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First published in the United States of America by Three Rivers Press, an imprint of the Crown Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House LLC 2007
First published in Great Britain by Allen Lane 2008
This edition published in Penguin Books 2017
Text copyright © Jay Heinrichs, 2007, 2013, 2017
The moral right of the author has been asserted
Front cover photograph © Media Bakery
ISBN: 978-0-241-30608-6
PREFACE
PREFACE TO THE NEW EDITION
INTRODUCTION
1. Open Your Eyes
THE INVISIBLE ARGUMENT
OFFENSE
2. Set Your Goals
CICERO’S LIGHTBULB
3. Control the Tense
ORPHAN ANNIE’S LAW
4. Soften Them Up
CHARACTER, LOGIC, EMOTION
5. Get Them to Like You
EMINEM’S RULES OF DECORUM
6. Make Them Listen
THE LINCOLN GAMBIT
7. Use Your Craft
THE BELUSHI PARADIGM
8. Show You Care
QUINTILIAN’S USEFUL DOUBT
9. Control the Mood
THE AQUINAS MANEUVER
10. Turn the Volume Down
THE SCIENTIST’S LIE
11. Gain the High Ground
ARISTOTLE’S FAVORITE TOPIC
12. Persuade on Your Terms
THE SISTER FRAME
13. Control the Argument
HOMER SIMPSON’S CANONS OF LOGIC
DEFENSE
14. Spot Fallacies
THE SEVEN DEADLY LOGICAL SINS
15. Call a Foul
NIXON’S TRICK
16. Know Whom to Trust
PERSUASION DETECTORS
17. Find the Sweet Spot
MORE PERSUASION DETECTORS
18. Deal with a Bully
SOCRATES’ SMILE
ADVANCED OFFENSE
19. Get Instant Cleverness
MONTY PYTHON’S TREASURY OF WIT
20. Change Reality
BAG FULL OF EYEBALLS
21. Speak Your Audience’s Language
THE RHETORICAL APE
22. Make Them Identify with Your Choice
THE MOTHER-IN-LAW RUSE
23. Recover from a Screw-Up
APPLE’S FALL
24. Seize the Occasion
STALIN’S TIMING SECRET
25. Use the Right Medium
THE JUMBOTRON BLUNDER
ADVANCED AGREEMENT
26. Give a Persuasive Talk
THE OLDEST INVENTION
27. Capture Your Audience
THE TRUMP PERIOD
28. Write a Persuasive Essay
THE FRENCH EXPERIMENT
29. Use the Right Tools
THE BRAD PITT FACTOR
30. Run an Agreeable Country
RHETORIC’S REVIVAL
APPENDICES
I. Argument Lab
II. The Tools
III. Glossary
IV. Chronology
V. Further Reading
ACKNOWLEDGMENTS
FOLLOW PENGUIN
To Dorothy Jr. and George:
You win.
Few people can say that John Quincy Adams changed their lives. Those who can are wise to keep it to themselves. Friends tell me I should also avoid writing about my passion for rhetoric, the three-thousand-year-old art of persuasion.
John Quincy Adams changed my life by introducing me to rhetoric.
Sorry.
Years ago, I was wandering through Dartmouth College’s library for no particular reason, flipping through books at random, and in a dim corner of the stacks I found a large section on rhetoric, the art of persuasion. A dusty, maroon-red volume attributed to Adams sat at eye level. I flipped it open and felt like an indoor Coronado. Here lay treasure.
The volume contained a set of rhetorical lectures that Adams taught to undergraduates at Harvard College from 1805 to 1809, when he was a United States senator commuting between Massachusetts and Washington. In his first class, the paunchy, balding thirty-eight-year-old urged his goggling adolescents to “catch from the relics of ancient oratory those unresisted powers, which mould the mind of man to the will of the speaker, and yield the guidance of the nation to the dominion of the voice.” To me that sounded more like hypnosis than politics, which was sort of cool in a Manchurian Candidate way.
In the years since, while reading all I could of rhetoric, I came to realize something: Adams’s language sounded antique, but the powers he described are real. Rhetoric means more than grand oratory, more than “using words … to influence or persuade,” as Webster’s defines it. It teaches us to argue without anger. And it offers a chance to tap into a source of social power I never knew existed.
You could say that rhetoric talked me into itself.
