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Glossary of Rhetorical Terms
accumulation to bdelygmia
accumulation
Figure wherein a rhetor gathers scattered points
and lists them together.
-"Emptiness, Qohelet says, everything is emptiness. What do people gain from all
the work they do under the sun? A generation goes and a generation comes, yet the earth
remains forever. The sun rises and the sun sets, and rushes back again to the place from
which it rises. The wind blows south, then returns to the north, round and round
goes the wind, on its rounds it circulates. All streams flow to the sea, yet the
sea does not fill up. All matters are tiring, more than anyone can express. The eye is not
satisfied with seeing, nor the ear filled with hearing. What is is what will be, and what
has been done is what will be done. There is nothing new under the sun."
("Ecclesiastes," The Old Testament)
-"I don't know how to manage my time; he does. . . .
I don't know how to dance and he does.
I don't know how to type and he does.
I don't know how to drive. . . .
I don't know how to sing and he does."
(Natalia Ginzburg, "He and I")
-"We have our troubles too--One trouble is you: you talk too loud, cuss too loud,
look too black."
(Langston Hughes, "High to Low")
allegory 
Extending a metaphor
through an entire speech or passage so that objects, persons, and actions in the text are
equated with meanings that lie outside the text. The most famous allegory
in English is John Bunyan's Pilgrim's Progress (1678), an allegory of Christian
salvation represented by the varied experiences of its Everyman hero, Christian.
[Gk. "to speak so as to imply something other"]
-"And now, I said, let me show in a figure how far our nature is enlightened or
unenlightened: --Behold! human beings living in an underground cave, which has a mouth
open towards the light and reaching all along the cave; here they have been from their
childhood, and have their legs and necks chained so that they cannot move, and can only
see before them, being prevented by the chains from turning round their heads. Above
and behind them a fire is blazing at a distance, and between the fire and the prisoners
there is a raised way; and you will see, if you look, a low wall built along the way, like
the screen which marionette players have in front of them, over which they show the
puppets. . . . And now look again, and see what will naturally follow if the
prisoners are released and disabused of their error. At first, when any of them is
liberated and compelled suddenly to stand up and turn his neck round and walk and look
towards the light, he will suffer sharp pains; the glare will distress him, and he will be
unable to see the realities of which in his former state he had seen the shadows; and then
conceive some one saying to him, that what he saw before was an illusion, but that now,
when he is approaching nearer to being and his eye is turned towards more real existence,
he has a clearer vision, -what will be his reply? And you may further imagine that
his instructor is pointing to the objects as they pass and requiring him to name them,
-will he not be perplexed? Will he not fancy that the shadows which he formerly saw
are truer than the objects which are now shown to him?"
(Plato, from Book Seven of The Republic, "Allegory of the Cave")
See also The Allegory
of Lady Rhetoric (Dr. Lamoureaux, Rhetorical Resources)
alliteration
Repetition of initial consonant sound. [L. "putting letters
together"]
-"In a somer seson, whan soft was the sonne,
I shope me into shroudes, as I a shepe were;"
(William Langland, 14th century)
-"Father is rather vulgar, my dear. The word Papa, besides, gives a
pretty form to the lips. Papa, potatoes, poultry, prunes, and prism, are all very
good words for the lips: especially prunes and prism."
(Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit)
-And still of a winter's night, they say, when the wind is in the trees,
When the moon is a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,
When the road is a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,
A highwayman comes riding-
Riding-riding-
A highwayman comes riding, up to the old inn-door.
(Alfred Noyes, "The Highwayman")
-"Guinness is good for you." (advertisement)
-"My style is public negotiations for parity, rather than private negotiations for
position." (Jesse Jackson)
ambiguity 
The presence of two or more possible meanings in any passage. (See William
Empson's Seven Types of Ambiguity, 2nd ed., 1947.)
[L. "wandering about"]
-"What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?"
(William Blake, "The Tyger")
-"I can't tell you how much I enjoyed meeting your husband."
-"I can't recommend this book too highly."
