Propaganda & Doth

(This word was on more than one persons vocabulary list this week!)

(Someone asked in class if this poster was a political cartoon.  I said that it was a better example of propaganda)

Propaganda
Communicating information in a way that tries to influence the opinion of your audience.  Propaganda is not impartial or objective.  There is an agenda being promoted, either subtly or overtly (look those words up if needed).  By definition propaganda is technically a neutral term - you could be influencing your audience for their good.  The connotation (look it up) of this word now, however, thanks to it's most manipulative masters like Hitler, Mussolini, Mao Tse Tung and currently Kim Jong-il is negative.  But it's not just the bad guys who used it - the US produced a lot of propaganda during WWII so that citizens would support the war effort and buy US War Bonds among other things.  (I was surprised recently to find this message even in reruns of Lassie!)  You could argue that Benjamin Franklin’s political cartoon of the segmented snake was propaganda.

Doth

Ok, this one requires a little grammar (something I'm just beginning to see the value and worth of).  'Doth' is a present tense of the word 'do'.  It is a holdover from Old or Middle English.  You'll hear it in familiar quotes like this one from Shakespeare:  "The lady doth protest too much," or in poems like "How doth your garden grow?".  Sometimes it is used instead of puting a present tense 's' on a verb like in protest and sometimes it literally replaces the word does!  I'm curious whose word this was and where you read it.  Was it someone reading Irving?