Gregory Aldrete
speaker
587 appearances
1 recordings
1 series
first heard Sep 2024
last heard Sep 2024
Gregory Aldrete’s voice in public audio — every appearance, attributed to the second.
Trend
recordings per month · last 12 monthsNo recordings in the last 12 months.Older appearances are listed below; set an alert to hear about the next one.
Appearances
So he actually says, when you put your fingers like this, it means such and such. Nice. And it turns out Roman orders had a system of sign language that they would use to augment their speeches. But here's the fun part. It wasn't like modern American sign language where a gesture means the same thing as a word.
Instead, and this goes back to Cicero, a certain gesture would indicate a certain emotion that you were meant to feel when you heard the words. So it's like your body is adding an emotional gloss to your speech. You're saying words, and then you're indicating how you think those words should make you feel.
And even more fun, the Romans believed that if I make certain hand gestures, you will almost involuntarily feel certain emotions. So if you're skilled, you can manipulate your audience by playing on their emotions. And this might sound kind of weird or improbable, but the metaphor that Cicero himself uses is he says, think about music.
Everybody knows that certain musical tones will make you feel a certain way. So think of movies today. In a horror movie, they're going to play strident, tense music. In a romantic scene, you're going to have strings, and it'll make you feel a certain way. When you hear the Jaws theme, you feel tense, right? Yeah. Cicero said the orator's body is like a lyre.
A lyre is a musical instrument, and you have to learn to play on your own body as a musical instrument to affect the emotions of your audience. I think he might be onto something, especially given how central public speaking was in Roman culture. And a lot of the Roman oratorical gestures, like I could probably do some and you could probably guess what emotion they're meant to be.
So for example, there's one where like you hold up your hands to the side and kind of push like this. So this is the gesture and what that means is kind of mild aversion. I don't like something. Now, if I couple this with turning my face to the, to the side, that, so pushing off to one side, turning my face away, it's a stronger version. That's like fear or something.
If I clench my fist and press it to my chest, that's anger or grief. If I slap my thigh again, that's an indication of anger. So a lot of these, uh, make sense. I mean, they're kind of natural gestures. Now, some are really weird and artificial. Um, I mean, one of my favorite of these is if you like hold your hand up open and then curl the fingers in one by one and then flip it out.
So this sort of thing. That to the Romans meant wonder, which you sort of see. But again, if you've been raised in a societal context – where you're used to the notion that this gesture means this emotion. When someone does it, you're probably going to feel that emotion. It's like memes today. If it becomes viral, it percolates through the culture and has power.
Well, I mean, for me, I just love analyzing modern political figures in terms of their body language.
Because how you deliver a speech is often more important than what you say. In fact, in the ancient world, the most famous Greek orator was a guy named Demosthenes. And once a guy came up to Demosthenes and said, Demosthenes, tell me, what are the three most important things in giving a speech? And Demasi said, well, they are delivery, delivery, and delivery.
That even the most brilliant speech, if accompanied by a boring delivery, is going to be less effective than a terrible speech given in an engaging and exciting or funny way.
I mean, Trump gesticulates a lot, but it's a fairly narrow set of gestures. I mean, if you watch him for a bit, he kind of has the same small set of gestures. And they're not – Honestly, they're not natural in that they're not kind of illustrating what he's saying. It's more just punctuation points. I think of his as more kind of these punctuation points for just going along with what he's saying.
There are speakers who truly can use their – hands and arms and faces creatively, and you watch them, and it's really enhancing the speech. I mean, just historically, Martin Luther King, he's famous for a lot of good speeches content. He was a good gesticulator too. He knew how to use his body. On the other hand, Adolf Hitler was a phenomenal gesticulator.
If you watch some of his speeches, even just like turn off the sound and watch them, he's doing awesome. all kinds of stuff, and he's really emphasizing his points in a very creative way. And this is what's fascinating about oratory and public speaking is it's this two-edged sword. You can use these techniques for good or you can absolutely use them for evil.
So the very same techniques in the hands of MLK, you say, this is wonderful, this is fantastic. In the hands of Hitler, you say – This is awful. Look, he's persuading a nation to commit atrocities.
It's the visual embodiment of the words where he's talking about, you know, Weimar Germany being taken advantage of supposedly and all this stuff. You're right. He's channeling the resentment of the people and using that to his personal advantage and for cynical evil really purposes. Yeah. But oratory is like that.
The question I always end up asking my students is, after studying Cicero and all these techniques, I say, okay, this is great oratory, but do you like this? Is this good that this works on human beings?
Right. I want you just focusing on the content and not being distracted. I'll tell you also with Cicero, one of the things that he and other – people who write about Roman oratory do is to say, and you can do this stuff badly, in which case it backfires horribly. So you can have people who attempt to gesticulate.
Again, modern politicians, you'll see this sometime where they feel like I'm supposed to be making hand gestures and they're terrible at it and it undercuts it. And Cicero and Quintilian give some very amusing examples from ancient Rome. So like he says, there was this one guy who when he spoke looked like he was trying to swat away flies because there were just these awkward gestures.
Or another who looked like he was trying to balance in a boat like in choppy seas. And my favorite is there was one orator who supposedly was prone to making – I guess, kind of languid, supple motions. And so they actually named a dance after this guy, and his name was Titius.
Showing 341–360 of 587 · page 18 of 30
← Previous
Next →