-"Prostitutes Appeal to Pope" (newspaper headline)
See also Kent
Bach's discussion of Ambiguity (Routledge Encyclopedia of History)
amplification
General term for all the ways an argument, an explanation, or a description can be
expanded and enriched. As Havelock, Ong, and others have pointed out, amplification is
clearly a virtue in an oral culture, providing redundancy of information, ceremonial
amplitude, and scope for memorable syntax and diction.
[L. "enlargement"]
"Mr. and Mrs. Veneering were bran-new people in a bran-new house in a bran-new
quarter of London. Everything about the Veneerings was spick and span new. All
their furniture was new, all their friends were new, all their servants were new, their
place was new, their carriage was new, their harness was new, their horses were new, their
pictures were new, they themselves were new, they were as newly-married as was lawfully
compatible with their having a bran-new baby, and if they had set up a great-grandfather,
he would have come home in matting from Pantechnicon, without a scratch upon him,
French-polished to the crown of his head."
(Charles Dickens, Our Mutual Friend)
anadiplosis
Repetition of the last word of one line or clause to begin the next.
(Pronounced "a na di PLO sis") [Gk. "doubling back"]
-"When I give I give myself."
(Walt Whitman)
-"Our doubt is our passion, and our passion is our task."
(Henry James)
-"All service ranks the same with God,
With God, whose puppets, best and worst,
Are we."
(Robert Browning, Pippa Passes)
-"The land of my fathers. My fathers can have it."
(Dylan Thomas on Wales)
analogy 
Reasoning or arguing from parallel cases. [Gk. "proportion"]
A simile is an expressed
analogy; a metaphor is
an implied one.
-"Writing a book of poetry is like dropping a rose petal down the Grand Canyon and
waiting for the echo."
(Don Marquis)
- "From what I can see, no matter what system of
government we have, there will always be leaders and always be followers. It's like
the road out in front of my house. It's on a steep hill. Every day I watch the
cars climbing up. Some go lickety-split up that hill on high, some have to shift
into second, and some sputter and shake and slip back to the bottom again. Same
cars, same gasoline, yet some make it and some don't. And I say the fellas who can
make the hill on high should stop once in a while and help those who can't. That's all I'm
trying to do with this money. Help the fellas who can't make the hill on high."
(Gary Cooper in Mr. Deeds Goes to Town, 1936)
-"Harrison Ford is like one of those sports cars that advertise acceleration from
0 to 60 m.p.h. in three or four seconds. He can go from slightly broody inaction to
ferocious reaction in approximately the same time span. And he handles the tight turns and
corkscrew twists of a suspense story without losing his balance or leaving skid marks on
the film. But maybe the best and most interesting thing about him is that he doesn't look
particularly sleek, quick, or powerful; until something or somebody causes him to gun his
engine, he projects the seemly aura of the family sedan."
(Richard Schickel, Time magazine review of Patriot Games)
anaphora 
Repetition of the same word or phrase at the beginning of successive clauses or verses.
[Gk. "carrying up or back"]
-"I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and
self-contained,
I stand and look at them long and long.
They do not sweat and whine about their condition,
They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,
They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,
Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,
Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,
Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth."
(Walt Whitman, Song of Myself, part 32)
-“The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s square wall of a forehead, which
had his eyebrows for its base, while his eyes found commodious cellarage in two dark
caves, overshadowed by the wall. The emphasis
was helped by the speaker’s mouth, which was wide, thin, and hard set. The emphasis was helped by the speaker’s
voice, which was inflexible, dry, and dictatorial. The
emphasis was helped by the speaker’s hair, which bristled on the skirts of his bald
head, a plantation of firs to keep the wind from its shining surface, all covered with
knobs, like the crust of a plum pie, as if the head had scarcely warehouse-room for the
hard facts stored inside.”
(Charles Dickens, Hard Times)
-"We shall not flag or fail. We shall go on to the end. We shall fight
in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence
and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our island . . . we shall never
surrender." (Winston Churchill)
-"He taught me how to clean out hog waste with a shovel and a
hose. He taught me how to clear land with a double-bladed ax. He taught me how
to plow a steep hillside with a team of mules. He taught me how to take up hay all
day long in the hot sun."
