Forensic Research Archive of Manipulation and Exploitation
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Techniques · Classical

Glittering generalities

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Also called Virtue words, Purr words

Virtue words (freedom, security, the people, science) used as substitutes for a testable claim.

The tell

Swap the virtue word for a concrete metric and the sentence collapses.

Not this

A defined principle applied to a named case.

History and effect

Also an IPA 1937 device, and the mirror image of name-calling: instead of a loaded negative label, a loaded positive one (freedom, security, the people, science) stands in for a claim.

It produces warm assent without ever requiring the audience to say what the word actually commits the speaker to.

Lineage: IPA 1937

How it works

A glittering generality attaches a cause, law, war, candidate or product to a word the audience already values (freedom, peace, justice, the people, security, greatness, natural) and then leaves that word undefined. Each listener supplies a meaning, and each supplies a favourable one. The Institute for Propaganda Analysis listed the device among its seven in 1937, and Alfred McClung Lee and Elizabeth Briant Lee's The Fine Art of Propaganda (1939) applied it to radio speeches by the priest Charles Coughlin. The IPA's point was that the virtue word asks for approval without asking for evidence.

It has four moving parts: a term with a strong positive charge for the audience; a link between that term and something specific and contestable; no definition or measure that would show whether the thing delivers what the word promises; and an implied opposite: if the law is the Patriot Act, opposing it sounds unpatriotic; if the campaign is for peace, critics sound as though they favour war. That last part is where the device meets Name-calling, its mirror image.

The usual vehicles are slogans, operation names, bill titles, product labels and movement names. Rhetoric scholars have described the vocabulary. S. I. Hayakawa (1941) contrasted "purr words" with "snarl words"; Richard Weaver (1953) called the most powerful terms "god terms"; Michael Calvin McGee (1980) called terms such as liberty and equality "ideographs", ordinary words that summarise a political commitment without spelling it out. Advisers on both sides of US politics have written openly about choosing such words, including the Republican pollster Frank Luntz (Words That Work, 2007) and the linguist George Lakoff, writing for progressives (Don't Think of an Elephant!, 2004).

Why it works

Positive words produce a feeling before they produce an argument. Robert Zajonc (1980) argued that affective reactions can precede detailed thought, and Paul Slovic and colleagues (2002) described the affect heuristic, in which the feeling attached to something serves as a shortcut for judging it. In Petty and Cacioppo's elaboration likelihood model (1986), when scrutiny is low, peripheral cues such as attractive wording outweigh argument quality.

Vagueness is also an asset. An undefined virtue word can unite people who would disagree over any specific version of it. The communication scholar Eric Eisenberg (1984) called this "strategic ambiguity". George Orwell made the same observation in 1946 about words such as democracy, freedom, patriotic and justice, which he said have several meanings that cannot be reconciled: "Words of this kind are often used in a consciously dishonest way." Finally, the implied opposite raises the social cost of dissent, since objecting to the label can be heard as objecting to the value. See Affect heuristic in the Learn library.

