Why was the Fariñas palusot speech so persuasive?

(The author is a former UP professor of psycholinguistics and a keen observer of speech communications)   Congressman Rudy Fariñas may be a lawyer, but one doesn’t exactly expect Mr. Suave when he’s about to speak. You anticipate a tough persona, and simple, direct words---a certain brashness even. Last week, in the crucial closing arguments of the impeachment trial of Chief Justice Renato Corona, Fariñas delivered a spellbinding speech in a mix of Tagalog and English devoid of legalese.  Senator Lito Lapid, who seemed to echo both street-corner listeners and ivory-tower observers, stressed on the last day of the trial that Fariñas convinced him of Corona’s guilt. Lapid was being watched closely as a possible vote for acquittal. So what was it that made the Fariñas speech so persuasive? Beneath the folksy language was a sophisticated use of rhetorical devices, from the strategic repetition of palusot as a hook to his clever dissection of Corona’s own words. Many have already commented on Fariñas’ use of palusot (loosely translated as lame excuse) as providing the “oomph” and recall in his speech, but I also appreciated how he used the same word as a way of coherently stringing together his different points against Corona (“pangalawang palusot, pangatlong palusot”).  But just as impressive was his use of palusot in a second sense: “huwag po ninyong palusutin (ang nagpapalusot),” harking back to a classical figure of speech, polyptoton (in which a word is used in two different ways). Fariñas used Corona’s own words to devastating effect, turning them on their head to make them work against Corona. For example, he did acknowledge that the prosecution team was indeed angry at Corona, but that Corona was completely wrong about why they were angry at him. He also enumerated the many sacrifices the prosecution team and even the senators have made (similar to Corona’s litany of suffering), and pointed out how a personal vendetta cannot explain this degree of collective sacrifice. The heart of the speech was the way Fariñas used glaring inconsistencies in Corona’s testimony to damage his credibility.  The image of Corona as a little boy converting his pesos into dollars was such an impossible scenario that it drove home the point that Corona had been lying all along.  As one classmate of Corona’s wrote on Corona’s imagined grade school, high school, undergraduate, and even law school honors:  “The cumulative weight of all those petty lies and belabored half-truths is crushing and it leaves him bereft of any moral ground to stand on.”    Congressman Fariñas compellingly summarized Corona’s lies and half-truths by stating, “We tend to contradict ourselves if we do not tell the truth.” However, he did not stop there. He coupled Corona’s lies with Corona’s own previous statement as a justice, that one can be impeached “due to political offenses growing out of personal misconduct, or gross neglect, or usurpation, or habitual disregard of the public interests… various in their character, and so much indefinable in their actual involutions, that it is almost impossible to provide systematically for them by positive law.” By using Corona’s own opinion, Fariñas basically led us to the conclusion that convicting Corona makes perfect sense. Sure, there may have been times when the transitions between the different excuses were awkward; sometimes the logic behind the ordering of the different palusots was not so obvious. But overall coherence was there. The case for convicting Corona was clear. There were a few mispronounced words, but Fariñas more than made up for these with his varied tone and volume, as well as appropriate use of pauses and hand gestures.  It helped too that he endeared himself to Senate President Enrile by greeting him in Ilocano, who complimented him in Ilocano in return, an exchange not lost on the many Ilocanos watching around the world. For the rest of the audience glued to the courtroom drama, the colloquial Tagalog and occasional use of humor fixed their attention so they could absorb the clarity of the speaker’s arguments. The lesson for students of communication: obscure references to laws, grandiloquence and screaming will not get you far, but a speech with both form and substance, well-crafted arguments and the right shade of rhetorical colors, and spoken at the right time and in the right place, can go down in history. - HS, GMA News