Five Lost Words
Or, how a candid love of hypocrisy can save us all.
As a devoted hypocrite, permit me to make a pathetic plea for rhetoric. While I respect your right to be an idiot, I count on your candid attention.
To someone born around the time of the American Revolution, the five strange words in that first paragraph—hypocrisy, pathetic, rhetoric, idiot, and candid—would hold very different connotations from today. I call them Lost Words, and personally would love to see them rediscovered, restored to their full glory, and made great again.
(By the way: If you happen to be an English teacher, one of those Lost Words might make you less inclined to teach students to find their “voice.” Self-expression is not nearly so useful as sympathetic expression. More on that in a bit.)
I stumbled across the Lost Words’ stories some thirty years ago, when I was bored with my job at Dartmouth College and wandering the open stacks of its vast library. Early in American history, it seems, the five terms broke loose from their etymological moorings and wound up meaning almost the reverse of what they originally intended.
Hypocrisy now connotes saying the opposite of what you do. But the ancient Greeks, who came up with the word, used it to refer to the act of delivering a speech.
What could have a more pathetic meaning than pathetic? It has made a strange odyssey from its original intent—the skillful use of an audience’s emotions through rhetoric.
Rhetoric, for its part, now rarely shows up without “empty” in front of it, implied or otherwise. In our common usage, it means useless or manipulative talk. Back in the day, however, rhetoric had a much grander sense. For two and a half millennia it held the crown as chief of the liberal arts, education that prepared boys and young men for leadership.
Idiot took on its current, mentally handicapped designation only after we forgot what the Greeks used it for: an idiotes was an individualist who had no use for society.
Finally, there’s Candor, close cousin to the word candidate. Both of them derive from the Latin word candere, meaning “white and glistening” or “pure.” (It’s where candy comes from.) Candidates in ancient Rome would wrap their sweet selves in white togas when they gave orations. It made them seem pure, if not glistening. As for candor, well, keep an open mind about that.
Let’s look at each term in greater detail and see how you might use them differently in the future.
HYPOCRISY
To dig beneath this word for its original meaning, we need an extra word: “crisis.” Krisis in ancient Greek referred to the audience’s decision. A political crisis necessarily led to a compromise or consensus (from the Latin meaning “knowing together” or sharing wisdom). Funny, isn’t it, that it now means something more disastrous? Hypocrisy—the hypo-crisis—is the stage that comes before the audience’s decision. And there we have it: a hypocrite is someone who delivers a speech. He’s someone who acts before the crisis.
We consider hypocrites to be liars. That’s because a person absorbed in self-expression—sticking to her guns, marching to the beat of a different drummer—rarely manages to persuade her audience. To do that, she needs to put herself in her audience’s shoes, to make them believe she’s one of them and capable of leading them. A good hypocrite may have to swallow some of her own opinions in order to get her audience to like and trust her. Is this fakery? Well, yes, I suppose it is. But call it benign fakery, much like leaving out of her resume the time she cut class to see a movie. Good hypocrisy leads to decisions. Self-expression rarely does.
Exercise: Get two volunteers. Have Volunteer A interview Volunteer B about what she believes or values—global warming, Taylor Swift, fish tacos, whatever. Which of these things does Volunteer A disagree with the most or value the least? Suppose they choose NASCAR as their subject. Have Volunteer A express intense interest in the sport. (“Tell me more about positive tire camber!”) Challenge him to use what he has learned to talk him into something else. (“Have they tried alternative fuels in those cars? What if NASCAR helped solve climate change!”) Let others in the room suggest tactics. That’s hypocrisy at its best.
PATHETIC
We normally expect argument to stick to pure unadulterated logic, with none of the rhetorical trans fats or additives of manipulation. Aristotle may not have approved. In one of the saddest passages he ever wrote, the philosopher conceded that logic alone rarely persuades; he attributed this failure to our “sorry human nature.” For informal arguments, Aristotle would add emotion, or pathos, to season the argumentative sauce.
It’s true that you just might persuade a particular half-Vulcan audience with logic alone. But try getting them out of their chairs to do anything. In addition to changing an audience’s mind, you need to get them to desire the goal and feel the passion to act. Pathos brings the desire. It forms the roots of several English words, including pathetic, sympathy, and, interestingly, pathology. (Some Greeks believed that emotions come from pain, or the absence of it. And a fun bunch they were, too.)
Persuasive pathos requires sympathy. You cannot manipulate someone’s emotions without understanding them first. So out of the worst motives, rhetoric forces people to think beyond themselves. What a great art!
Read nineteenth century novels, and you’ll find lots of praise for “pathetic” speech or poetry. The Victorians went big on pathos.
Exercise: Anyone going for a college admissions interview, or a job interview, or giving a presentation should follow the outline that the great Roman Orator Marcus Tullius Cicero recommended for a speech: Start by portraying your fine upstanding character and your relationship to the audience, then tell your story, and finally get a little pathetic—emotional—at the end. Ethos first, then logos, then pathos. Character, story, passion. That’s the ciceronian outline.
