By Philip Seargeant

In this article I address the question of what constitutes a political catchphrase, and in formulating an answer, look at the range of partially synonymous and related terms which fall broadly within the semantic field of the ‘catchphrase’. In doing so, I look at the role played by political catchphrases in political discourse, with a particular focus on how they relate to political persuasion and propaganda. As ever with exercises such as this, the initial definition can only be provisional and the hope is that the subsequent discussion can help refine it – in this case, via reference to the web of similar and overlapping concepts that constitute the taxonomy I’m sketching here.

What is a political catchphrase?

The premises which underpin the significance of the role of catchphrases in political discourse are the essential part that language plays in politics generally (language being a critical form of action) and the importance of concision and simplification in today’s communications ecosphere. My initial definition of a catchphrase is simply: a concise expression (word or phrase) of political significance. To this one might perhaps add that such expressions are distinctive and that they become an established part of public discourse. Suman Gupta, in his book Political Catchphrases and Contemporary History, uses the definition: ‘a nodal linguistic feature in public [or political] discourse’ and draws on William Safire’s characterization of a word that ‘crystallises an issue’ and ‘sparks a response’. Distilling this into a few fundamental properties we end up with concision, salience and significance as defining features of the genre.

Dictionaries tend to define the concept of the catchphrase as it occurs in everyday usage (i.e., not specifically in the political sphere) as a word or phrase in regular circulation which has come to be representative of a person, group or point of view. In popular culture, the concept is most associated with quotes from celebrities and comedians which have become part of the essential paraphernalia of that celebrity’s public image. Like idioms, their meaning is greater than the sum of the individual parts and draws on a specific cultural history that’s shared with their audience.

A political catchphrase, on the other hand, isn’t simply a catchphrase that was used and is associated with a particular political actor. While the category can include examples of these, its meaning is anchored more around expressions which play distinct roles in political discourse. In other words, catchphrases are political tools in their own right which have an effect on the way that power operates in society. They’re a form of political rhetoric – one that’s characterised by its succinctness, and by popular usage and uptake.

The other prominent sphere in which catchphrases are used is advertising and branding. There’s a great deal of overlap between the role played by catchphrases in politics and commercial domains, and also a great deal of influence between the two. Shared characteristics include the aims of brand awareness, brand loyalty and persuasion, along with the use of concision and various stylistic techniques to attract attention. As Gupta notes, within the corporate role all aims are ultimately financial, and the purpose of the catchphrase is the promotion of products and services. As such, they tend to be created by design rather than emerge organically from public discourse, and are often regulated by forms of legal oversight (copyright and IP regulation, for example). There can, of course, be direct convergence of the two domains in certain cases: Donald Trump’s never-ending grift, for instance, has used catchphrases to both commercial and political ends.

Different types and their various properties

With a definition as broad as that outlined above, the concept can include a variety of different genres of utterance, including the following: slogans, framing devices, dog whistles, indexing words, soundbites, headline journalism, clickbait, quotes, keywords, buzzwords, memes, hashtags, nicknames, hot button topics and so on. The table below is an attempt to identify the clusters of key features that distinguish each of these as distinct genres of political discourse. The qualities included in the table are variously categorised according to the following general factors:

• Function – i.e., what the catchword/phrase is intended to achieve;
• Provenance – i.e., how the phrase gets coined or popularised, whether this is by design or happens ‘organically’, etc.;
• Form – i.e., the linguistic and stylistic character they take;
• Usage – i.e., what role the phrases play in people’s linguistic repertoire.

(As a sidenote, there are other related terms for referring to multi-word expressions – terms such as idioms, fixed phrases, proverbs, aphorisms – which I haven’t included here because they are not, for the most part, expressly political.)

The qualities listed in the table can be glossed as follows:

