Have you ever thought one of your possessions had it in for you? A temperamental car perhaps, that refused to start on a day you had an important appointment. Has life ever smacked you in the face? Have you ever been to a city that never sleeps? Endowing an animal, object or idea with human qualities like this has two names. It’s called prosopopoeia if you want to empty a room, and personification if you don’t.
Our tendency to humanise the non-human world is so natural and widespread, it’s easy to overlook it. Animals talk in children’s books, and we don’t blink an eye. Flowers dance in the breeze. Justice is blind. Time and tide wait for no man. Genes are selfish. Inflation robs us of our hard-earned savings and the ugly face of poverty stares back at us.
In everyday language personification often goes unnoticed. But in a poem, or work of literature, it tends to hit us right between the eyes. Take Emily Dickinson’s personification of death:
Because I could not stop for Death –
He kindly stopped for me –
The Carriage held but just Ourselves –
And Immortality.
How different this image of death is from the more familiar Grim Reaper. Instead, the poet presents us with a gentleman who travels the world in a horse-drawn carriage, stopping, every so often, to kindly offer lifts to those he meets along the way. Compared with the faceless Grim Reaper with his intimidating black hooded cape and scythe, Dickinson’s gentleman cuts an almost benign figure. This comes as a relief, as we know that one of these days he’ll be stopping his carriage for us. And, if the thought of some kind of afterlife brings you comfort, the presence of his companion, Immortality, offers a crumb of hope.
Personification helps us get a handle on ungraspable phenomena, such as death, by reducing them to a human scale. It can transform a perplexing abstraction into a character you might sit next to on a bus or bump into at a party; it domesticates the unintelligible. But personification achieves its aims by oversimplifying and distorting the complexity of the world, so there’s a price to pay. It has no interest whatsoever in evidence and reason. Its approach is unashamedly emotional – it moves and persuades us by appealing directly to the heart, rather than the intellect.
In the hands of a politician, personification can easily slip unnoticed under the radar:
“The state needs to keep its nose out of our lives.” (Nick Clegg)
“The state seizes their homes and their life savings without offering them any alternative.” (Iain Duncan Smith)
“The state gives you money for nothing.” (David Cameron)
“The state spends too much of our national wealth.” (John Major)
Quotes like these paint a picture of the kind of person you’d move house to avoid – an interfering nosey parker, an unscrupulous grasping bully, a waster and a spendthrift. But if you look into the diverse workings of the state, you’ll find it doesn’t resemble a person in the least bit. With its executive, bureaucracy, courts and numerous other institutions, the state is more like a crowd than a person.
On Margaret Thatcher’s watch the personification of the state underwent a drastic makeover that continues to this day. The helping hand was replaced by an outstretched leg that trips up enterprise and choice. Thatcher declared it was “time to shake off the self-doubt induced by decades of dependence on the state as master”. Her avowed mission was to – literally and metaphorically – cut the state down to size and make it our servant.
Whatever your view of Thatcher’s overturning of the post-war consensus, the effectiveness of her negative personification of the state is hard to deny. As we’ve seen, personification like this goes largely unnoticed because it’s such a common feature of everyday language; and things you don’t notice are by definition difficult to resist.
Working with the adroitness of a conjuror, personification leaves our critical intellect in the dark as it goes about its business of substituting an emotional experience for argument and evidence. Professional persuaders know that people might not remember what you said to them, but they’ll always remember how what you said made them feel. This means personification is invaluable to them as it’s one of the touchiest, feeliest rhetorical devices around.
The work of neuroscientists such as Antonio Damasio has confirmed the crucial role emotions play in every decision we make. In fact, neuroscience has discovered that people with damage to the parts of the brain responsible for processing emotion struggle to make even the most trivial of decisions. But the reverse isn’t true. And the subtle persuasive power of personification reminds us that even without the support of reason and evidence, our emotions are more than capable of making our minds up for us.
http://www.creativityworks.net/
With polling day three weeks from today, Mind your language invites readers to submit outstanding examples of electionspeak between now and 7 May. Add your favourite below, or tweet with the hashtag #electionspeak. There are prizes for the winning politician and whoever nominates them.