Well, what Michelle is to style mavens, Barack is to grammarians. Who knew that so many of them would come out of the woordwork to dissect his speech?
Oh yeah: I did.
The latest Stanley Fish column (link) continues the trend. Dr. Fish writes that the Obama inauguration speech is better read, over and over, than it was to listen to. And he gets all nerdy about it, too:
If we regard the text as an object rather than as a performance in time, it becomes possible (and rewarding) to do what the pundits are doing: linger over each alliteration, parse each emphasis, tease out each implication.
There is a technical term for this kind of writing – parataxis, defined by the Oxford English Dictionary as “the placing of propositions or clauses one after the other without indicating . . . the relation of co-ordination or subordination between them.”
The opposite of parataxis is hypotaxis, the marking of relations between propositions and clause by connectives that point backward or forward. One kind of prose is additive – here’s this and now here’s that; the other asks the reader or hearer to hold in suspension the components of an argument that will not fully emerge until the final word.
It’ll be interesting to see how a hyper-literary president responds, when he knows that professors are drooling over the possibilities in his speeches, and dissecting them. And what a refreshing change to not have a lowest-common-denominator attitude from someone in authority. Now I just have to continue to avoid “Paul Blart.”
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