the main site here.

I'm an introvert. That's why I love rhetoric

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I live in a town of 278 people in rural New Hampshire, between Boston and Montreal. Most of the town consists of a mountain and a protected lake. There are more moose, bears, and beavers than people. This is no accident. I’m an introvert living in an introvert’s paradise.

My place, surrounded by very few people.

My office is a cabin on the edge of a 20-acre meadow. My wife, Dorothy, helped a 22-year-old timber framer build it back when I was working at my last legitimate job, miserably struggling to manage a group of magazine people.

I deliberately face away from the window. It’s just too tempting to go outside. Alone.

The cabin lies some distance from my house.

The cabin is somewhere in those trees.

I ski to work in the winter. When the snow is less than perfect, I enjoy complaining to Dorothy about my commute. (She drives to work.)

my commut.e. the meadow lies beyond it.

We live on 150 acres. This provides an effective barrier from the neighbors. In any case, our neighbors are New Englanders. Yankees aren’t the most outgoing people in the world, which suits me fine.

A neighbor (he lives only about three miles away0 sent up his drone for me.

Yet you might consider me fairly social if you met me. That’s because I’ve spent many years studying rhetoric. The ancient art taught me how to speak and write persuasively, produce something to say on awkward occasions, and maybe even make some people like me when I speak. Rhetoric has disciplined me to think beyond myself, reading people and sensing their fears and desires (not so much as an empath; more like a sympath).

Rhetoric has hardly turned me into an extrovert. A dinner party still leaves me exhausted, and I die a thousand deaths before entering a room filled with strangers. But the tools of ethos, pathos, and logos—especially ethos—can actually make me enjoy social occasions now and then. Dorothy is an extrovert, a professional fundraiser, and I need to do the extrovert thing for the sake of our marriage. (Excuse the mess. Our cats did that. Introverts love cats.)

In the hoiuse. socializing with my back to dorothy.

While I originally decided to write about rhetoric to help give a voice to women and traditionally excluded groups, these days I’m especially delighted when a shy student tells me that the tools I teach helped her win friends and influence people.

I like to think that we introverts ponder more deeply than our peers. (But maybe that’s just because I’m an introvert.) Give young introverts the means of selling ideas and the tools of leadership; then watch them save civilization.

Meanwhile, I’m happily writing alone in my cabin, spreading the rhetorical gospel, and thankful that you’re with me.

If you want regular rhetorical tools and tidbits, or to ask me your burning persuasion questions, check out my Substack newsletter, Aristotle’s Guide to Soul Bending.