Sunday, April 8, 2007
Rhetorical Ecologies
I liked the way Jenny Edbauer traced the rhetorical ecology, or the “range of processes and encounters” (6) of “Keep Austin Weird.” I thought this might be a good assignment for students – trace the rhetorical ecology of something. Some ideas: Trace the way brands become commonplace names for things (I think there's a word for this), like Kleenex or Xerox. You could also trace how TV or movie catchphrases are circulated (e.g. “yadda, yadda, yadda” or “I'll be back”) In fact, lots of things from popular culture would work – re-makes of movies, covers of songs, how books influence authors. One example I thought of would be our own Mike Kardos' piece on the Missouri Review blog about how people have co-opted the title of Carver's “What We Talk About When We Talk About Love.” Politics might be a fruitful angle as well. I'm thinking specifically of how the phrase “partial-birth abortion” was created by the pro-life movement and then circulated into commonplace usage.
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The term I learned for how brand names become the generic terms for their given class of products is "semantic broadening." The term actually refers to any "meaning shift in which a word can be used to refer to a more general class of items than previously" (from Wolfram and Schilling-Estes' _American English, page 404). So semantic broadenings also include words like "holiday," which used to refer to only "holy days" but now refer to any day off that's given. The word "barn" similarly used to only refer to buildings that store grain (something like "silo" now), but broadened to include buildings that are used for farm-related purposes. The adoption of brand names to refer to a whole class of products is probably the most prominent form of broadening that occurs now. Kleenex and Xerox are two salient examples, as is Band-Aid and also Frigidaire and Coke (the latter two are often used in the South to refer to all refrigerators and *all* soda-- including Coca-Cola's arch-rival, Pepsi--respectively).
An interesting side note (for me, any way) is that while one might think--as I did, originally--that corporations would welcome their brands becoming so successful that they become synonymous with the whole class of products they're included in, corporations often actually *resist* such trends because they're afraid that if the term indeed becomes so commonplace that everyone uses as a generic term for that class of products then they'll lose their copyright protection of the brand name.
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