(Al Gore Jr., on his life experiences growing up as the son of Senator Al Gore Sr.)
-"I'm not afraid to die. . . . I'm not afraid to live.
I'm not afraid to fail. I'm not afraid to succeed. I'm not afraid to fall in
love. I'm not afraid to be alone. I'm just afraid I might have to stop talking
about myself for five minutes."
(Kinky Friedman, When the Cat's Away)
anticipation
General name for figures wherein a rhetor foresees and replies to objections.
Similar to refutation.
-"On the morning of his execution, King Charles the First put on two
shirts. 'If I tremble with the cold," he said, 'my enemies will say it was from
fear. I will not expose myself to such reproaches.'"
(qtd. in Sleuth)
-"Of course, my critics will say: 'What is the point
of a Modern Pod For Sitting In? The user may just as well smoke his cigarettes and
converse with others at a café, without the inconvenience of being cocooned inside a
ludicrous pod!' How exasperating critics can be. The 'point' of my Modern Pod is
that it uses a new material, Perplex. Is innovation no longer enough for these . . . these
jaded nincompoops?"
(French architect and designer L'Obscurier, Diaries)
anticlimax
A bathetic declension from a noble tone to a less exalted one--often for comic effect.
-"Not only is there no God, but try getting a plumber on weekends."
(Woody Allen)
antimetabole
See chiasmus.
antirrhesis
Rejecting an argument because of its insignificance, error, or wickedness.
[Gk. "refutation, counterstatement"]
-"I have been mocked and censured as a scare-monger and even as a war-monger, by
those whose complacency and inertia have brought us all nearer to war and war nearer to us
all." (Winston Churchill)
-“In his remarkable apology for lynching, Bishop Haygood, of Georgia, says:
‘No race, not the most savage, tolerates the rape of woman, but it may be said
without reflection upon any other people that the Southern people are now and always have
been most sensitive concerning the honor of their women—their mothers, wives, sisters
and daughters.’ It is not the purpose of
this defense to say one word against the white women of the South. Such need not be said, but it is their misfortune
that the chivalrous white men of that section, in order to escape the deserved execration
of the civilized world, should shield themselves by their cowardly and infamously false
excuse, and call into question that very honor about which their distinguished priestly
apologist claims they are most sensitive. To
justify their own barbarism they assume a chivalry which they do not possess. True chivalry respects all womanhood, and no one
who reads the record, as it is written in the faces of the million mulattoes in the South,
will for a minute conceive that the southern white man had a very chivalrous regard for
the honor due the women of his own race or respect for the womanhood which circumstances
placed in his power. That chivalry which is
‘most sensitive concerning the honor of women’ can hope for but little respect
from the civilized world, when it confines itself entirely to the women who happen to be
white. Virtue knows no color line, and the
chivalry which depends upon complexion of skin and texture of hair can command no honest
respect.”
(Ida B. Wells-Barnett, A Red Record)
antithesis
Juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases.
[Gk. "opposition"]
-"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing." (Goethe)
-"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of
incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring
of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before
us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way."
(Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)
-"Death destroys a man, but the idea of death saves him."
(E. M. Forster, Howard's End)
-"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."
(Martin Luther King, Jr., speech at St. Louis, 1964)
-"We think in generalities, but we live in details." (Alfred North
Whitehead)
-"The more acute the experience, the less articulate its expression."
(Harold Pinter)
antonomasia 
Substitution of a title, epithet, or descriptive phrase for a proper name (or of a
personal name for a common name) to designate a member of a group or class.
(Pronunciation: "an toe no MAS ya") [Gk. "naming instead"]
-Calling a lover "Casanova," a man in love "Romeo," an office
worker "Dilbert," Elvis Presley "the King," Bill Clinton "the
Comeback Kid," or Horace Rumpole's wife "She Who Must Be Obeyed."
