Retrospective on the Dangers of Overstatement
By Jose A. Carillo
As a largely self-taught student of rhetoric, I watched and listened attentively to the homily that Sunday afternoon in an in-house chapel of a Metro Manila mall. The Roman Catholic priest officiating the Holy Mass* exuded the verve and confidence of an experienced schoolmaster, speaking in fluent Tagalog interspersed with impeccable English. He obviously knew how to speak rhetorically, and I must say that at the start, his eloquence held me and the rest of the audience impressed if not spellbound.
His elocution was classically Aristotelian. First, although a lector had already given a suitable introduction for him, the priest restated his bonafides to more firmly establish his ethos, or the appeal of a speaker’s character (“Yes, I am a teacher, make no mistake about that.”). Then, for pathos, or the appeal to emotion, he used some academic-style humor that often drew laughter and half-smiles from the full-house audience. I thus imagined that he was conversant with the Grecian flowers of rhetoric, so I naturally expected his homily to have a persuasive logos or appeal to reason as well.
THIS GENERIC HOLY MASS CELEBRATION PHOTO IS USED IN THIS ARTICLE
FOR REPRESENTATION PURPOSES ONLY AND NOT TO IDENTIFY THE PRIEST
OR ANY OF HIS ASSISTANTS MENTIONED IN THE NARRATIVE
To my bewilderment, however, he used a strange rhetorical device for the homily. What he did was to pick a native-language phrase—let’s just say “pinakamatalik kong kaibigan” (“my closest friend”)—then playfully asked everybody what each letter of the first word (“pinakamatalik”) represented. Of course, there really was no way even the most intelligent person could have fathomed what those were. It was like prodding a quiz show contestant with this riddle: “Give me the names of all the persons who perished in the Titanic.” A mind with total recall and steeped in trivia probably could have hazarded a guess if the priest had used a concrete noun instead, like “Doe, a deer, a female deer/Ray, a drop of golden sun…” in that delightful song of the Von Trapps in The Sound of Music movie. But the priest did it in the manner that people with nothing else to do will ask: ‘Ano ang kahulugan ng bawat letra sa katagang ‘San Miguel’? Sirit na? Ang hina mo naman! E, di ‘(S)a (a)ming (n)ayon (m)ay (i)sang (g)inoo (u)minom (e)h (l)asing.” (“In our village a gentleman got drunk.”)
The rhetorical device he used certainly was not a hyperbole, or an extravagant exaggeration used for emphasis or effect, as in “I ate so much that I must now be heavier than an elephant.” It could not have been a simile or metaphor either, because no word was really compared or substituted with another. I had a fleeting feeling—soon gone—that it was some form of synecdoche, a variant of the metaphor that mentions the part to signify a whole, as in “I need six hands” to mean “I need six people.” In hindsight, I can see now that it was a weak fusion of metonymy and prosopopoeia, the first being a figure of speech that substitutes some suggestive word for what is actually meant, and the latter—also called personification—one that invests human qualities to abstractions or inanimate objects. In any case, his question was so nebulous that the priest, as might be expected, ended up providing all the answers himself.
The words he assigned to each of the letters of the word “pinakamatalik” were so convoluted and are no longer relevant, so I will not dwell on them here. They formed the core of his logos, however, and from sheer repetition, they ultimately brought home the message of the beneficence, love, and invitation to the communion that God extends to us all. There was no question about that.
The problem was that the priest simply didn’t know when to stop. Ever the taskmaster giving pupils a grammar drill to the very end, he dunned his listeners many times to repeat each word; when anyone balked, the priest would browbeat him or her until he or she relented and blurted out the words. Then he asked everyone to do what I thought bordered on the impertinent and absurd: to declare this to his or her seatmate “Ikaw ang pinakamatalik kong kaibigan” (“You are my closest friend”). He sternly badgered the listeners until he was satisfied that their collective voice was loud enough.
That was where, I think, the logic of his logos snapped; the liberties he took with the language simply became too embarrassing. Perhaps “Ikaw ay aking kaibigan” would have been acceptable rhetorically, but to ask someone to tell a total stranger that he or she is “your closest friend”? This gave you the feeling that the priest was more interested in testing his power to elicit the blind and thoughtless obedience of his flock than in planting a divine message in their minds.
In his classic book, Rhetoric, Aristotle argued that persuasion by argument is best achieved when the speaker’s chain of argumentation is not too hard to follow and not too long: “The links in the chain must be few.” I have this feeling that the priest, in coercing his listeners to be party to his convoluted rhetoric, had seriously violated that role on both counts. This is the danger in overstatement that all public speakers must always guard against to retain their persuasiveness and credibility intact.
*At that time he looked like he was somewhere between his mid-30s or early-40s.
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This essay first appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in The Manila Times circa 2003 and subsequently appeared in his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today’s Global Language, ©2004 by Jose A. Carillo. © 2008 by Manila Times Publishing. All rights reserved.
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