The Commonplace

            Three black men approached me yesterday. Those black men happened to be quite intellectual friends of mine who attend Harvard and wanted to give me advice on world politics. But you wouldn’t think that, would you? Commonplace ideas and beliefs are those that most of your audience has in common. For some reason, our society has this negative idea of black men in groups while if I had been approached by three white females, it would not have come off as harshly. The Commonplace is a place where it seems your audience and you stand on equal footing. If you both think that gays should be banned from strip bars, that is your Commonplace. If you happen to both think that Stephanie Meyer is the very literal and figural definition of “sucking” as a writer, that is your commonplace to later convince your opponent of why is then that the Fifty Shades of Grey writer is actually talented (She’s not. That was just an example). The Commonplace is a way to reel your opponent, to begin in a common ground that will lead them to believe you guys think in the same manner, and ergo your future argument will ring some lines of truth.

            The Commonplace Label is a great  use of The Commonplace and a great starting point for your argument, because they’ll think your argument is just a small step from that commonplace. These are not only beliefs, they are also slogans that have been ingrained into society’s mind. An example of this the “Where’s the beef?” slogan from the fast food restaurant Wendy’s. Walter Mondale used the commonplace slogan to attack his presidential opponent Gary Hart in a 1984 primary of the election. 1:16 minutes into the video, Walter uses the slogan to describe how he feels of Gary Hart’s ideas, very obviously making his point to the audience that is very familiar to the slogan and the negative connotation it brings with it. By doing this, he is standing on common ground with his audience and almost trailing their thinking to where they agree with him.

           

            Another tool is the Advantegeous. In this type of deliberative argument, you word the choices in a way that sounds as if your own personal choice is the better one. You downplay the one you hope they don’t pick, try to subtly mold it to the point where they’d rather gash their eyeballs out, or along those lines, and you make the other one to be more optimistic and satisfying for them. And yet, there are times when your audience will not deign to fall into your ever-concinving claws. They will keep repeating a phrase or an idea, clutching it like a handbag worth their year’s salary. Said repetition of an idea is babbling. “If your audience repeats the same thing over and over again, it is probably mouthing a commonplace.” Heinrichs’ definition of babbling is quite believable, like if someone were trying to convince an abstinent  girl who was raised in a town where every advertisement pronounced sex’s evilness and every school preached the sin that it was, chances are if you argue with her, she will most likely repeat “Sex is evil!” because that is a commonplace to her. And most commonplace’s are just things that have been programmed into our minds that we repeat them for the sake of an argument when really, all we are doing, is repeating a phrase, backing it up with no logical argument whatsoever. This is why The Rejection is usually made up of commonplaces. If an audience turns you down and you listen to the language it uses, chances are they will be using commonplaces, and you can use this further into the argument.