When I began writing this book a dozen years ago, my wife thought I was finally getting rhetoric out of my system. Not exactly. Since then, rhetoric has become a part of me. I learn more about it every day, in Skype-ins with students, lectures at colleges, and my consulting work. What’s more, my self-indulgent plunge into rhetoric turned out to be actually useful. Thank You for Arguing has been translated into eleven languages. It has become standard reading in high school AP English Language classes, gets taught in thousands of college and law school courses, and—thanks to educators—became a New York Times education bestseller.
But that’s not the useful part. I see rhetoric spreading among the brightest young people, and that gives me hope for our deeply troubled society. In an era of fake news, bizarre politics, and groupthink-infested communities and campuses, rhetoric offers a way out. Or, rather, it shows a way back to the problem-solving conversations that created capitalist democracies in the first place.
Plus, my own family has found rhetoric to be personally useful. After suffering through my excited rhetorical dinner talk throughout their childhoods, my son and daughter are natural rhetoricians today. While they are teenagers through most of this book, they have since grown up into articulate and useful adults. Dorothy Jr. heals transplant patients as a nurse in Washington, D.C. George teaches high school history in Sun Valley, Idaho—along with an argumentation course that uses this book as a text. Both of them know how to argue without anger. My wife, Dorothy Sr., uses her persuasive skill as a senior fundraiser for a medical school and major medical center.
Readers seem to have benefited as well. I love hearing from readers how they use the tools in this book. They often ask me to name my own favorite rhetorical devices. I find myself increasingly using concession—the practice of agreeing with an opponent’s point. It defuses tension faster than any other tool.
At the same time, readers and educators have asked for more skills, such as dealing with a bully and writing an essay. This edition includes new chapters for both, along with one that delves into the mystery of tropes, those reality-bending devices that enrich poetry and manipulate voters.
While this edition replaces some worn-out pop-culture references, I kept everything about The Simpsons. Because much of the show’s humor comes from twisting logic, there simply is no more entertaining way to teach logical fallacies.
While working on this manuscript, I found myself observing the astonishing political rise of Donald Trump. Many voters admired him for his straight-talking scorn of political rhetoric. But Trump’s 2016 campaign gave me a chance to show one of oratory’s coolest tricks, the period. Trump used it masterfully.
Finally, you’ll find an enriched set of exercises in the back, all under the rubric of “Argument Lab.” It’s the result of a collaboration with the brilliant rhetorician David Landes, who teaches at the American University of Dubai and has given countless workshops and guest lectures around the world. You’ll find our quizzes and exercises in that section, along with videos and blog posts on ArgueLab.com. Educators take note: David has written a guide to teaching the book, available for free from Random House. To find out how to get your copy, go to ArgueLab.com and click on the “For Educators” link.
David teaches rhetoric in a way that’s uniquely suited to our era. While many people rightly question the ethics of such a manipulative art, he points out that rhetoric can bring us all together in a way that no other discipline can. “It empowers the unempowered, heals the wounded, and restores relationships,” he says.
In fact, while rhetoric can help train top debaters, most of the art has nothing to do with winning. “There are as many motivations to argue as there are situations,” David says. “Many people just need to be heard without judgment. Others need to feel involved. Others feel pressured to fake a confident opinion.”
That’s where rhetoric comes in. It helps you understand the deeper power of words and the motivations behind them. Effective persuasion requires reading the beliefs and expectations, values, and emotions of your audience. You can do this cynically. You can use rhetoric to get your point across, and even to change the world. But often the goal “is people, not ideas,” as David puts it.
Rhetoric can be—often is—a destructive force. That alone is reason enough to learn it, if only to inoculate ourselves against its manipulation. But rhetoric also offers the most healing power I know. I honestly believe it can save our civilization.
Concordia discors.
Harmony in discord.
—HORACE
Truth springs from argument among friends.
It is early in the morning and my seventeen-year-old son eats breakfast, giving me a narrow window to use our sole bathroom. I wrap a towel around my waist and approach the sink, avoiding the grim sight in the mirror; as a writer, I don’t have to shave every day. (Marketers despairingly call a consumer like me a “low self-monitor.”) I do have my standards, though, and hygiene is one. I grab toothbrush and toothpaste. The tube is empty. The nearest replacement sits on a shelf in our freezing basement, and I’m not dressed for the part.
