Neutrality in the Queen's Christmas speech

In an earlier blog entry (12 November 2008), I looked at the way the Queen’s speech at the state opening of parliament each year is a model of how to read out someone else’s words (i.e. the government’s legislative plans for the coming year) with complete neutrality.

Although her annual broadcast to the Commonwealth on Christmas day is supposed to be her words to people in the UK and the British Commonwealth, she has to solve a rather different problem of displaying neutrality – not between different political parties, but between different religions.

As head of the Church of England, she's obviously free, and perhaps even obliged, to be open about her own Christian faith in her Christmas message, but sections aimed at believers in other religions have become a regular feature in recent years, as is illustrated by the following three extracts:

2005
"There may be an instinct in all of us to help those in distress, but in many cases I believe this has been inspired by religious faith. Christianity is not the only religion to teach its followers to help others and to treat your neighbour as you would want to be treated yourself. 

It has been clear that in the course of this year relief workers and financial support have come from members of every faith and from every corner of the world.
"

2006
"It is worth bearing in mind that all of our faith communities encourage the bridging of that divide. The wisdom and experience of the great religions point to the need to nurture and guide the young, and to encourage respect for the elderly…. The scriptures and traditions of the other faiths enshrine the same fundamental guidance. It is very easy to concentrate on the differences between the religious faiths and to forget what they have in common."

2007
"All the great religious teachings of the world press home the message that everyone has a responsibility to care for the vulnerable."

You can inspect the whole scripts of these and ones going back to 1996 by clicking on the title above. Or you can click here to see her in action last year, or here (after 3.00 p.m. UK time on 25 December) to check whether she has any more religious neutrality in store for us this year.

What did Santa say before "Ho, ho ho"?

I’ve just received an email with Christmas greetings from the White House Writers Group in Washington D.C., which contains a nice little ditty:

Santa called the other day.
"I need a speech and right away!
It should sound new, but somehow old;
A message sweet, yet still quite bold.
My words must be both short and clear
And memorable throughout the year!"
Our writers worked all through the night
To get each phrase exactly right.
Then one scribe cried, "Ah ha! I know!
Tell Santa to say just, 'Ho, ho, ho!'"

Rhetorically speaking, their use of repetition, alliteration and a three-part list can hardly be faulted.

But, having just seen Santa using these very words 3,000 miles away from Washington, I realise that this memorable line raises another intriguing question, namely, what had he been talking about just before saying “ho, ho, ho”?

The reason for asking the question comes from many years ago when I heard the late Gail Jefferson talking about her fascinating and innovative work on transcribing particles of laughter, of which “ho, ho, ho” is one of several possible vowel sounds – such as “ha, ha , ha”, “he, he, he”, “huh, huh, huh”, etc.

The gist of Jefferson’s point was that which one of these gets selected often seems to be triggered by vowel sounds that had come immediately before it. Someone might say “he was stung by a bee – he-he-he!”, “he was locked in the bar – ha-ha-ha” or “she dropped a bottle of gin on her toe – ho-ho-ho”.

I didn’t catch what Santa had been saying just before he used the line that had been supplied to him by the White House Writers Group, so there’s scope here for a pre-Christmas creative competition.

Suggestions as to what it was he'd said just before "ho-ho-ho" before midnight on 25th December, please.

You don’t have to be Barack Obama to use rhetoric and imagery to discuss the financial crisis

When I show clips of top politicians in action to illustrate the power of rhetoric and imagery, people sometimes react by saying that such techniques may be all very well in political speeches but wouldn’t be much use in the kind of technical presentations they have to do.

It's alright for Barack Obama to say things like "The road ahead will be long. Our climb will be steep", as he did in his victory speech in Chicago, but conjuring up images of journeys and hills isn't the kind of thing that professionals like economists and bankers can do.

My usual reply to such reactions is that nothing could be further from the truth - because I've yet to come across any subject where rhetoric and imagery can't be used to make a point more clearly and/or effectively.

The following transcript and video clips provide a nice illustration of how rhetorical techniques (including contrasts, a puzzle-solution format and a three-part list) and imagery can be used to discuss the ongoing financial crisis. Complicated it may be, but here we have a Nobel prize-winning economist (Joseph Stiglitz) talking about an economy going into "a tailspin", using a contrast (between two points in time and two contrasting facts) followed by a medical metaphor (“the cure is worse than the disease”).

The video then cuts to a segment from a prime-time (UK) television news broadcast (from ITN) in which the newsreader starts by using a puzzling headline that gets us wondering what the governor of the Bank of England's "most downbeat prediction yet about the economy” actually is and a solution that seems to be using an image (“the ‘nice’ decade is over”) – though actually Mr King's use of "nice" is a reference to an acronym for 'Non-Inflationary Consistent Expansion', that's been used by economists to describe the sort of growth the UK has experienced since Labour came to power in 1997.

He then uses a three-part list and a metaphor (“travelling along a bumpy road”) that’s immediately picked up by a reporter, who continues the journey imagery (“en route”) and sums the problem up with a simple contrast (“high inflation and low growth”).

It’s worth comparing this with another news programme featured in a previous blog entry on 9th October 2008 ('PowerPoint Peston' - click here to view) and reflecting on which way of getting messages across is easier to follow.

TRANSCRIPT OF VIDEO CLIPS:

Stiglitz:
[METAPHOR] When the largest economy in the world goes into a tailspin it's going to have global repercussions.
[A] Before the Iraq war the price of oil was twenty-five dollars a barrel.
[B] Now it’s over a hundred and ten dollars a barrel.
[METAPHOR] The cure is worse than the disease.

Newsreader:
[P] The governor of the Bank of England made his most downbeat prediction yet about the economy.
[S] What Mervyn King called 'the nice decade' is over.

King:
[1] The nice decade is behind us.
[2] The credit cycle has turned.
[3] Commodity prices are rising.

[METAPHOR] We are travelling along a bumpy road as the economy rebalances.

Reporter:
So we’re all now traveling along the governor’s bumpy road.
[A] En route, high inflation
[B] and low growth.