To win over any audience, find the commonplaces.

When you go highbrow, others might want low.

My books often get criticized by lovers of the classics for telling jokes about Aristotelian rhetoric. These worshipers of our philosophical forebears wish I showed more gravitas toward the ancients. One reviewer of Thank You for Arguing expressed outrage over an anecdote about Marcus Tullius Cicero.

After divorcing his wife of thirty years, the sixty-year-old wedded a teenager. When asked what he was doing marrying a young girl, Cicero smirked. “She’ll be a woman tomorrow.” Citizens throughout the republic were heard to say, “Ick.”

The reviewer harrumphed, “Citizens of ancient Rome did not use the work “ick.”

Mea culpa, dear sir. Mea maxima culpa. But this is the problem when one’s writing appears before various audiences. I wanted my book to be read by people—especially young people—who didn’t swoon at the mention of Aristotle and Cicero. (Frankly, I’m a fanboy of both, and do feel free to flame me for using “fanboy” in a classical context.)

Now to turn far, far from the classics:

Some of the leading Democrats have the opposite problem. Cerebral, highbrow New York Times columnist Ezra Klein recently interviewed cerebral, highbrow Transportation Secretary Pete Buttigieg for the Ezra Klein podcast. Educated Democrats adore Buttigieg for his surpassing articulateness. One auscultates this gent and one thinks, “When AI wants to speak perfect English it accesses Buttigieg.”

(Yes, I used “surpassing,” “auscultates,” “one,” and “gent,” and “accesses” deliberately. I’m making a point. See: topic, below.)

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This facund fellow was on friendly terrain for this interview. Klein’s listenership has an average IQ rivaling that of Los Alamos. I feel guilty listening to his podcasts without a Ph.D. The secretary clearly knew exactly where he was. Here’s an excerpt in which Buttigieg describes cerebral, recently highbrow JD Vance:

“He’s somebody who is a product of the Midwest but, after trading off of that Midwest identity, is now, in my view, promoting policies and a ticket that would be really harmful for the industrial Midwest. And so I’m thinking a lot about what I consider to be a faux populism. This space he’s carved out, where he achieves a certain credibility by criticizing both parties, saying that Democrats and Republicans in the past have gotten things wrong, but then all the prescriptions he seems to be ready to vote for or act for are things like undercutting your right to choose or tax cuts for the rich or a lot of other things that I think are objectionable about good old-fashioned Republican policy. I’m just thinking a lot about how to penetrate that veneer.”

Oh, that Faulknerian penultimate sentence! Never mind that he loses track of his clauses. He still sounds so thoughtful!

But pay close attention to a more effective device: his commonplaces. A commonplace is a word or expression that marks the epicenter of an audience’s beliefs and values. The term derives from the rhetorical concept of the topic, or subject.

Bear with me for an etymology dive: Topic descends from the Greek topos, meaning place. The same Greek root gives us topography and topological. The ancient Greeks thought of rhetoric geographically. To engage an audience, Greek orators knew to meet the audience where its attitude was. That meant using their language, particularly the terms that reflected the audience’s self-identity. The common places.

What were Buttigieg’s commonplaces, the ones that made the Klein crowd flutter and swoon?

Faux populism

Penetrate that veneer

Trump’s fake is Buttigieg’s faux. Where the hoi polloi might say “cut through the bullshit” or “show that clown for what he is,” Buttigieg slaps on a veneer. All entirely appropriate to the audience.

But the man often runs into problems when he talks to the rest of America. He’s just too articulate. In an earlier post I sparked an argument over whether there’s such a thing as good grammar. I believe there is, if you assume that “good” means “perfect for NPR or Ezra Klein.” Ditto with your commonplaces. The sad fact is that most people want leaders with a little smudge on the polish. As the German writer Christoph Martin Wieland put it:

“To be not as eloquent would be more eloquent.”

Political consultants make their bones sussing out the commonplaces of various voting cohorts. The word community, for example, plays big in solid-blue districts, but bombs in red-leaning focus groups. Ditto with identity. Warrior does well with men, not so well with women. Duty appeals to white men, less so to others. Foreign words—especially French words (I’m looking at vous, faux) do poorly with all but us cerebral Substackers.

And JD Vance’s “childless cat ladies”? Ouch. While it doubtless sounded witty to Fox host Tucker Carlson, that trope wandered way beyond the pale for child-free families as well as cat lovers and most women. That’s something to keep in mind when you’re on any social medium: Your immediate audience may find you clever, but an unintended audience lurks, eager to judge you for your misplaced commonplaces.

Think of a commonplace as an audience’s attitudinal bullseye. Even your sharpest darts had better not miss the mark lest someone gets hurt. Starting with you.