Monthly Archives: August 2012

Water Snake is related to Water Fish.

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I present Common Sense from Chet Tiffany. Common sense-you know, sound judgment, prudence, or wisdom. Try reading it aloud because it’s fun and sort of flows poetically. And then think about “common sense” and how a lotta times it depends on audience and values to be common and/or sense. I like Chet, but his/her sense ain’t really common…to me. What I mean is I imagine Chet Tiffany is like me and suffered a lot with regards to “common sense.” What I mean is “common sense” is a big assumption that’s rarely common and not always the only sense.

My dad often asked me if I had “common sense” or would strongly suggest I use my “common sense.”  It got me worried about what he meant and I felt like I was under common-sense surveillance a lot. Before acting I would think, “is this common sense?” or “would this be common sense?” An audience of Dad meant I’d rarely get it right or be common sensical.

Anyway here are some examples of “common” and “uncommon” sense that are in no way like Chet’s. I don’t know how to imitate his artistry.

  1. Common sense: Turn off the air conditioner in your car to get more power—it’s common sense. Value=speed
    Uncommon sense: Use air conditioner and feel cool and get less power—it’s common sense. Value=comfort
  2. Common sense: If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it—it’s common sense.
    Value=money
    Uncommon sense: It ain’t broke, but it ain’t pretty. So I’m gonna fix it—it’s common sense.  Value=visual aesthetics
  3. Common sense: If there’s snow on the ground wear your shoes to class—it’s common sense. Value=comfort
    Uncommon sense: If there’s snow on the ground don’t wear your shoes to class—it’s common sense. Value=coolness…I mean fashionable in reckless behavior.
  4. Common sense: If a chicken doesn’t fit into a microwave to be defrosted, rig the microwave so it’ll operate with the door open—it’s common sense.
    Value=problem solving to make squares pegs fit round holes.
    Uncommon sense: If a chicken doesn’t fit into a microwave to be defrosted, defrost it in the sink with warm water—it’s common sense.
    Value=problem solving to try a different mode. Thanks for some of the great examples, Mary Bendel-Simso!

Water Snake is related to Water Fish.

It’s common sense people!

Language Intelligence: A Non-Academic’s Take on Rhetoric

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Not really a book review (because I haven’t read it, duh!), but more of a heads-up: political blogger Joe Romm (from ThinkProgress) has just released his book Language Intelligence: Lessons on Persuasion From Jesus, Shakespeare, Lincoln, and Lady Gaga. As you can tell from the subtitle, it’s more or less a pop take on rhetoric, partly a “what to look for” and partly a “how to” manual… Romm delves into politics (naturally), but also into areas like scientific discourse and popular culture. I’ve glanced at some blog posts about the book, and from what I can glean, it delves heavily into matters relating to style (lots of references to “the figures of speech”) and oratorical performance. Maybe worth a read?

Hungry Man Chicken Dinner and Love

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Okay, this is half-baked, baked-half, and most likely under theorized but then, again, I’m shorting, so I think it’s okay.

Cluck-cluck.

It’s really just a parallel I’ve noticed between rhetoric and conditioning (the non-hair follicular kind). There’s a trope called metonymy and in rhetoric it means that you are making an association between things through their contiguity (Burbules, 1997).  So, for instance, say you’re advertising for a Hungry Man chicken dinner and you want that dinner to be associated with something abstract like “love.”  You could make an advertisement where you surround that chicken dinner with metonymic images of “love” (e.g. hearts, puppies, and Ted Nugent). And if you repeat this imagery enough “love” might rub off enough from the images on to a Hungry Man chicken dinner to remind a lot of people about “love.” Eating a Hungry Man chicken dinner might become a metonym for “love.” Instead of “I heart you” we might say, “I Hungry Man chicken dinner you.”

Conditioning (that behavioral kind) seems to be doing something similar, don’t it? Say you have a chicken that you want to train to cluck when it sees an image of “love” (i.e. if it sees hearts, puppies, or Ted Nugent). What you’d do is shape the behavior.  You’d have a cue (e.g. the pictures). And you’d have a reinforcement (e.g. a treat like a piece of bread or a Hungry Man!). Then you’d have the behavior you wanted (i.e. a cluck when the chicken sees the pictures).  Every time there is a cluck when an appropriate picture is shown, you’d provide a treat.  You’d do this until you associated clucking with the pictures and the treat so much so that once the chicken sees the picture, she doesn’t even need the treat.  It’s automatic. Seeing those pictures results in a cluck without the treat.  In a sense, the chicken is part of a metonymical move.  What I mean is, the imagery is associated with “love.”

Rhetors do similar things. Instead of food, they associate an image with other images to make an association and make that association automatic. Conditioning and metonymying aint’ exactly alike but, then again, they ain’t exactly different. I was thinkin’ that maybe what rhetors do should be called “metonymic conditioning.”  Whatcha think?

Watch this vid on Conditioning Chickens

Last thing and I swear it’s funny!  A Prof. of Psych told me about something her dad did when he was a college student. In a class of his, the students conducted a conditioning experiment on their teacher (teacher wasn’t in on the experiment).  Every time the teacher stood in a certain part of the room, the class would participate in discussion.  Everywhere else, there was no discussion.  From my understanding, it worked and the teacher began spending a lot of time in that part of the room. The teacher got Hungry Manned!