-"If the waiter has a mortal enemy, it is the Primper. I hate the
Primper. HATE THE PRIMPER! If there's a horrifying sound a waiter never
wants to hear, it's the THUMP of a purse on the counter. Then the digging sound of the
Primper's claws trying to find makeup, hairbrushes, and perfume. You see, I feel that if
you cannot complete your prep work by the time you leave your house in the morning, you
have completely forfeited your right to do so at any other point in the day. Your
opportunity is over and you have lost your chance. Once, I was stuck in a bathroom waiting
for a Primper to leave while my intestines threatened to shoot out of my belly button for
hours. By the time the ordeal was over, it was dark outside, and everyone in my office
thought I had gone home."
(Laurie Notaro, The Idiot Girls' Action-Adventure Club)
apophasis
The mention of something in disclaiming intention of mentioning it--or pretending to deny
what is really affirmed.
[Gk. "denial"] (See paralepsis.)
-"Mary Matlin, the Bush campaign's political director, made the point with
ruthless venom at a press briefing in Washington, saying, 'The larger issue is that
Clinton is evasive and slick. We have never said to the press that he is a
philandering, pot-smoking, draft-dodger. There's nothing nefarious or subliminal
going on.'"
(reported in Manchester Guardian, 1992)
-“Our country puts $1 billion a year up to help feed the hungry. And we're by far the most generous nation in
the word when it comes to that, and I'm proud to
report that. This isn't a contest of who's
the most generous. I'm just telling you as an
aside. We're generous. We shouldn't be bragging about it. But we are. We're
very generous.”
(President George W. Bush, 9 August 2004)
-"It's not my habit to comment on books that don't interest me or, for various
reasons, I don't like."
(Mayor Massimo Cacciari of Venice, on John Berendt's 2006 novel The City of
Falling Angels)
aporia 
The expression of real or simulated doubt or perplexity. In classical rhetoric, aporia
means placing a claim in doubt by developing arguments on both sides of an issue. In
the terminology of deconstruction, aporia is a final impasse or paradox--the site
at which the text most obviously undermines its own rhetorical structure, dismantles, or
deconstructs itself.
[Gk. "without passage"]
-"A virginal air, large blue eyes very soulful and appealing, a dazzling fair
skin, a supple and resilient body, a touching voice, teeth of ivory and the loveliest
blond hair--there you have a sketch of this charming creature whose naive graces and
delicate traits are beyond our power to describe." (Marquis De Sade)
-"Uh, how do I say this without being offensive? Marge, there ain't enough
booze in this place to make you look good."
(Moe in The Simpsons)
aposiopesis
An unfinished thought or broken sentence.
[Gk. "maintaining silence"]
-"I will have such revenges on you both
That all the world shall--I will do things--
What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be
The terrors of the earth!" (Shakespeare, King Lear)
-“Secondly, the tactics of our--as you know, we don't have relationships with
Iran. I mean that's -- ever since the late
70's, we have no contacts with them, and we've
totally sanctioned them. In other
words, there's no sanctions -- you can't -- we're out of sanctions.”
(President George W. Bush, 16 July 2003)
apostrophe
Breaking off discourse to address some absent person or thing, some abstract quality, or a
nonexistent character.
[Gk. "turning away"]
-"Milton! thou should'st be living at this hour:
England hath need of thee . . .."
(William Wordsworth, "London, 1802")
-"Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art" (John Keats)
-"Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of
experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race. . .
. Old father, old artificer, stand me now and ever in good stead."
(James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man)
apposition 
Placing side-by-side two coordinate elements, the second of which serves as an explanation
or modification of the first.
- "I have been walking on ballfields for 16 years, and I've never received
anything but kindness and encouragement from you fans. I have had the great honor to
have played with these great veteran ballplayers on my left -- Murderers Row, our
championship team of 1927. I have had the further honor of living with and
playing with these men on my right -- the Bronx Bombers, the Yankees of today.
