Language Intelligence: Lessons on persuasion from Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga [Kindle Edition]

I started following the author and twitter and facebook and it really made me open my eyes to how important it is that I keep up to date with emerging social media!

I am happy to learn more about this language of ours and how to use it for all situations. Wordsmiths love all books on the subject.

This book was very helpful because it informed me about the fundamental value and importance of rhetorical devices which I hitherto regarded as decorative and/or stylistic appendages, akin to cake decorations.

As to the argument that climate science, as per the debate over man's contribution to global warming, is constrained by the inability of climate scientists to rhetorically articulate their science, to the polity, I would contend that Joseph Romm too much advocates the use of rhetoric to propagate sophistry to be seized upon by governments all too eager to have ways via which to subjugate the polity. A practice that is very much in play in the less savoury and impossible to negotiate with, non-English language parts of the world, where rhetoric is endemic: Iran and North Korea, to cite two.

Rhetoric may well make for more effective communication than plain language. However, as understood by President Obama, in his drive towards 'a more perfect union' that is not the free-for-all tribal dystopia of Kenya, the land of his Father: Beyond the high-art of Shakespeare or the harmless entertainment of Lady GaGa, less reliance on rhetoric is indicative of a culture that has an intelligence with regard to the abstract in lieu of that which may be conveniently concretised via metaphor and simile to sew dissent and division, like the ultra-nationalist vainglory that underpins today's Hungary under the thrall Fidesz and Jobbik, and Greece too much under the thrall of Golden Dawn.

To be fair, though, Joseph Romm does remark upon the darker side of rhetoric, and, to that effect, cites Cicero: "I have often seriously debated with myself whether men or communities have received more good or evil from oratory and a consuming devotion to eloquence."