【词汇大师】怀念大师William Safire（1/2）

英语自学网

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怀念语言大师William Safire。老人不仅是语言学家，更是一位政治家，没有人能够忘记他为美国政府作出的杰出贡献。
TIPS
本篇仅为William Safire的话，没有主持人的话。
HINTS
rhetoric
New Deal
New Frontier
New Covenant

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"I was looking for some criticism of people who were defeatist, who thought that we could never win in Vietnam. And so I came up with the nattering nabobs of negativism. That is known as red meat rhetoric. When you talk about 'There's no red meat in this speech,' that means there's no ammunition that you can feed to your supporters to use, or throw into the cage of a lion that was hungry.
"Politicians have to use metaphors and similes and word pictures and figures of speech in order to capture attention and encapsulate an idea or a vague program that otherwise would put people to sleep. So they have to say 'I'm gonna offer you a New Deal' or 'take you to a New Frontier' -- I've just quoted [Franklin] Roosevelt and [John] Kennedy - or suggest a New Covenant. Now that was suggested by Bill Clinton and it didn't fly for some reason. You never really know when the political language is going to work or when it's gonna lay an egg.”