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Glossary of Rhetorical Terms

catachresis to distinctio

catachresis  
An extreme, far-fetched, or mixed metaphor; strained or deliberately paradoxical figure of speech; deliberate substitution of an inexact word in place of the correct one.
(Pronunciation "cat a KREE sis") [Gk. "misapplication"]
-"To take arms against a sea of troubles." (Shakespeare, Hamlet)
-"Red trains cough Jewish underwear for keeps!  Expanding smells of silence.   Gravy snot whistling like sea birds."
(Amiri Baraka, "The Dutchman")
-"The moon was full. The moon was so bloated it was about to tip over. Imagine awakening to find the moon flat on its face on the bathroom floor, like the late Elvis Presley, poisoned by banana splits. It was a moon that could stir wild passions in a moo cow. A moon that could bring out the devil in a bunny rabbit. A moon that could turn lug nuts into moonstones, turn little Red Riding Hood into the big bad wolf."
(Tom Robbins, Still Life with Woodpecker)

categoria 
Direct exposure of an adversary's faults.
[Gk. "accusation"]
- "I accuse Lt.  Col.  du Paty de Clam of being the diabolical creator of this miscarriage of justice — unwittingly, I would like to believe — and of defending this sorry deed, over the last three years, by all manner of ludricrous and evil machinations. 
"I accuse General Mercier of complicity, at least by mental weakness, in one of the greatest inequities of the century. 
"I accuse General Billot of having held in his hands absolute proof of Dreyfus’s innocence and covering it up, and making himself guilty of this crime against mankind and justice, as a political expedient and a way for the compromised General Staff to save face. 
"I accuse Gen.  de Boisdeffre and Gen.  Gonse of complicity in the same crime, the former, no doubt, out of religious prejudice, the latter perhaps out of that esprit de corps that has transformed the War Office into an unassailable holy ark. 
"I accuse Gen.  de Pellieux and Major Ravary of conducting a villainous enquiry, by which I mean a monstrously biased one, as attested by the latter in a report that is an imperishable monument to naïve impudence. 
"I accuse the three handwriting experts, Messrs.  Belhomme, Varinard and Couard, of submitting reports that were deceitful and fraudulent, unless a medical examination finds them to be suffering from a condition that impairs their eyesight and judgement.  
"I accuse the War Office of using the press, particularly L’Eclair and L’Echo de Paris, to conduct an abominable campaign to mislead the general public and cover up their own wrongdoing. 
"Finally, I accuse the first court martial of violating the law by convicting the accused on the basis of a document that was kept secret, and I accuse the second court martial of covering up this illegality, on orders, thus committing the judicial crime of knowingly acquitting a guilty man."
(Emile Zola, "J'Accuse," 13 Jan. 1898)
-"The average American judge, as everyone knows, is a mere rabbinical automation, with no more give and take in his mind than you will find in the mind of a terrier watching a rathole."
(H. L. Mencken, "Mr. Justice Holmes")
-"You people and sixty-two million other Ameicans are listening to me right now. Because less than three percent of you people read books. Because less than fifteen percent of you read newspapers. Because the only truth you know is what you get over this tube. Right now, there is a whole, an entire generation that never knew anything that didn't come out of this tube. This tube is the gospel, the ultimate revelation. This tube can make or break Presidents, Popes, Prime Ministers. This tube is the most awesome, god-damned force in the whole godless world . . . We deal in illusions, man. None of it is true! But you people sit there day after day, night after night, all ages, colors, creeds--we're all you know. You're beginning to believe the illusions we're spinning here. You're beginning to think that the tube is reality and that your own lives are unreal. You do whatever the tube tells you. You dress like the tube, you eat like the tube, you raise your children like the tube. You even think like the tube. This is mass madness. You maniacs. In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion. So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now. Turn them off right now. Turn them off and leave them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I am speaking to you now. Turn them off!"
(Peter Finch as Howard Beale in Network, 1976)

chiasmus
A verbal pattern in which the second half of an expression is balanced against the first but with the parts reversed. (Similar to antimetabole, chiasmus also involves a reversal of structures in successive phrases or clauses.)   The adjectival form is chiastic.
(Pronunciation: "ky-AZ-mus") [derived from Greek letter"X"]
--"I flee who chases me, and chases who flees me." (Ovid)
--"Fair is foul, and foul is fair." (Shakespeare, Macbeth I.i)
--"Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not original, and the part that is original is not good."(Samuel Johnson)
--"If black men have no rights in the eyes of the white men, of course the whites can have none in the eyes of the
blacks." (Frederick Douglass, "An Appeal to Congress for Impartial Suffrage")
--"The question isn't whether Grape Nuts are good enough for you; it's whether you are good enough for Grape Nuts." (advertisement)
--"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change amid order."
(Alfred North Whitehead)
--"I have taken more out of alcohol than alcohol has taken out of me." (Winston Churchill)       
--"The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children produce adults."
(Peter De Vries)
--"Don't sweat the petty things--and don't pet the sweaty things."  (anonymous)
--"Never let a fool kiss you--or a kiss fool you."  (anonymous)
--"Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done."
(George W. Bush)
[See also Dr. Mardy Grothe's web site, Chiasmus.com.]