“George!” I yell. “Who used all the toothpaste?”
TRY THIS IN A MEETING
Answer someone who expresses doubt about your idea with “Okay, let’s tweak it.” Now focus the argument on revising your idea as if the group had already accepted it. This move is a form of concession—rhetorical jujitsu that uses your opponent’s moves to your advantage.
A sarcastic voice answers from the other side of the door. “That’s not the point, is it, Dad?” George says. “The point is how we’re going to keep this from happening again.”
He has me. I have told him countless times how the most productive arguments use the future tense, the language of choices and decisions.
“You’re right,” I say. “You win. Now will you please get me some toothpaste?”
“Sure.” George retrieves a tube, happy that he beat his father at an argument.
Or did he? Who got what he wanted? In reality, by conceding his point, I persuaded him. If I had simply said, “Don’t be a jerk and get me some toothpaste,” George might have stood there arguing. Instead I made him feel triumphant, triumph made him benevolent, and that got me exactly what I wanted. I achieved the pinnacle of persuasion: not just an agreement, but one that gets an audience—a teenage one at that—to do my bidding.
No, George, I win.
What kind of father manipulates his own son? Oh, let’s not call it manipulation. Call it instruction. Any parent should consider rhetoric, the art of argument, one of the essential R’s. Rhetoric is the art of influence, friendship, and eloquence, of ready wit and irrefutable logic. And it harnesses the most powerful of social forces, argument.
‣ Useful Figure
SYNCRISIS: Reframes an argument by redefining it. “Not manipulation—instruction.” You’ll find a whole chapter on figures later on, as well as a glossary in the back.
Whether you sense it or not, argument surrounds you. It plays with your emotions, changes your attitude, talks you into a decision, and goads you to buy things. Argument lies behind political labeling, advertising, jargon, voices, gestures, and guilt trips; it forms a real-life Matrix, the supreme software that drives our social lives. And rhetoric serves as argument’s decoder. By teaching the tricks we use to persuade one another, the art of persuasion reveals the Matrix in all its manipulative glory.
‣ Persuasion Alert
It’s only fair to show my rhetorical cards—to tell you when I use devices to persuade you. The Matrix analogy serves as more than a pop culture reference; it also appeals to the reader’s acceptance of invisible wheels within wheels in modern existence, from computer software to quantum physics. Rhetoric calls this shared attitude a “commonplace”; as you shall see, it is one of the building blocks of persuasion.
The ancients considered rhetoric the essential skill of leadership—knowledge so important that they placed it at the center of higher education. It taught them how to speak and write persuasively, produce something to say on every occasion, and make people like them when they spoke. After the ancient Greeks invented it, rhetoric helped create the world’s first democracies. It trained Roman orators such as Julius Caesar and Marcus Tullius Cicero and gave the Bible its finest language. It even inspired William Shakespeare. Every one of America’s founders studied rhetoric, and they used its principles in writing the Constitution.
‣ Persuasion Alert
Here I yank you from Webster to Animal House, not just to encapsulate rhetoric’s decline but to make you unconsciously vote for my side of the argument. Whose side are you on, Webster’s or John Belushi’s? The technical term for this shotgun marriage of contrasting thoughts is antithesis, meaning “opposing idea.”
Rhetoric faded in academia during the 1800s, when social scientists dismissed the notion that an individual could stand up to the inexorable forces of history. Who wants to teach leadership when academia doesn’t believe in leaders? At the same time, English lit replaced the classics, and ancient thought fell out of vogue. Nonetheless, a few remarkable people continued to study the art. Daniel Webster picked up rhetoric at Dartmouth by joining a debating society, the United Fraternity, which had an impressive classical library and held weekly debates. Years later, the club changed its name to Alpha Delta and partied its way to immortality by inspiring the movie Animal House. To the brothers’ credit, they didn’t forget their classical heritage entirely; hence the toga party.
Scattered colleges and universities still teach rhetoric—in fact, the art is rapidly gaining popularity among undergraduates—but outside academia we forgot it almost entirely. What a thing to lose. Imagine stumbling upon Newton’s law of gravity and meeting face-to-face with the forces that drive the universe. Or imagine coming across Freud for the first time and suddenly becoming aware of the unconscious, where your id, ego, and superego conduct their silent arguments.
