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Cicero ain’t got no podcast
Occasionally I encounter people who dismiss my interest in frame language by saying something like, “Oh, that’s just rhetoric. The Greeks and Romans invented that stuff centuries ago.”
To me that seems accurate, but also incomplete and insufficient to dismiss current work in the fields of rhetoric, frames, and persuasive language. I find it much easier to persuade people to read new books and to visit web sites operated by people who are alive and talking.
The Word Nerds, for example, record their conversations about language and offer podcasts every couple of weeks. In this recent conversation they examine modern political rhetoric.
So when people tell me that Cicero was the man for political rhetoric, I say, “Yeah, but as far as I know, Cicero ain’t got no podcast.”
