Oh Pitbull

Logos, pathos and ethos. These are those words that you can hear endless times in English class yet still have no idea what they mean. The one that is probably the biggest victim of this is ethos. Your teacher describes that ethos is the use of character. Ok, what does that mean and how do you do that? In the sixth chapter of Thank You for Arguing, Heinrichs attempts to answer these questions as clearly as he can, and he is able to succesfully do this with some examples that are really easy to understand. However, I want to show a different approach to the art of ethos. While Heinrichs shows how you should take advantage of ethos, I want to show you the opposite of ethos. In this entry you will learn about how to mess up in the use ethos through everyone's favourite baldy: Pitbull.

I want you to ask yourself something: do you like Pitbull? I'm not asking you about your trivial musical taste. I'm asking you if you like Pitbull as a person. This response is an effect of ethos. Personally, I don't really like Pitbull as a person.

Something about Pitbull makes me think that he didn't do too hot in his English classes. Maybe it is strange rhymes or how he always sings about the same things. Another possible reason is that he has no understanding of how to use ethos.

Two tools that Heinrichs gave us for the use of ethos are bragging and appealing to the values of the audience. When it comes to bragging, Pitbull seems to be a master. The amount of bragging that occurs in his songs get to a point where it is ridiculus. However, overusing the tool of bragging doesn't make you good at ethos. In the contrary, at extreems it actually hinders the success in terms of ethos. You can't really like a character who won't shut up about his money and how "Tiger Woods times Jesse James equals Pitbull all night long." In the other hand, when it comes to appealing to the audience's values, Pitbull is at the other extreme. Lyrics-wise, Pibull is only able to appeal to the values of people like him. Now, I am not going to judge people like Pitbull, but the use of lines such as "I got it locked up like Lindsay Lohan" and "Fo sho, flood the club like New Orleans" is pretty worrisome. If you do not think that these are brilliant lyrics and feel that they are offensive, then you have just experienced how it is to be in the recieving end of bad ethos. These lines don't make you like Pitbull. In fact, now you wouldn't actually want to hear what Pitbull wants to say. Such is the importance of ethos in rhetoric. Ethos is basically the door, the first step in succesfully convincing.

Hopefully, you were now able to actually learn something from Pitbull: how not to use ethos. Pitbull should feel proud. Or he could just not care. He's probably too busy counting his money in order to care about what some high school kid has to say about his rhetorical skills.