TRY THIS IN A PRESENTATION
The Romans were using the “But wait, there’s more” pitch a couple of millennia before infomercials. They gave it a delectable name: dirimens copulatio, meaning “a joining that interrupts.” It’s a form of amplification, an essential rhetorical tactic that turns up the volume as you speak. In a presentation, you can amplify by layering your points: “Not only do we have this, but we also …”
I wrote this book for that reason: to lead you through this ill-known world of argument and welcome you to the Persuasive Elect. Along the way you’ll enhance your image with Aristotle’s three traits of credible leadership: virtue, disinterest, and practical wisdom. You’ll find yourself using logic as a convincing tool, smacking down fallacies and building airtight assertions. Aristotle’s principles will also help you decide which medium—text? phone? skywriting?—works best for each message. You will discover a simple strategy to get an argument unstuck when it bogs down in accusation and anger.
And that’s just the beginning. The pages to come contain more than a hundred “argument tools” borrowed from ancient texts and adapted to modern situations, along with suggestions for trying the techniques at home, school, or work, or in your community. You will see when logic works best, and when you should lean on an emotional strategy. You’ll acquire mind-molding figures of speech and ready-made tactics, including Aristotle’s irresistible enthymeme, a neat bundle of logic that I find easier to use than pronounce. You’ll see how to actually benefit from your own screw-ups. And you’ll discover the most compelling tools of all in your audience’s own self-identity.
By the end of the book you will have mastered the rhetorical tricks for making an audience eager to listen. People still love a well-delivered talk; the top professional speakers charge more per person than a Bruce Springsteen concert. I devote a whole chapter to Cicero’s elegant five-step method for constructing a speech—invention, arrangement, style, memory, and delivery—a system that has served the greatest orators for the past two thousand years.
Great argument does not always mean elaborate speech, though. The most effective rhetoric disguises its art. And so I’ll reveal a rhetorical device for implanting opinions in people’s heads through sheer sleight of tongue.
Besides all these practical tools, rhetoric offers a grander, metaphysical payoff: it jolts you into a fresh new perspective on the human condition. After it awakens you to the argument all around, the world will never seem the same.
I myself am living proof.
To see just how pervasive argument is, I recently attempted a whole day without persuasion—free of advertising, politics, family squabbles, or any psychological manipulation whatsoever. No one would persuade me, and I would avoid persuading them. Heck, I wouldn’t even let myself persuade myself. Nobody, not even I, would tell me what to do.
If anyone could consider himself qualified for the experiment, a confirmed hermit like me could. I work for myself; indeed, having dropped out of a career in journalism and publishing, I work by myself, in a cabin a considerable distance from my house. I live in a tiny village in northern New England, a region that boasts the most persuasion-resistant humans on the planet. Advertisers have nightmares about people like me: no TV, no smartphone, dial-up Internet. I’m commercial-free, a walking NPR, my own individual, persuasion-immune man.
As if.
TRY THIS IN A PROPOSAL
If your idea has been used elsewhere, describe its success in vivid detail as though the audience itself had accomplished it. Show how much more skill and resources your plan dedicates to the idea. Then feel free to use your favorite cliché, e.g., “It’s a slam dunk.”
My wristwatch alarm goes off at six. I normally use it to coax myself out of bed, but now I ignore it. I stare up at the ceiling, where the smoke detector blinks reassuringly. If the smoke alarm detected smoke, it would alarm, rousing the heaviest sleeper. The philosopher Aristotle would approve of the smoke detector’s rhetoric; he understood the power of emotion as a motivator.
For the time being, the detector has nothing to say. But my cat does. She jumps on the bed and sticks her nose in my armpit. As reliable as my watch and twice as annoying, the cat persuades remarkably well for ten dumb pounds of fur. Instead of words she uses gesture and tone of voice—potent ingredients of argument.
I resist stoically. No cat is going to boss me around this morning.