Examples across eras and sides

  • Helft uns siegen! (1917, Germany, Imperial war-loan campaign). Fritz Erler's poster puts a steel-helmeted infantryman over the words "Help us win! Subscribe to the war loan." "Winning" is offered as the reason to buy, with no statement of cost, odds or war aims for the buyer to weigh. Every major combatant ran similar campaigns (Library of Congress poster collection; see Helft uns siegen! Zeichnet die Kriegsanleihe (Help Us Win! Subscribe to the War Loan)).
  • The Stockholm Appeal (1950, Stockholm and worldwide, Soviet-sponsored peace movement). The Partisans of Peace movement, which became the World Peace Council, launched an appeal in Stockholm in 1950 to outlaw atomic weapons, and its organisers reported hundreds of millions of signatures. The historian Lawrence Wittner documents that the movement followed Soviet direction and that its "peace" tracked Soviet foreign policy, at a time when the United States held the larger atomic arsenal and the Soviet Union, which had tested its first bomb in 1949, was building its own. Critics could be cast as opponents of peace (Lawrence S. Wittner, One World or None, 1993).
  • Campaign slogans (1984, 2008, 2016, United States, both major parties). Ronald Reagan's 1984 re-election advertising opened with "It's morning again in America"; Barack Obama's 2008 campaign used "Hope" and "Change we can believe in"; Donald Trump's 2016 campaign used "Make America Great Again", echoing Reagan's 1980 "Let's Make America Great Again". Each phrase names a positive state (renewal, hope, change, greatness) without stating a measure, while each campaign also published specific policy positions elsewhere (Kathleen Hall Jamieson, Packaging the Presidency, 3rd ed., 1996; campaign materials).
  • Military operation names (1989-2003, United States, Department of Defense). The 1989 invasion of Panama was named Operation Just Cause; the 2001 campaign in Afghanistan was first announced as Operation Infinite Justice and renamed Operation Enduring Freedom after objections that, in Islamic belief, only God provides infinite justice; the 2003 invasion of Iraq was named Operation Iraqi Freedom. Gregory Sieminski, writing in the Army War College journal, identifies Just Cause as a turning point toward names chosen for their public-relations effect. The names foreground a value; the stated aims (removing Manuel Noriega, dismantling al-Qaeda and removing the Taliban government, disarming Iraq and removing Saddam Hussein's government) are what could be measured (Gregory C. Sieminski, "The Art of Naming Operations", Parameters, 1995).
  • Bill backronyms (2001, United States, Congress). The Uniting and Strengthening America by Providing Appropriate Tools Required to Intercept and Obstruct Terrorism Act was built so its initials spell USA PATRIOT, and it passed the Senate 98 to 1. The same year Senators Dick Durbin (Democrat) and Orrin Hatch (Republican) introduced the Development, Relief, and Education for Alien Minors Act, the DREAM Act. Each acronym attaches a virtue word to a long, specific text, so a vote against the text can be described as a vote against the word (bill texts, 2001).
  • The Chinese Dream (2012, China, Communist Party leadership). In November 2012, visiting the "Road to Rejuvenation" exhibition at the National Museum of China, Xi Jinping described the Chinese Dream as the great rejuvenation of the Chinese nation, and the phrase became a central slogan of his leadership. Official texts later tied it to the "two centenary" goals, which give it a partly measurable content; in much public use the dream itself is left open (Xi Jinping, The Governance of China, Foreign Languages Press, 2014).
  • "Natural" on food labels (ongoing, United States, food manufacturers). "Natural" is one of the most common positive claims on US packaged food. The Food and Drug Administration had no formal definition; its longstanding policy treated the word as meaning that nothing artificial or synthetic has been added that would not normally be expected, and in 2015 it asked the public whether and how to define it. The label carries a strong positive association while committing the seller to little a shopper could check (U.S. Food and Drug Administration, "Use of the Term 'Natural' in the Labeling of Human Food Products", request for comments, 2015).

How to spot it

  • Replace the virtue word with a concrete measure (a number, a date, a named outcome). Does the sentence still say something you could check?
  • What would count as failure? If no possible result could show that the "freedom", "peace" or "greatness" was not delivered, the word is doing the work of an argument.
  • Is the word defined anywhere, in the bill text, the platform, the label regulation, or the stated war aims? Do those contents match the name?
  • Who is implicitly cast as being against the word, and is that a fair description of what they actually oppose?
  • Would people on the other side use the same word to support the opposite policy? If so, the word alone settles nothing.
  • Is the name of the thing (a law, operation, product or movement) doing work that its contents do not?

Where it ends: edge cases and legitimate persuasion

  • Defined principles. "Liberté, égalité, fraternité", the motto of the French Republic written into Article 2 of the 1958 Constitution, names values that are then given content by law and courts. A principle that is defined and applied to a named case is the "Not this" line on this page. It becomes a glittering generality only when invoked in place of an argument about a specific policy.
  • Euphemism. Euphemism / doublespeak softens something unwelcome ("special military operation" for a war, Address announcing a 'special military operation'); a glittering generality adds shine to something already presented as good. Operation names can do both at once.
  • Transfer and semantic hijack. Transfer borrows prestige from a symbol such as a flag or a church; this device borrows it from a word, and the two often appear together, as in Helft uns siegen! Zeichnet die Kriegsanleihe (Help Us Win! Subscribe to the War Loan). When a virtue word is redefined to mean something close to its opposite, the case moves toward Semantic hijacking.
  • Name-calling. Name-calling is the mirror: a loaded negative word in place of a claim.
  • Legitimate slogans. Slogans, mottos and memorable titles are normal in politics and business, and every party and government uses them. Use is honest when the concrete commitments the word implies are stated and can be checked elsewhere, when the speaker accepts being judged against them, and when the word is not used to paint opponents as enemies of the value itself.

