It's not often that a figure of speech makes the headlines -- as happened this week with the rhetorical term "sarcasm." At a press conference a couple of days ago, the present occupant of the White House, Donald J. Trump, whose use of language is occasionally infelicitous, let fly with a giant whopper. He announced that the horrid new coronavirus could be cured by (gasp!) an injection of bleach. When his foolish advice attracted scorn, he backtracked by claiming that his words were merely "sarcastic."
To put the blame on sarcasm is a transparent lie, of course, believed only by one person in the entire universe -- Trump himself -- although no doubt his brek-a-kek-keks of toadies will pretend that his analysis was pure genius.
But did he truly mean "sarcasm" -- a trope generally marked by a mocking tone of voice and "a sharp, bitter, cutting or caustic expression, a contemptuous gibe or taunt in which hostility is disguised as humor." Trump seems to define sarcasm rather more loosely: to him in means "I didn't say what I said yesterday and, besides, it's all the fault of the media." What a curious line of defense, and what a misuse of a rhetorical term!
Besides, one should think twice before invoking sarcasm, because the term has a bad name among the psychologists, who consider it a "maladaptive coping mechanism for those with unresolved anger or frustration." There's a class of people who employ sarcasm because they have "certain forms of brain damage as a consequence of lesions in the right parahippocampal gyrus." I have no particular knowledge of Mr. Trump's parahippocampal gyrus, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's taken a bit of a beating these last few years.
Sarcasm has even been banned by Trump's great friend Kim Jong-Un. No sarcasm in North Korea -- a rare instance of a figure of speech being consigned to a firing squad.
Besides, Trump is already the master of a number of the tropes of traditional rhetoric. There's enellage, a sentence that ignores the usual grammatical rules and conventions; solecism and tautology, gross violations of syntax and logic; hyperbole, or exaggeration, and its less well-known cousin, adynaton, a collection or list of impossibilities; aposiopesis, the sudden end of a sentence before completion; and paraprosdokian, the unexpected truncation of a clause. But all would agree that the figure of speech that Trump deploys most regularly is prevaricatio.
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