Definition
McGee defines ideograph in his article “The ‘Ideograph’: A Link Between Rhetoric and Ideology” which appeared in the Quarterly Journal of Speech in 1980. He begins his essay by defining the practice of ideology as practice of political language in specific contexts—actual discursive acts by individual speakers and writers. The question this raises is how does this practice of ideology create social control.
McGee’s answer to this is to say that “political language which manifests ideology seems characterized by slogans, a vocabulary of ‘ideographs’ easily mistaken for the technical terminology of political philosophy.”.
More specifically, he goes on to offer his definition of “ideograph”: “an ideograph is an ordinary-language term found in political discourse. It is a high order abstraction representing commitment to a particular but equivocal and ill-defined normative goal.”.
An ideograph, then, is not just any particular word or phrase used in political discourse, but one of a particular subset of “hot button” terms that are often invoked in political discourse but which does not have a clear, univocal definition. Despite this, in their use, ideographs are often invoked precisely to give the sense of a clearly understood and shared meaning.
These potent terms makes them the primary tools for shaping public decisions. It is in this role as the vocabulary for public values and decision-making that they are linked to ideology.
Read more about this topic: Ideograph (rhetoric)
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