LA Weekly denounced "Bush's talking-points war" early last year. A highlight of Bill O'Reilly's Fox News conservative commentary is his "Talking Points Memo," while Joshua Micah Marshall publishes his own "Talking Points Memo," a popular liberal Weblog.
The New York Times advertises an online service of expanded analysis -- available for a fee to nonsubscribers -- with a new feature under that red-hot title: "Read Talking Points, and everything clicks."
Small wonder that Tom Oliphant, the Boston Globe columnist with whom I have cheerfully jousted on television, made a point to Don Imus on MSNBC that I ought to get cracking in a language column about talking points.
The question is this: How can a phrase be embraced by so many on both sides of the political divide while being an object of scorn by so many others equally politically opposed?
Rightists and leftists hoot at the very idea of talking points as both conservative and liberal media biggies use the phrase to attract readers and viewers.
The phenomenon has resulted in what may be the first quadripartisan semantic split.
etymology
Etymology may help. I first heard the phrase as a White House speechwriter, ducking dreary assignments for "Rose Garden rubbish."
President Nixon would often say to his writers, "Never mind preparing formal remarks for this bunch, just give me a page of talking points." (He would refer to other brief lines, amusing or poignant, with a musical term: "grace notes," which were a cut above a list of factual talking points.)
Subsequent research driven by Oliphant's demand reveals earlier usage not in political speech but in financial jargon.
In Sinclair Lewis' classic 1922 novel, Babbitt, the author described "a broker ... who understood Talking Points, Strategic Values, Key Situations, Underappraisals."
To underscore his satire, the novelist capitalized the pretentious words used to bedazzle investors.
But talking-pointillists have long been active in politics.
The Indiana Democrat used the phrase in 1901 to describe an attempt by President Theodore Roosevelt to require a balance of trade with Cuba, advising Republican leaders to tell him "that while reciprocity is excellent as `a talking point,' it will not `go' with the Senate."
The quotation marks indicate slang, and its Midwestern usage was apparently known to be from a commercial field.
A Salem, Ohio, firm in 1893, a Merriam-Webster lexicographer informs me, advertised a carpet sweeper with "no mere talking point attachments."
In The Daily Review of Decatur, Illinois, in 1897, an advertiser hailed its Viking bicycle's "best talking point," and a year later a shirtwaist company was boasting "a talking point above another similar in appearance."
And thanks to NewspaperARCHIVE.com, I dug up this claim of a product's high repute from the Finkle and Lyon Sewing Machine Co of New York that ran in The Indiana Democrat on Oct. 2, 1862: "We prefer such a reputation to one based on mere `talking points,' as they are technically called in the trade."
pejorative
From this phrase history dating to the Civil War we can deduce that a talking point started out as a commercial claim; in time, the item in a sales pitch was derided, perhaps by competitors or disappointed customers, as a "mere" boast by a fast talker.
That pejorative connotation persisted into our time. "Republican `talking points' are meant to distort the truth," snorts Paul Rolly in The Salt Lake Tribune, while National Review Online snarls, "Please spare us the excuses warmed over from Democratic talking points in the 1990s ...."
A reader of The Lansing State Journal imputes a puppetlike quality even to other letter writers: "Many offer no opinion of their own -- just talking points."
Now the pendulum appears to be swinging back again, as can be seen by the delighted seizure of the phrase by media personalities and institutions.
They are using the technique and its label in covering or criticizing the technique.
"Talking points are a core set of messages an executive or politician utilizes in communicating with stakeholders," says Richard Edelman, a public relations executive.
"It's a term of art for having an outline of your remarks," he adds.
George Lakoff, professor of cognitive science and linguistics at University of California at Berkeley, goes further: "The talking points frame assumes that there are many spokespeople, that there will be `message discipline' and that they will remain `on message' (that is, sticking to the talking points)."
"If you listen carefully as you watch the political talk shows, you will hear the same language and arguments over and over, and you can probably learn to reconstruct the talking points from them. It's a fun game to play. Try it," he said.
Other `points'
We have no trouble with other pointed phrases.
Turning point has not changed from its 1817 coinage meaning "a moment at which change occurs," though the synonym "watershed" had its recent vogue.
Breaking point, with an 1828 origin describing iron architectural trusses, has evolved to "the moment that a person gives way under stress."
And, bullet point is an unnecessary extension of the typographers' word "bullet," as in a Champion Paper Co house organ's 1947 usage, "Sheer monotony is unrelieved even by the bullets."
PowerPoint, one word, is business-presentation software named in 1987 for the Apple Macintosh platform that Microsoft Office adopted in 1990 and claims is now used around the world millions of times a day. (Its stupefying misuse by presenters who merely read words off a screen is called "death by PowerPoint.")
But all those other points are beside the point.
The strange double life of talking point is exemplified in an innocently irreverent cartoon by Mike Peters.
It shows a giant hand reaching through the clouds to extend the tablets containing the Ten Commandments to the outstretched hands of Moses, with the voice of God saying, "Here, these are your talking points."?
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