The watch beeps again. I wear a Timex Ironman, whose name comes from a self-abusive athletic event; presumably, if the watch works for a masochist who subjects it to two miles of swimming, a hundred miles of biking, and 26.2 miles of running all in one day, it would work for someone like me who spends his lunch hour walking strenuously down to the brook to see if there are any fish. The ancient Romans would call the Ironman’s brand appeal argumentum a fortiori, “argument from strength.” Its logic goes like this: if something works the hard way, it’s more likely to work the easy way. Advertisers favor the argument from strength. Years ago, Life cereal ran an ad with little Mikey the fussy eater. His two older brothers tested the cereal on him, figuring that if Mikey liked it, anybody would. And he liked it! An argumentum a fortiori cereal ad. My Ironman watch’s own argument from strength does not affect me, however. I bought it because it was practical. Remember, I’m advertising-immune.
TRY THIS AT HOME
If you’re appalled at the notion of manipulating your loved ones, try using pure logic—no emotions, no hidden tactics, no references to your authority or the sacrifices you make. Do it for a whole day, and you may be surprised by a rising level of anger in your family. Seduction is a great pacifier.
But its beeping is driving me crazy. Here I’m not even up yet and I already contemplate emotional appeals from a cat and a smoke detector along with a wristwatch argument from strength. Wrenching myself out of bed, I say to the mirror what I tell it every morning: “Don’t take any crap from anyone.”
The cat bites me on the heel. I grab my towel and go fix its breakfast. Five minutes later I’m out of toothpaste and arguing with my son. Not a good start to my experiment, but I’ll chalk it up to what scientists euphemistically call an “artifact” (translation: boneheaded mistake) and move on. I make coffee, grab a pen, and begin writing ostentatiously in a notebook. This does little good in the literary sense—I can barely read my own scribble before coffee—but it produces wonderful rhetorical results: when my wife sees me writing, she often brings me breakfast.
‣ Tips from the Ancients
WHEN JUSTICE WASN’T BLIND: Aristotle said that emotion trumps logic. A famous Roman orator proved this by using strategic pornography to defend a beautiful priestess of the Temple of Aphrodite charged with prostitution. When the trial appeared to be going badly, the orator made the young woman stand in the middle of the Roman Forum, where he tore off her clothes. It worked. Moved by this zaftig agent of the goddess of love, the (all-male) jury acquitted her. The same technique helped Sharon Stone get away with murder in Basic Instinct.
Did I just violate my own experiment? Shielding the notebook from view, I write a grocery list. There. That counts as writing.
Dorothy returned to full-time work after I quit my job. The deal was that I would take over the cooking, but she loves to see her husband as the inspired author and herself as the able enabler. My wife is a babe, and many babes go for inspired authors. Of course, she might be persuading me: by acting as the kind of babe who goes for inspired authors, she turns me on. Seduction underlies the most insidious, and enjoyable, forms of argument.
Seduction is not just for sex, either. Writer Frederick Kaufman showed in Harper’s Magazine how the Food Network uses techniques identical to that of the porn industry—overmiked sound, very little plot, and good-looking characters, along with lavish close-ups of firm flesh and flowing juices.
RACHAEL RAY: Lentils poof up big when you cook ’em. They just suck up all the liquid as they get nice and tender.
EMERIL LAGASSE: In go the bananas. Oh, yeah, babe. Get ’em happy right now.
We live in a tangled, dark (I almost added “moist”) world of persuasion. A used car salesman once seduced me out of fifteen grand. My family and I had just moved to Connecticut, and I needed cheap transportation. It had been a tough move; I was out of sorts. The man at the car lot had me pegged before I said a word. He pointed to a humble-looking Ford Taurus sedan, suggested a test drive, and as soon as I buckled in he said, “Want to see P. T. Barnum’s grave?” Of course I did.
The place was awesome. We had to stop for peacocks, and brilliant-green feral Peruvian parrots squawked in the branches of a huge fir tree. Opposite Barnum’s impressive monument stood Tom Thumb’s marker with a life-sized statue of the millionaire midget. Enthralled by our test drive, I did everything else the salesman suggested, and he suggested I buy the Ford. It was a lemon.
He sized me up and changed my mood; he seduced me, and to tell you the truth, I enjoyed it. I had some misgivings the next morning, but no regrets. It was a consensual act.
Which leads us to argument’s grand prize: the consensus. It means more than just an agreement, much more than a compromise. The consensus represents an audience’s commonsense thinking. In fact, it is a common sense, a shared faith in a choice—the decision or action you want. And this is where seduction comes in. As St. Augustine knew, faith requires emotion.
