Rhetoric, the art of persuasion and speaking, founded in the 5th century BC…..
I know, I know, here we go again with this looonnnggggg plethora of what rhetoric is and the many ways it’s used, Plato this and Aristotle that. Trust me, today I’m not going to define Rhetoric, but I am going to share a specific type of Rhetoric. It is called polysemic rhetoric. Polysemic rhetoric when something is associated with two or more meanings.
Basically, polysemic rhetoric is a word with multiple meanings. Let’s take the word Dish as an example. Dish has many interpretations it could mean a meal or the actual plate holding the meal. This type of rhetoric is used in different areas in our society, like advertising, music, and movies. This kind of rhetoric serves the purpose of allowing people to come up with their own interpretations of that word, song and or movie that doesn’t give you a definite meaning. One example that I always think about is advertising and how they use polysemic to let consumers come up with their own interpretation. One ad that comes to mind is this Mercedes ad.
This ad displays polysemic advertising because of the car company getting their consumers to believe their brand is the best, leaving the nothing part up to interpretation. Does the word nothing mean the other car companies are bad? Does nothing mean you shouldn’t get a car at all? The word nothing in the ad can have multiple meanings.
This can also be seen in music, for some reason I think of Justin Bieber, in my opinion he has a lot of cheesy phrases that can have a lot of meanings. But what I noticed is in a lot of Justin Bieber songs, he uses the word bad in different ways. In the song 10,000 hours he uses the word bad by saying “Ooh, want the good and the bad and everything in between”. The meaning of bad in this case is used as something that has poor quality. He also uses the word bad in his song I Don’t Care saying “I can deal with the bad nights when I'm with my baby, yeah”. This meaning of bad is used to describe a situation of a rough night. This use of the word bad is polysemic rhetoric because the word has multiple meanings that can interpret different understandings of his songs.
Now that you have seen the many examples that I have provided, it’s important to see the use of polysemic rhetoric, and the multiple meanings that can come from it.
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