I have been given fame and undeserved praise by the boys up there behind the wire in the
press box -- my friends, the sports writers. I have worked under the two
greatest managers of all time, Miller Huggins and Joe McCarthy. I have a
mother and father who fought to give me health and a solid background in my youth. I have
a wife, a companion for life, who has shown me more courage than I ever
knew. People all say that I've had a bad break. But today -- today I consider
myself the luckiest man on the face of the earth."
(Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig, The Pride of the Yankees, 1942)
- "The sky was sunless and grey, there was snow in the air, buoyant motes, play
things that seethed and floated like the toy flakes inside a crystal." (Truman
Capote, The Muses Are Heard)
- "It was a bleak period of present privation and threatening disaster--the
period of soya beans and Basic English--and in consequence the book is infused with a kind
of gluttony, for food and wine, for the splendours of the recent past, and for rhetorical
and ornamental language, which now with a full stomach I find distasteful."
(Evelyn Waugh in 1959 on his wartime novel Brideshead Revisited)
- “Lolita, light of my life, fire of my
loins.”
(Vladimir Nabokov, Lolita)
artistic proofs [Gk. entechnoi
pisteis]
Proofs or means of persuasion taught specifically by the art of rhetoric. In
Aristotle's rhetorical theory, these include ethos, pathos, and
logos.
Asiatic
A prolix or highly ornamented style. Contrast with Attic.
-"Altho’ Dixon is heading off to Sumatra with a member of the Church of
England,— that is, the Ancestor of Troubles,— a stranger with whom he morever
but hours before was carousing exactly like Sailors, shameful to say, yet, erring upon the
side of Conviviality, will he decide to follow Fox’s Advice, and answer 'that of God'
in Mason, finding it soon enough with the Battle on all ‘round them, when both face
their equal chances of imminent Death.
"Dissolution, Noise, and Fear. Below-decks, reduced to nerves, given into the emprise
of Forces invisible yet possessing great Weight and Speed, which contend in some Phantom
realm they have had the bad luck to blunder into, the Astronomers abide, willing
themselves blank yet active. Casualties begin to appear in the Sick Bay, the wounds
inconceivable, from Oak-Splinters and Chain and Shrapnel, and as Blood creeps like Evening
to Dominion over all Surfaces, so grows the Ease of giving in to Panic Fear. It takes an
effort to act philosophickal, or even to find ways to be useful,— but a moment’s
re-focusing proves enough to show them each how at least to keep out of the way, and
presently to save steps for the loblolly boy, or run messages to and from other parts of
the ship.
"After the last of the Gun-Fire, Oak Beams shuddering with the Chase, the Lazarette
is crowded and pil’d with bloody Men, including Capt. Smith with a great Splinter in
his Leg, his resentment especially powerful,— 'I’ll have lost thirty of my Crew.
Are you two really that important?' Above, on deck, corpses are steaming, wreckage
is ev’rywhere, shreds of charr’d sail and line clatter in the Wind that is
taking the Frenchman away."
(Thomas Pynchon, Mason and Dixon)
assonance
Identity or similarity in sound between internal vowels in neighboring words.
[L. "to sound towards"]
-"Old age should burn and rave at close of day;
Rage, rage, against the dying of the light." (Dylan Thomas)
-"Strips of tinfoil winking
like people" (Sylvia Plath)
asyndeton
Omission of conjunctions between words, phrases, or clauses (opposite of polysyndeton).
(Pronounced "a SIN da ton") [Gk. "unconnected"]
-"Dogs, undistinguishable in mire. Horses, scarcely better--splashed to
their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another's umbrellas, in a general
infection of ill temper . . .." (Charles Dickens, Bleak House)
-“Listlessly, confidently, poor people
all of them, they waited; looked at the palace itself with the flag flying; at Victoria,
billowing on her mound, admired her shelves of running water, her geraniums; singled out
the motor cars in the Mall first this one, then that; bestowed emotion, vainly, upon
commoners out for a drive; recalled their tribute to keep it unspent while this car passed
and that.”
