Powerful Palaver
If a politician relies entirely on fake tears, dramatic gasps, and mentioning "the children" to win a debate, they are over-indexing on this specific Aristotelian mode of appeal.
What is pathos?
The Witches give Macbeth a false sense of security by using deceptive double-talk. He only realizes he's completely doomed when Macduff reveals he was delivered via this specific medical loop-hole.
What is a Caesarean section?
If a poem lacks any consistent meter, refuses to rhyme, and generally behaves like prose that just felt like taking a few random line breaks, it belongs to this style.
What is free verse?
Australian Prime Minister Julia Gillard stood up in 2012 and systematically dismantled her opponent for calling her a witch, she was delivering a masterclass in challenging this type of societal power.
What is gendered power / patriarchy / misogyny?
This legendary William Shakespeare tragedy features the famous, existential line: "To be, or not to be: that is the question."
What is Hamlet?
This is the fancy rhetorical term for repeating the exact same word or phrase at the beginning of successive sentences, a favourite trick of Barack Obama and Martin Luther King Jr.
What is anaphora?
On the night of Duncan’s murder, Shakespeare uses nature to mirror the breakdown of the primogenitor, featuring storms, earthquakes, and this bizarre cannibalistic animal behaviour.
What is horses eating each other?
When a poet decides to write a poem that is explicitly about the agonizing process of writing a poem, they are indulging in this meta-literary concept.
What is metapoetry?
We analysed how different global news agencies framed the tragic 2022 death of _____, which sparked massive human rights protests against this specific laws-and-institutions "form of power".
Who was Mahsa Amini?
If you are terrified of a government surveillance state tracking your every move, you can thank George Orwell’s dystopian novel Nineteen Eighty-Four for inventing this iconic, two-word phrase for the ultimate surveillance boss.
Who is Big Brother?
Advertisements or public service announcements (PSAs) that shamelessly weaponise a targeted, aggressive, or highly personal takedown of an opponent are known as this type of "ad".
What is an attack ad?
After Macbeth brutally hacks King Duncan to death, he famously panics that all the water in this specific Roman god’s entire ocean wouldn't be enough to clean the blood off his hands.
Who is Neptune?
This device occurs when a poet aggressively forces harsh, clashing, and deeply unmusical sounds into a line to make it sound deliberately unpleasant.
What is cacophony?
We learned that this legendary, ancient Greek female poet pioneered personal lyricism from the island of Lesbos, though only fragments of her work survived historical gatekeeping to hide her sexuality.
Who was Sappho?
Homer’s grand ancient Greek epic poem The Odyssey details a disastrous, ten-year journey home from the Trojan War, which was famously sparked because a prince ran off with this legendary woman, the "face that launched a thousand ships".
Who was Helen of Troy?
When mass media or governments deceptively manipulate language and imagery to force a specific ideological bias down the public's throat, they are deploying this ten-letter term.
What is propaganda?
This specific term describes the dodgy, half-truth double-talk used by the Witches to trick Macbeth into feeling safe.
What is equivocation?
If you are reading a 19th-century poem that aggressively rejects scientific logic, throws a massive tantrum against the Enlightenment, and obsesses over the terrifying beauty of raw nature, you are reading this movement.
What is Romanticism?
This Romantic movement poster-boy was famously described by an ex-lover as "mad, bad, and dangerous to know".
Who was Lord Byron?
Robert Louis Stevenson contributed to the Gothic tradition with a famous novella tracking a brilliant doctor / murderer, and coined this split psyche term.
Who is Jekyll and Hyde?
This two-word socio-linguistic phenomenon occurs when a massive faceless institution tries to sound like your chummy, personal best friend by using words like "you" and "we" in public health messaging.
What is synthetic personalisation?
To understand why Macbeth is so utterly terrified of the Weird Sisters or why an Elizabethan audience would lose their minds over king-killing, you must understand this rigid historical concept of cosmic hierarchy.
What is the Great Chain of Being / Divine Right of Kings?
This 20th-century literary movement featured poets using jazz-infused rhythms and urban dignity to celebrate racial identity and protest discrimination.
What is the Harlem Renaissance?
Our oratory analysis featured a 1990 speech delivered to a massive crowd immediately upon this speaker's release from a 27-year political imprisonment in South Africa.
Who was Nelson Mandela?
You spent weeks tracking Macbeth's body count, but if you pivot to Shakespeare’s ultimate teenage tragedy, Romeo and Juliet, the entire catastrophic plot is kicked off by a street brawl between these two rival Italian families.
Who are the Capulets and Montagues?