From Ancient Greece To Iraq The Power Of Words On Wartime Rhetorical Analysis

Tone can be described as the author’s “attitude and feelings about the audience and the subject matter.” An author’s tone can not only help influence the reader’s opinion of the piece but can also In the essay, “From Ancient Greece to Iraq, the Power of Words on Wartime”, Robin Tolmach Lakoff uses cynical words, informative anecdotes, and blunt humor to enlighten the audience of the dehumanization of the enemy. She uses many specific examples in the text to get her tone and point across, including contemptuous expressions. The author uses very cynical words to discuss her tone in this essay. She says, “Bullets and bombs are not the only tools of war. Words, too, play their part” (14). She also uses words such as repugnant, reclamation, and disparaging very early on in the essay to express her mood to the reader on this topic (14-15). Another example of cynical words that the author uses in the text is “Soldiers, and those who remain at home, learn to call their enemies by names that make them seem not quiet human — inferior, contemptible and not like “us” (14). The author also goes into great detail about how this does not just occur in one part of the world or in one time

She tells the story of how during the American Revolution, the British gave the colonists the nickname of the “Yankees” and how they turned it around to “make the word their own and gave it a positive spin, turning the derisive song “Yankee Doodle” into our first national anthem” (15). You can almost hear the tone in her voice when she says “The reasoning is: They are not really human, so they will not feel the pain” (14). The author seemed very irritated and annoyed when she talked about how American soldiers called Iraqis, or “hadijs", “which used in a derogatory way, apparently unaware that the word, which comes from the Arabic term for a pilgrimage to Mecca, is used as a term of respect for older Muslim men”