chreia
(Pronounced "CRAY-yuh")
An elementary exercise, or progymnasmata, in which the rhetor elaborates on a famous event or saying.

cliche
A trite expression--often a figure of speech whose effectiveness has been worn out through overuse and excessive familiarity.
[Fr. "a stereotype plate"]
-"That's the way with these directors, they're always biting the hand that lays the golden egg."
(Samuel Goldwyn)
-"Live and learn."
-"What goes around comes around."

climax
Mounting by degrees through words or sentences of increasing weight and in parallel construction (see auxesis), with an emphasis on the high point or culmination of a series of events or of an experience.
[Gk. "ladder"]
"I came, I saw, I conquered." (Julius Caesar)
"I am the way, the truth, and the life." (St.John Chapter 14, verse 4)  
"Nothing has been left undone to cripple their minds, debase their moral stature, obliterate all traces of their relationship to mankind."
(Lloyd Garrison, Narrative of the Life of an American Slave)
"Out of its vivid disorder comes order; from its rank smell rises the good aroma of courage and daring; out of its preliminary shabbiness comes the final splendor. And buried in the familiar boasts of its advance agents lies the modesty of most of its people."
(E. B. White, "The Ring of Time"-describing a circus in Florida)

commonplace
Any statement or bit of knowledge that is commonly shared among a given audience or a community; also, an elementary exercise, or progymnasmata; also, in invention, another term for a common topic.

commoratio
Repetition of a point several times in different words.
(Pronunciation: "ko mo RAHT see oh")  [L. "dwelling"]
-"What didst thou covet?  What didst thou wish?  What didst thou desire?" (Cicero)
-"Brave Sir Robin ran away
Bravely ran away, away
When danger reared its ugly head
He bravely turned his tail and fled
Yes, Brave Sir Robin turned about
Undoubtedly he chickened out
Bravely taking to his feet,
He beat a very brave retreat . . .."  (Monty Python and the Holy Grail)
-"This parrot is no more!  It has ceased to be!  It's expired and gone to meet its maker!  This is a late parrot!  It's a stiff!  Bereft of life it rests in peace--if you hadn't nailed it to the perch it would be pushing up the daisies!  It's rung down the curtain and joined the choir invisible!  This is an ex-parrot!"  (John Cleese in Monty Python's Flying Circus)

complex sentence
A sentence that contains at least one independent clause and one dependent clause.
-"He was like a cock who thought the sun had risen to hear him crow."
(George Eliot, Adam Bede)
-"I think we ought to have as great a regard for religion as we can, so as to keep it out of as many things as possible." 
(Sean O'Casey, The Plough and the Stars)

compound sentence
A sentence that contains at least two independent clauses.
"The glacier knocks in the cupboard,
The desert sighs in the bed,
And the crack in the teacup opens
A lane to the land of the dead."
(W. H. Auden, "As I Walked Out One Evening")

concession
Figure wherein a rhetor concedes a disputed point or leaves a disputed point to the audience to decide.
-"I am not finding fault with this use of our flag; for in order not to seem eccentric I have swung around, now, and joined the nation in the conviction that nothing can sully a flag.  I was not properly reared, and had the illusion that a flag was a thing which must be sacredly guarded against shameful uses and unclean contacts, lest it suffer pollution; and so when it was sent out to the Philippines to float over a wanton war and a robbing expedition I supposed it was polluted, and in an ignorant moment I said so.  But I stand corrected.  I concede and acknowledge that it was only the government that sent it on such an errand that was polluted.  Let us compromise on that. I am glad to have it that way. For our flag could not well stand pollution, never having been used to it, but it is different with the administration."
(Mark Twain, 1901)