Seduction is manipulation, manipulation is half of argument, and therefore many of us shy from it. But seduction offers more than just consensual sex. It can bring you consensus. Even Aristotle, that logical old soul, believed in the curative powers of seduction. Logic alone will rarely get people to do anything. They have to desire the act. You may not like seduction’s manipulative aspects; still, it beats fighting, which is what we usually mistake for an argument.
TRY THIS AT WORK
You can use seduction—the nonsexual kind—in a presentation. Will your plan increase efficiency? Get your audience to lust after it; paint a vision of actually taking lunch hours and seeing their families more.
Meanwhile, my experiment gets more dubious by the moment. I’m leaving the bathroom when Dorothy puts a plate of eggs on the table, shrugs into her suit jacket, and kisses me goodbye. “Don’t forget, I’ll be home late—I’m having heavy hors d’oeuvres at the reception tonight,” she says, and leaves for her fundraising job at a law school. (Fundraising and law. Could it get more rhetorical?)
I turn to George. “So, want to have dinner with me or on campus tonight?” George attends a boarding school as a day student. He hates the food there.
“I don’t know,” he says. “I’ll call you from school.”
I want to work late and don’t feel like cooking, but I’m loath to have George think my work takes priority over him. “Okay,” I say, adding with as much enthusiasm as I can fake, “we’ll have stew!”
“Ugh,” says George, right on cue. He hates my stew even more than school food. The odds of my cooking tonight have just gone way down.
Oops, as that fine rhetorician Britney Spears put it, I did it again. And so goes my day. In my cabin office, I email editors with flattering explanations for missing their deadlines. (I’m just trying to live up to their high standards!) I put off calling Sears to complain about a $147 bill for replacing a screw in our oven. When I do call eventually, I’ll take my time explaining the situation. Giving me a break on the bill will cost less than dealing with me any further.
TRY THIS AFTER YOU’RE PUT ON HOLD
This works with most bureaucrats. Pretend you have all the time in the world, and present your choice as the lesser of two evils. They either cut you a break or waste more time with you. Functionaries, like water, follow the path of least resistance.
At noon, I grab some lunch and head outside for a walk. A small pile of fox scat lies atop a large granite rock. Mine, the fox says with the scat. This spot belongs to me. Territorial creatures, such as foxes and suburbanites, use complicated signals to mark off terrain and discourage intruders—musk, fences, scat, marriage licenses, footprints, alarm systems … Argument is in our nature, literally.
TRY THIS IN A PRESENTATION
Present a decision with a chiasmus by using a mirror image of your first choice: “Either we control expenses or let expenses control us.”
A mockingbird sings a pretty little tune that warns rivals off its turf. Without a pause it does the same thing in reverse, rendering a figure of speech called chiasmus. This crisscross figure repeats a phrase with its mirror image: “You can take a boy out of the country, but you can’t take the country out of a boy.” “I wasted time, and now time doth waste me.” Our culture underrates figures, but only because most of us lack the rhetorical savvy to wield them. They can yield surprising power. John F. Kennedy deployed a chiasmus during his inaugural address—“Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”—and thousands joined the Peace Corps. I fell in love with figures, and even launched a website, Figarospeech.com, devoted to them. Figures add polish to a memo or paper, and in day-to-day conversation they can supply ready wit to the most tedious conversations.
‣ Persuasion Alert
Whoa there. A presidential chiasmus drove people into the Peace Corps? I use one of the more persuasive ways to cheat in logic—because B follows A, A caused B. I call it the Chanticleer fallacy, after the rooster who thought his crowing made the sun come up.
The phone is ringing when I get back to my cabin. It’s George calling to say he plans to eat at school. (Yes!) So I work late, rewarding myself now and then by playing computer pinball. I find I can sit still for longer stretches with game breaks. Is this persuasion? I suppose it is. My non-rhetorical day turned out to be pretty darn rhetorical, but nonetheless agreeable.
I finally knock off work and head back to the house for a shower and shave, even though this isn’t a shaving day. My wife deals with a lot of good-looking, well-dressed men, and now and then I like to make a territorial call, through grooming and clothing, to convince her she did not marry a bum. I pull on a cashmere sweater that Dorothy says makes my eyes look “bedroomy” and meet her at the door with a cold gin and tonic.
Let the seduction begin.