Parsing:
To examine closely or subject to detailed analysis, especially by breaking up into components:
To make sense of; comprehend: I simply couldn't parse what you just said

Hopefully people will be able to parse what I say as I start a little series in which I attempt to relate Barack Obama's rhetorical style backwards to his life experiences and forwards to his widespread public appeal.  Today's installment is by means of an introduction and a plug for a website useful to anyone interested in Oratory and Rhetoric.  American Rhetoric is one of my favorite websites.  I direct my students there all the time.  Not only does it have tools for understanding rhetorical techniques: it also has a bank of over five thousand speeches of all types for study and analysis.  Among those are over 25 examples of Barack Obama addresses, most of them with both text and real audio.  All his major addresses since the Democratic Convention of 2004 are here, as well as many less known examples of discourse in a number of different situations.

I believe that one ought to both listen and read a speech whenever possible.  In some ways the written word is a sorry substitute for the spoken word, or so Cicero, whom I quote more often than I should, leads me to believe.  People who follow my blog from time to time notice a kind of Victorianism which I hope is not just an affectation.  I like to use italics and boldface type.  Underlines, too.  Ctrl I, Ctrl B and Ctrl U are very familiar with my gentle carresses.  I do this to indicate the stresses one would hear if my blather approached them through their ears and not through their eyes.  A few of the senior set here may remember one of my favorite Pogo Characters, PT Bridgeport.


Bridgeport the barker bear spoke in balloons adorned with elaborate and exuberant fonts of all types.  Everything was an emphasis..no two emphases alike.  A bit over the top, PT-a bit over the top.

Yet, as I tell my students meaning is simple sentences is concealed behind emphasis, and this meaning either must be revealed by context or orthography if the author is to control the meaning contained and avoid unwanted ambiguity.
    Bring me the blue pen on the table suggests what?
    Bring me the blue pen on the table (and don't give it to someone else in the room)
    Bring me the blue pen on the table (I'm not interested in the black, red, or green one)
    Bring me the blue pen on the table (not the pencil or crayola, silly, the blue pen).
    Bring me the blue pen on the table. (Not the one on the counter, or the one in your pocket)

Stupid little example, I know, I know.  But listening to the speaker's emphasis can nail down meaning which might be missed otherwise. 

The text can differ from the delivery in other ways, as well.  For example, the words gonna and wanna don't appear in the written text of many of the speeches delivered.  Going to and want to, on the other hand are prominent.  Obama swings effortlessly from the gonna/wanna camp to the going to/want to camp, and back again.  I lay this up to consciousness of his audience, and to an awareness that Americans don't much appreciate being talked down to by "pointy-headed intellectuals".  Probably Adlai Stevenson's greatest campaign blunder was is reflected in this anecdote:  A supporter once called out, "Governor Stevenson, all thinking people are for you!" And Adlai Stevenson answered, "That's not enough. I need a majority."  Thinking this was one thing: saying it was quite another matter.  Using popular idiom increases one's popularity, as long as it isn't forced or mannered. 

As an aside (I'm allowed one per post), most of the elite misunderstood the import of Obama's bad bowling badly.  They laughed at him...not noting how happy he was to laugh at himself, and how willingly the folks in the alley were to laugh with him.  No one in politics can afford to seem better than every one else at everything.  (I thing some of the reporters might actually find bowling fun if they weren't so afraid of betraying their class by appearing ridiculous in public).

So, as I meander through some of Obama's life experiences and some of his rhetorical arsenal, I'm going to speculate about how they connect.  Nobody has suggested he learned his effectiveness at public speaking school, so he must have cobbled it together from things he learned elsewhere.  I have no doubt I'll be spanked when I'm wrong.  But I hope any one who reads my next few posts will have some fun on the way.