• A fun, easy-to-read book on how language can be used to manipulate or be manipulated.
• After reading this book, you’ll know how to better understand and decipher your interlocutor’s speech and avoid mistakes.

For more than a century, linguistics has been developing as a discipline and has been interested in the different types of influence that language exerts on thought. It has long been known that well-chosen words have the power to convince or dissuade, to make a person sympathetic or simply more credible in the eyes of those they are speaking to. This is the art of rhetoric, practiced since antiquity. But for centuries, these observations were confined to manuals based on specific examples and situations that were often invented. However, over the last forty years, the rise of psycholinguistics, with its ability to use the tools of psychology to test phenomena linked to the structure of language and its use, has fundamentally changed the situation. Linguistics can now be defined as a human science, because it presents empirically-based results that have greatly increased in validity and in generalisation. This book echoes the union between linguistics and psychology, by presenting a series of everyday linguistic phenomena that are at the root of the power of language as a tool of persuasion.

Each chapter sets the phenomenon in question in its linguistic context, using simple words and real examples (often taken from advertising or political speeches), before presenting the experimental (and often entertaining!) research that has enabled us to refine our knowledge of their impact on persuasion, and even turned them into formidable tools of manipulation that everyone would benefit from knowing.