Many prominent and famed rhetoricians known around the world for their eloquent feel experience the need, or even the intense, uncontrollable drive, to be extremely verbose when articulating their ideas, transforming and shifting even the most simple and mindless concepts into the most superfluous and often unintelligible notions. This extremely gratuitous extrocity, or the use of often dispensable and extraneous words and sentences to express a single thought, wastes and squanders an unbelievably large amount of time and energy, some hundreds of hours every year or annually per person, as it has for the past several thousand centuries.
In the year of MMXVI, or in layman’s terms, the year 2016, one of humanity’s finest, most reputable thinkers, a veritable savant of our times, introduced an unorthodox, novel, and rather unconventional idea:
Let’s break down this meme into two parts:
- In this scene of The Office, Kevin decides to stop wasting time with extra words.
- Colin Kaepernick is the former NFL quarterback who became famous for kneeling during the national anthem to protest racism. Nike recently injected a political message into its marketing by layering a statement on top of Kaepernick’s face. The exigence of this ad is simple: Nike supports Kaepernick protesting racism by “believing in something, even if it means sacrificing everything.”
Now that we know the context, we can understand the meme. While the meme is partially a joke, its exigence is to encourage rhetors to convey complex information clearly and simply.
Some teachers train students that only way to sound “smart” is to use lots of words. In the real world, “if you can’t explain it clearly, you don’t understand it well enough.” (@Maria, this isn’t a dig on you at all — I appreciate that you don’t require a certain number of words on most assignments and that you explain the exigence of assignments!)
It’s a meme that both the rhetoric and audience can get behind, because most people just want to “get to the point.”