(Virginia Woolf, Mrs. Dalloway)
- "Why, they've got 10 volumes on suicide alone. Suicide by race, by color,
by occupation, by sex, by seasons of the year, by time of day. Suicide, how
committed: by poisons, by firearms, by drowning, by leaps. Suicide by poison,
subdivided by types of poison, such as corrosive, irritant, systemic, gaseous, narcotic,
alkaloid, protein, and so forth. Suicide by leaps, subdivided by leaps from high
places, under the wheels of trains, under the wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses,
from steamboats. But Mr. Norton, of all the cases on record, there's not one single
case of suicide by leap from the rear end of a moving train."
(Edward G. Robinson as insurance agent Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity,
1944)
-"I have found the warm caves in the woods,
filled them with skillets, carvings, shelves,
closets, silks, innumerable goods"
(Anne Sexton, "Her Kind")
-"In some ways, he was this town at its best--strong, hard-driving, working
feverishly, pushing, building, driven
by ambitions so big they seemed Texas-boastful." (Mike Royko, "A
Tribute")
Attic
Brief, witty, sometimes epigrammatic style--opposite of the ornate Asiatic style.
[Gk. "the style of Attica"]
-"Some books are to be tasted. Others to be swallowed, and some few to be
chewed and digested. That is, some books are to be read only in parts; others to be
read but not curiously; and some few to be read wholly, and with diligence and
attention." (Francis Bacon, "Of Studies")
auxesis 
A gradual increase in intensity of meaning: words arranged in ascending order of
importance. See also climax.
[Gk. "amplification"]
-"Since brass, nor stone, nor earth, nor boundless sea,
But sad mortality o'er-sways their power."
(Shakespeare, Sonnet 65)
-“That’s it. There you are. Man say to his woman: I got me a dream. His woman say: Eat your eggs. Man say: I got to take hold of this here world,
baby! And a woman will say: Eat your eggs and
go to work. Man say: I got to change my life,
I’m choking to death, baby! And his
woman say—Your eggs is getting cold!"
(Lorraine Hansberry, A Raisin in the Sun)
-"It's a well hit ball, it's a long drive, it might be, it could be, it IS . . .
a home run."
(Chicago Cubs announcer Harry Carey)
-"Jeans That Can
Lengthen Legs
Hug Hips
& Turn Heads"
(advertisement for Rider Jeans)
bdelygmia 
A litany of abuse--a series of critical epithets, descriptions, or attributes.
(Pronounced "de LIG me uh") [Gk. "abuse"]
-"A custom loathsome to the eye, hateful to the nose, harmful to the brain,
dangerous to the lungs, and in the black, stinking fume thereof, nearest resembling the
Stygian smoke of the pit that is bottomless."
(King James I of England, A Counterblast to Tobacco)
-"[T]he American people, taking one with another, constitute the most timorous,
sniveling, poltroonish, ignominious mob of serfs and goose-steppers ever gathered under
one flag in Christendom since the end of the Middle Ages, and . . . they grow more
timorous, more sniveling, more poltroonish, more ignominious every day."
(H. L. Mencken, "On Being an American")
-"Your soul is an apalling dump heap overflowing
with the most disgraceful assortment of deplorable
rubbish imaginable,
Mangled up in tangled up knots.
You nauseate me, Mr. Grinch.
With a nauseous super-naus.
You're a crooked jerky jockey
And you drive a crooked horse.
Mr. Grinch.
You're a three decker sauerkraut and toadstool sandwich
With arsenic sauce."
(Dr. Seuss, How the Grinch Stole Christmas)
-"The Republicans are not stupid. They tagged the liberals as 'latte-drinking,
Volvo-driving, school-busing, fetus-killing, tree-hugging, gun-fearing, morally relativist
and secularly humanist so-called liberal elitists,' as commentator Jason Epstein described
it, soft on communism, soft on crime, opposed to capital punishment, and soft on the new
war on terrorism."
(Mortimer Zuckerman, U.S. News, 6 June 2005)
| 
| 
English 5730 is
taught by Dr. Richard Nordquist.
Armstrong Atlantic State University
Savannah, Georgia 31419
912-921-5991
e-mail: engl5730@lycos.com
15 Jan 2008