RHETORIC
The ancients considered rhetoric the essential skill of leadership. It taught students how to speak and write persuasively, produce something to say on every occasion, and make people like them when they spoke. Aristotle defined rhetoric as the art of “finding the available means of persuasion.” Notice he didn’t say “the art of winning an argument in three seconds” or “the art of having your way.” You don’t so much think up your argument as gather it, plucking it from cultural traditions and the audience’s beliefs and opinions. This highly social attitude, this ability to find inspiration outside oneself, is so different from our own culture, isn’t it? That’s exactly why we need to teach rhetoric at all levels. Our republic depends on it.
Exercise: Not so much an exercise as a conversation. I conduct several free video chats with classes each week during the school year. (Teachers can book me here.) I’m also happy to talk with book clubs or Toastmasters. But I especially love talking rhetoric with students. You can almost see the light bulb blink over the heads of one or two of them. I like to think those are the ones who will save civilization. For the first time in their lives, they understand that words aren’t just for self-expression. Words can actually do things. They can make other people do things! As John Quincy Adams told first-year students at Harvard—future masters of the nineteenth-century universe—rhetoric contains “unresisted powers.” How cool is that?
IDIOT
“He who is unable to live in society, or who has no need because he is sufficient unto himself, must be either a beast or a god,” quoth Aristotle. He clearly wouldn’t vote Libertarian. Nor would he find us very godlike. No matter how individualistic we try to be, humans remain a tribal species. It’s in our genes. When we don’t work in common as a society, when we lose our faith in the possibility of consensus, we form tribes.
That’s another bonus word, by the way. Tribes (pronounced TREE-bays in Latin) were family-based factions in ancient Rome. Tribal factions destroyed the Roman republic and gave rise to a charming, charismatic dictator named Caesar.
Idiots form tribes, which lead to tyranny. The American founders, all of whom boasted a rhetorical education, tried to develop a system of government that would prevent factionalism through separation of powers and an openness to debate. Theocratically inclined citizens today claim that our republic was created as a “Christian” nation. The founders certainly were Christians for the most part, being Protestants of various denominations along with several Catholics. Some of the leading Founders, though, didn’t seem to consider themselves Christian in any current sense of the word. Adams, Jefferson, Franklin, Madison, Washington, and Hamilton (who found religion later) stressed rationalism over faith and rhetorical debate over enforced faith. When Jefferson drafted the Virginia Statute of Religious Freedom in 1777, “Our civil rights have no dependence on our religions opinions.” But he and his colleagues were passionate advocates of rhetoric. You could say that America established itself as a rhetorical nation—a republic that could resolve disagreements without the threat of violence.
The chief requirement for citizens of a rhetorical nation, other than the duty to vote, is the willingness to be candid. That just happens to be our next word.
Exercise: Debate this question: When does individualism turn into idiocy?
CANDOR
Candor once meant being open to possibilities. Now it means being closed to all but your own truth—saying what’s on your mind and ignoring what’s on everyone else’s mind. Getting your facts straight is important in any argument, of course. But deliberative rhetoric, the kind that leads to consensual decisions, works best in the future tense. That’s because decisions lie in the future. The problem with facts? They take you only so far into the future.
Universal Truths, which we call “values,” also often clash with deliberative argument. When Benjamin Franklin edited Jefferson’s draft of the Declaration of Independence, he changed “We hold these truths to be sacred and undeniable” to “We hold these truths to be self-evident.” Not so much ordered by God as patently obvious. Inarguable.
When it comes to making decisions, on the other hand, a permanent Truth might not fit the circumstances of the moment. Conditions change. When your horse collapses midstream, for example, it might be a very good idea to change horses. Laughter may not make the best medicine when there’s a good antibiotic on hand. Candor means being willing to listen to either alternative, without holding stubbornly to one diktat.
And a candid persuader, in the original sense of the word, is open to the possibility that he just may be wrong.
Exercise: Have two volunteers argue about a choice—where to go on vacation, what to eat for lunch, whatever. Before they begin, though, have them leave the room for a moment. While they’re away, tell everyone else to monitor what tenses the debaters use. Deliberative argument, which was Aristotle’s favorite rhetoric, uses the future tense. It’s the language of politics and choices. When does the debate get a little uncomfortable? What tense are they in? Now have them evaluate the speeches of Donald Trump and Kamala Harris. Who employs the future tense the most? Does one party use it more than the other? What tenses do attack ads use the most?
Your bright, readerly student loves to learn what etymology reveals about our society. It makes her write better, and there’s the added benefit of annoying her parents by replying “Thank you” every time they say her room looks pathetic. Plus, teaching her to express herself more outwardly promises a still grander payoff—she becomes a full participant in our republic.
As an example, here’s a bonus exercise: the ethopoeia. It has been entertaining students for some 2,500 years, and it works like this. Participants play the roles of prominent people and debate each other, plucking characters out of different eras. Someone pretending to be Achilles debates another playing Caesar, for example. I’d like to see one student playing Eleanor Roosevelt debate the role of workers’ unions with another student imitating Ronald Reagan. Or we could stick closer to the present. Make a virtual Osama Bin Laden argue with Quentin Tarantino about violence in the media.
Exercises like the ethopoeia get participants used to talking on their feet, delivering orations without notes, and learning to enjoy debate. They focus not on self-expression but on expressing the audience’s beliefs and desires—endowing their purposes, as Shakespeare put it, with words that make them known. Students become hypocrites who employ their pathetic rhetoric in the candid pursuit of consensus.
In other words, they graduate from idiocy. They become good citizens.
