How old is the study of phrasing?
The study of human movement—at least, in the formal, sophisticated way that I’m talking about in the article—dates to Rudolf Laban, who was active between the wars. Much of his work was picked up and extended in the nineteen-fifties and sixties by a man named Warren Lamb. So this is a discipline with a fairly extensive history. Laban, interestingly, was a dancer, and this theory started as a way of understanding and notating dance. If you think about it, in that world you need a language to describe movement just as you need a language to describe music. You write about political phrasing, and how a politician like Bill Clinton or Ronald Reagan is better at calming and inspiring an audience than a politician like George W. Bush is. How much difference does that make to voters watching speeches on television? How much does phrasing overlap with personal charisma? That’s a good question, and not one I have a good answer to. Television has a strangely muting effect on a lot of this stuff.
