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Glittering generalities are vague words or phrases that appeal to emotions and are commonly used in politics. They can also be used to describe individuals and flatter groups of people. Overuse can make them lose their power, and critical audiences may see them as lacking substance. Related terms include “golden hammer” and “ideogram.”
A glittering generality is a word or phrase that carries a strong emotional appeal, with versatility for rhetorical use. Rhetoric is the study of how language is used to attract an audience. Glittering generality, as a rhetorical technique, represents a simple and fundamental strategy for evoking certain emotions and reactions from listeners or readers.
The main feature of glittering generalities is that they are vaguely worded and contain ideas that are commonly considered extremely important in a given community. Some of the most classic examples of glittering generality consist of political terms relating to desirable traits for a nation or society. For example, the words “freedom” or “hope” or even the word “democracy” may be considered glittering generalities in many Western cultures.
Along with words and phrases that appeal to an individual’s sense of freedom, other glittering generalities are often applied to describe individuals. Some of these include words such as “courage”, “honor” or simply “strength”. These glittering generalities are often used to describe an audience in order to flatter a group of people for political reasons.
Part of the theory behind valuing glittering generalities is that words used as widely and as broadly as some of the above tend to become somewhat meaningless to an audience. This is especially true as modern societies grow more literate and linguistically advanced. Many pundits speak of irony or progressive sophistication in a target audience, where many of the words identified as glittering generalities may have had a lot of rhetorical power in the past, but are now much less useful for influencing the ideas of a group of people.
Some other related rhetorical terms tend to go along with the idea of using glittering generality. Some social scientists refer to the idea of a “golden hammer,” which, in communications, is a word or phrase heavily relied upon by a speaker or writer. As mentioned above, these types of sentences tend to lose power with overuse, and critical members of an audience may take them as an indication that the speaker has little substance to say.
Another term that may be related to glittering generalities is the ideogram. Those who coined this term defined it as a simple word or phrase that is used in context. The theory is that the ideogram functions to characterize or manifest certain ideological elements that speakers or writers convey to an audience via a particular choice of words. This also applies to commonly identified glittering generalities that tend to embody a popular ideal held by large numbers of people.
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