Page 287 - Between One and Many The Art and Science of Public Speaking

254 Part 3 Putting Theory Into Practice

Whether or not satirist extraordinaire Stephen Colbert took a course in gen-
eral semantics while attending Northwestern University, we cannot say. But
it’s clear that he understands the importance of words and language and skill-
fully uses them to skewer those naive enough to believe that, “Sticks and stones
may break their bones but words will never hurt them.” With tongue fi rmly in
cheek, for example, Colbert treats viewers of his hit show on Comedy Central
to a nightly feature he calls, “The Word.” During the inaugural show of the
Colbert Report, he even introduced his audience to a word of his own invention:
“Truthiness.”
According to Colbert, truthiness is a condition that describes people who
base their opinions on gut reaction rather than the reasoning and evidence de-
manded by models of argument. Truthiness is a product of what people feel intu-
itively, rather than reason logically. Thus, a person in a state of truthiness might
say, “I don’t know . . . I just feel like I can trust the guy,” rather than, “I trust him
because he’s given me example after example of the fact that I can.”
Although truthiness was named word of the year by the dictionary folks at
Merriam-Webster in 2006, it remains to be seen whether it becomes a part of
people’s accepted vocabulary. Even so, its example illustrates a point we will
make repeatedly in this chapter. Language is a living and dynamic feature of the
communication landscape. The words we choose to string together to express
ourselves change. They change because the evolving world in which we live re-
quires it.
This chapter links words and language to the art and science of public speak-
ing. Our goal is twofold. First, we want to demonstrate how people use words
and language to shape the world we see and think about. Second, we want to
show how you can use words and language to breathe life into your speeches so
that audiences can share the world you see and think about. Topics we will cover
include:

• How words and language relate to what we see and think
• How understanding words and language assist us in audience analysis
• And how we can actually use language to make our speeches instruments
of understanding and infl uence.

Word Power

Language is the rule-governed word system we use to verbally communicate.
language
Stripped to the barest of essentials, words are symbolic substitutes for the things
The rule-governed word
they represent. The word chair is not the actual thing, for example, but a sym-
system we use to verbally
bolic representation of it. And the word love is not the emotion that prompts us
commmunicate.
to use it in conjunction with someone about whom we care deeply. Yet the power
these “symbolic substitutes” have in shaping what we think or feel about per-
sons, places, and things can be mind-boggling.
There is considerable evidence, for example, that words “frame” how we see
the world and how we interpret our experience. Knowing this, people who hope
to infl uence us choose specifi c words and phrases to maximize the chances that
we will interpret their messages as they intend them to be interpreted. When suc-