• Ideologically-loaded: the terms encode a particular ideological perspective or bias via the language they use to frame an issue. Given that the general topic is political catchphrases, to an extent all the genres listed here are ideological. In this context, however, the category is applied to those which very specifically advocate for one ideological position over another. Slogans, for instance, are part of propaganda resources for a party or movement, and thus ideologically-loaded. Buzzwords, on the other hand, tend to be more descriptive than propagandistic, even if they still frame an issue in a particular way. Ideological connotations can arise from the provenance of a term as well as from its uptake by a particular community – a term such as ‘virtue signalling’, for instance, was coined by a right-leaning journalist, and is particularly used against the left. But its use isn’t restricted to those of this ideological bent and thus isn’t always ideologically-loaded.
• Explicit persuasive purpose: the use of the terms primarily as a means of political persuasion rather than, for example, a form of description or referent for a phenomenon or movement.
• Simplifying: the way catchphrases present issues in overly simplistic terms and drain them of complexity and nuance. This can include trivializing an issue, and often results in a process of distortion. Despite the fact that catchphrases are by definition concise this doesn’t necessarily mean they truncate an argument. Keywords, for instance, tend to be ‘difficult’ words with complex or elusive meanings.
• Mis / disinformation: whether the catchphrase presents an issue or information in a way which distorts the facts of the matter and contributes to the circulation of mis- and disinformation. This is often closely related to the use of a catchphrase for propagandistic purposes.
• Stylistically creative: the use of stylistic devices and tropes to attract attention and render the catchphrase particularly memorable. This often includes using distinctive figures of speech such as metaphors, alliteration, rhyme and parallelisms.
• Memorable / quotable: the ‘catch’ element of ‘catchphrases’. There is overlap here with the above in that stylistic devices can be used to make a phrase more salient and memorable. It could be argued that all the different genres listed in the table include this quality (this is why they all fall under the umbrella term ‘catchphrases’) – yet some do so to a more acute extent than others. For instance, being memorable is not a core quality of keywords.
• Purposefully manufactured: catchphrases which have been designed rather than having developed their popularity organically from their use in public discourse.
• Indexical of a worldview: There are a number of terms which, when used, can index an entire worldview. In these instances, the catchphrases have become part of the jargon used by a faction or community, and while seemingly descriptive, they take on specific ideological connotations because of the history of their usage. Terms of this sort could be said to characterise a discourse community, as they feature as key linguistic tools which define membership of that community. The many terms used by conspiracy theorists are a prime example of this.
• Expressive of identity: use of the catchphrase becomes an emblem for a faction or movement’s identity. The MAGA slogan, for example, has become part of an unofficial uniform for adherents of Donald Trump. Related to this are catchphrases which work in part as an attack on an opponent’s identity and engage in ‘destructive adversariality’. The aim here is to undermine the status of the opponent by associating them with undesirable characteristics. Within the domain of catchphrases, nicknames are the most prominent example of this.
• Agenda creating: use of a catchphrase either to help create or establish a particular concept by supplying it with a label and conferring a set of connotations on a phenomenon, or to boost the profile of the concept within public discourse.
• Proxies for broader debate: catchphrases whose interpretation sparks controversy or argument. The subject of the argument is a broader issue, but it’s conducted via a focus on the catchphrase/word itself. The debate over gendered pronouns, for instance, and the terms used in this, is about understandings of gender in general rather than solely the grammatical lexis used to refer to people.
• Liable to travel: the popularity of the catchphrase results in its being taken up in various different contexts. A slogan, for example, can be appropriated by others apart from its original users, and soundbites can be intertexually recycled for multiple different scenarios and purposes.

There are a couple of things to note from the exercise of trying to categorise the different genres of catchphrase according to these properties. The first is that in some cases the properties are not essential to the genre but are still present. Furthermore, when present but not essential, properties can apply to a greater or lesser degree. As such, attributing properties to genres is not always a straightforward process and the taxonomy is not a fixed inventory so much as an initial checklist for assistance in the analysis of catchphrases.  

Based on this chart then, we can begin to reflect on which elements appear fundamental to the broader concept of the political catchphrase. Returning to the three ‘essential’ properties drawn from the different definitions discussed at the beginning of the article, all of the genres within the chart constitute concise forms of communication and they all have a particular significance for their audience, be this a specific faction or the public at large. The vast majority of them also have a certain salience or prominence in political discourse, and indeed often become the subject of discussion and debate in their own right.

This last property doesn’t apply to all genres however. ‘Dog whistles’, for example, are intended to be viewed as unexceptional by the majority and only trigger a specific subset of the population. An important part of their function is to hide in plain sight and act as a form of covert communication for those sympathetic to a particular set of beliefs. ‘Framing devices’ similarly share this aim of hiding in plain sight, but in their case the goal is for them to become part of mainstream discourse and to be seen as natural and neutral ways of referring to a concept or issue.

All of which suggests that there’s little scope to move beyond a very broad definition of ‘political catchphrase’ – something along the lines of ‘a concise expression (word or phrase) of political significance’. But that at the same time, the complexity that’s masked by such a definition can nevertheless be mapped out according to a mostly circumscribed set of qualities which can act as a starting point for analysis of the role that catchphrases play in political discourse.

Image credit: RoRo, CC0, via Wikimedia Commons