Sources

  • Eisenberg, Eric M. "Ambiguity as Strategy in Organizational Communication." Communication Monographs, 1984.
  • Hayakawa, S. I. Language in Action. Harcourt, Brace, 1941 (later Language in Thought and Action).
  • Jamieson, Kathleen Hall. Packaging the Presidency: A History and Criticism of Presidential Campaign Advertising. Oxford University Press, 3rd ed., 1996.
  • Lakoff, George. Don't Think of an Elephant! Know Your Values and Frame the Debate. Chelsea Green, 2004.
  • Lee, Alfred McClung, and Elizabeth Briant Lee, eds. The Fine Art of Propaganda: A Study of Father Coughlin's Speeches. Institute for Propaganda Analysis / Harcourt, Brace, 1939.
  • Luntz, Frank. Words That Work: It's Not What You Say, It's What People Hear. Hyperion, 2007.
  • McGee, Michael Calvin. "The 'Ideograph': A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology." Quarterly Journal of Speech, 1980.
  • Orwell, George. "Politics and the English Language." Horizon, 1946.
  • Petty, Richard E., and John T. Cacioppo. Communication and Persuasion: Central and Peripheral Routes to Attitude Change. Springer, 1986.
  • Sieminski, Gregory C. "The Art of Naming Operations." Parameters (U.S. Army War College), 1995.
  • Slovic, Paul, Melissa Finucane, Ellen Peters, and Donald G. MacGregor. "The Affect Heuristic." In Heuristics and Biases, ed. Gilovich, Griffin and Kahneman. Cambridge University Press, 2002.
  • U.S. Food and Drug Administration. "Use of the Term 'Natural' in the Labeling of Human Food Products; Request for Information and Comments." Federal Register, 2015.
  • Weaver, Richard M. The Ethics of Rhetoric. Henry Regnery, 1953.
  • Wittner, Lawrence S. One World or None: A History of the World Nuclear Disarmament Movement Through 1953. Stanford University Press, 1993.
  • Xi Jinping. The Governance of China. Foreign Languages Press, 2014.
  • Zajonc, Robert B. "Feeling and Thinking: Preferences Need No Inferences." American Psychologist, 1980.

Case studies

In the collection

All 75 glittering generalities examples
Proclamation by the Queen in Council, to the Princes, Chiefs, and People of India (printed sheet, Allahabad, 1 November 1858)Proclamation by the Queen in Council, to the Princes, Chiefs, and People of India (printed sheet, Allahabad, 1 November 1858)Nov 1, 1858 · Glittering generalities, ScapegoatingBharat Mata (Mother India)Bharat Mata (Mother India)1905 · Transfer, Glittering generalitiesProclamation of the Irish Republic (Poblacht na hÉireann), Easter RisingProclamation of the Irish Republic (Poblacht na hÉireann), Easter RisingApr 24, 1916 · Transfer, Glittering generalitiesZa naši samostatnost! Hrr na vraha! Za demokracii! Československá armáda (For our independence! Charge at the murderer! For democracy! Czechoslovak Army)Za naši samostatnost! Hrr na vraha! Za demokracii! Československá armáda (For our independence! Charge at the murderer! For democracy! Czechoslovak Army)1918 · Name-calling, Glittering generalitiesContent noteEesti rahwas, hoia kokku! (Estonian people, hold together!): Rahvarinne election leafletEesti rahwas, hoia kokku! (Estonian people, hold together!): Rahvarinne election leaflet1938 · Identity fusion, Glittering generalitiesThis Man Is Your Friend: Russian. He Fights for FreedomThis Man Is Your Friend: Russian. He Fights for Freedom1942 · Glittering generalities, TransferYou Are a Filipino / My Dear Son (voting poster sheet for the Philippines)You Are a Filipino / My Dear Son (voting poster sheet for the Philippines)1951 · Glittering generalities"Right to Life" demonstration, at White House and Capitol"Right to Life" demonstration, at White House and CapitolJan 23, 1978 · Glittering generalities

In the watch briefs

All 20 briefs

In campaigns

Related techniques

Name-callingTransferEuphemism / doublespeak