Arabic speakers boo at names too!

"An imam leading the dawn prayer urged all Libyans to stand united and hailed the ousting of 'the tyrant Gaddafi', prompting jeers from the crowd at the mention of the former leader's name" - report about Libyans celebrating Eid on AlJazera's website earlier today (paragraph 4).

I was struck by this sentence because it represents the opposite of a technique for triggering applause that's described in my books as 'clap on the name'.

A prompt for boos & jeers too

I've noticed in other contexts, as when a crowd gathers on the pitch for the speeches and awards at the end of international cricket test matches, that naming one of the players (or umpires) quite often prompts booing and jeering.

So the fact that a name can prompt an identical response from an audience of Arabic speakers is something I'll be adding to my collection of evidence that there's something very general (i.e. cross-cultural) about the way in which audiences respond to different rhetorical techniques.

Related posts:

• Using 'clap on the name' to introduce or commend someone
• How NOT to introduce a speaker
• 'Clap on the name': a practical tip for Ed Miliband' and/or his speechwriters

777: 7 Kindle books, 7 pluses and 7 minuses

I've been a fan of Amazon's Kindle ever since signing a contract for digital versions of two of my books - when I discovered that the author's share of the royalties is about seven times more than the miserable 7.5% we get from sales of conventional paperback books.

Now, having just finished reading a seventh book on a Kindle of my own, I can report on the gadget from a user's point of view.

1. Pluses

1. My main reason for getting a Kindle was that I found the print in a book I was trying to read so small that it was almost unreadable without a magnifying glass. By letting you select the size and type of font suits you, the gadget solves the problem at a stroke (and I finished reading the said book much more quickly than expected).
2. The screen really does make it easy and comfortable to read for long periods - compared with those on computers, iPads, etc.
3. Very portable.
4. Long battery life between recharging.
5. Good connectivity with a computer.
6. Fairly easy to convert PDF and Word documents for reading on Kindle.
7. Spectacularly fast downloads of books from Amazon.

2. Minuses

1. Given the ease of reading via bigger fonts, it's odd that the colour and size of the Kindle's QUERTY keyboard makes it quite difficult to read and use, especially in poor light.
2. It's difficult to stand it up on a table without it slipping down - why it doesn't have a lever on the back for propping it up at an angle (like many portable radios) is quite beyond me.
3. No good for reading in the bath.
4. Although you can search backwards and forwards, it's far more complicated than flicking through a proper book.
5. Page-turning and other buttons make it too easy to press the wrong one by mistake and get lost and/or end up in the wrong place.
6. Pictures, footnotes, bibliographies, etc. are grouped together at the end of Kindle books, which requires much tedious manipulation if you want to refer to them while reading the text. As a result, non-fiction books are much more trouble to read than fiction.
7. I hadn't realised that, when reading a proper book, you're constantly monitoring how far you've got and how long it's going to take to get to the end. Kindle doesn't have page numbers, but does tell you what percentage of the book you've read so far. But, if it's a very long book 1% can mean as many as 8 pages of densely packed pages - which can be more demoralising than I'd realised.

3. Verdict

There may be as many minuses as pluses, but Kindle's supreme virtue (1.1) makes all the cons seem little more than minor irritations.

I do, however, think that Amazon should be trying to do something about some of the minuses, and especially those that would be so cheap and easy to fix (e.g. 2.1 & 2.2).

Yvette Cooper's precisely timed response to a contrast from Ed Miliband

I noted a while back in a post showing how a member of the audience anticipated the answer to a rhetorical question by David Cameron that television editors are sometimes very helpful in providing detailed data on the interaction between a speaker and audience.

In that particular case, the camera switched from speaker to audience just before he delivered the answer to his question - with which a woman in the audience (on the left of the screen) was already agreeing before he actually got there (for more discussion of which, see HERE):

In the House of Commons, some members of the audience are routinely visible behind the person who's speaking, as in this next clip from Ed Miliband's speech in the debate about last week's riots.

What's interesting is that it shows just how quickly some listeners can and do respond when a speaker uses a rhetorical technique - in this case a contrast, with repetition and alliteration - to make a pont:

[A] To seek to explain

[B] is not to seek to excuse.

Yvette Cooper, behind his right shoulder, starts nodding in agreement before he gets to the end of the word "excuse" - at which point the MP sitting behind her starts to nod too:

In Our Masters' Voices (1984) I suggested that contrasts work to trigger applause (and other positive reactions) because the first part enables listeners to anticipate and identify precisely when the speaker reaches the end of the second part.

What I liked about this sequence, apart from Ed Miliband's neat contrast, was the way in which we can actually see Ms Cooper's positive response getting under way a split second before he's finished saying the word "excuse".

Foot note

This was also the first speech I'd heard from Mr Miliband since his nose operation and all the speculation about whether its real aim was to change his voice or to cure his sleep apnoea, which had made me curious to see if he sounded any different than he did before the operation.

As far as I could tell, his voice sounded exactly the same, but I do hope that the operation will have given his wife and children some relief from his alleged snoring - I say 'alleged' because I too am regularly accused of the same offence, even no one in the family has ever managed to produce any evidence (other than hearsay) in support of their complaints.