confirmation
Part of a discourse that elaborates arguments in support of a rhetor's position.
-"The few bright meteors in man's intellectual horizon could well be matched by woman, were she allowed to occupy the same elevated poison. There is no need of naming the De Staels, the Rolands, the Somervilles, the Wollstonecrafts, the Wrights, the Fullers, the Martineaus, the Hemanses, the Sigourneys, the Jagiellos, and the many more of modern as well as ancient times, to prove her mental powers, her patriotism, her heroism, her self-sacrificing devotion to the cause of humanity-the eloquence that gushes from her pen or from her tongue. These things are too well known to require repetition. And do you ask for fortitude of mind, energy, and perseverance? Then look at woman under suffering, reverse of fortune, and affliction, when the strength and power of man has sunk to the lowest ebb, when his mind is overwhelmed by the dark waters of despair.  She, like the tender plant, bent but not broken by the storms of life, now only upholds her own hopeful courage, but, like the tender shoots of the ivy, clings around the tempest-fallen oak, to bind up the wounds, peak hope to his faltering spirit, and shelter him from the returning blast of the storm."
(Ernestine L. Rose, from "An Address on Women's Rights" 1851)

connotation   
The emotional implications and associations that words may carry, as distinguished from their denotative (or dictionary) meanings.  Connotations may be (1) private and personal, the result of individual experience; (2) group (national, linguistic, ethnic); or (3) general or universal (held by all or most people).
-When I with you so wholly disappear
into the mirror of your slender hand
grey streets of the city grow roses
and daisies, the music of flowers
blooms in our voices, the eye of
the grocer flares like a candle"
(Peter Meinke, "When I with You")   

copia
(Pronounced "KO pee ya")
Expansive richness as a stylistic goal.  See Erasmus's De copia.
[L."abundance"]
-"If I am truly that peace so extolled by God and by men; if I am really the source, the nourishing mother, the preserver and the protector of all good things in which heaven and earth abound; if, without me, no prosperity can endure here below; if nothing pure or holy, nothing that is agreeable to God or to men can be established on earth without my help; if, on the other hand, war is incontestably the essential cause of all the disasters which fall upon the universe and this plague withers at a glance everything that grows; if, because of war, all that grew and ripened in the course of the ages suddenly collapses and is turned into ruins; if war tears down everything that is maintained at the cost of the most painful efforts; if it destroys things that were most firmly established; if it poisons everything that is holy and everything that is sweet; if, in short, war is abominable to the point of annihilating all virtue, all goodliness in the hearts of men, and if nothing is more deadly for them, nothing more hateful to God than war -- then, in the name of this immortal God I ask: who is capable of believing without great difficulty that those who instigate it, who barely possess the light of reason, whom one sees exerting themselves with such stubbornness, such fervor, such cunning, and at the cost of such effort and danger, to drive me away and pay so much for the overwhelming anxieties and the evils that result from war -- who can believe that such persons are still truly men?" 
(Erasmus, The Complaint of Peace)
See also students' illustration of copia at the web site of the Boise State University Writing Center.

crot
Verbal bit or fragment used as autonomous unit with absence of transitional devices to preceding or subsequent units, thereby creating an effect of abruptness and rapid transition.
-"Heads, heads, take care of your heads . . . Five children--mother--tall lady, eating sandwiches--forgot the arch--crash--knock--children look round--mother's head off--sandwich in her hand--no mouth to put it in--head of a family off--shocking, shocking!"  (Charles Dickens, Little Dorrit)
-"Four senators get drunk and try to neck a lady politician built like an overloaded tramp steamer. The Presidential automobile runs over a dog. It rains." (H.L. Mencken, "Imperial Purple")
-"Footprints around a KEEP OFF sign.
Two pigeons feeding each other.
Two showgirls, whose faces had not yet thawed the frost of their makeup, treading indignantly through the slush.
A plump old man saying 'Chick, chick' and feeding peanuts to squirrels.
Many solitary men throwing snowballs at tree trunks.
Many birds calling to each other about how little the Ramble has changed.
One red mitten lying lost under a poplar tree.
An airplane, very bright and distant, slowly moving through the branches of a sycamore."
(John Updike, "Central Park")
-See excerpt from Writing, by Rachel Blau DuPlessis.)

decorum
Fitness in matters of language and usage: the grand and important theme is treated in a dignified and noble style, the humble or trivial in a lower manner.  "Though initially just one of several virtues of style ('aptum'), decorum has become a governing concept for all of rhetoric. Essentially, if one's ideas are appropriately embodied and presented (thereby observing decorum), then one's speech will be effective. Conversely, rhetorical vices are breaches of some sort of decorum. Decorum invokes a range of social, linguistic, aesthetic, and ethical proprieties for both the creators and critics of speech or writing. Each of these must be balanced against each other strategically in order to be successful in understanding or creating discourse." (Silva Rhetoricae)
(See Cicero's discussion of decorum in De Oratore.)

deduction
Method of reasoning wherein a conclusion is derived from comparison of general to particular premises.
-"Sherlock Holmes and John Watson were on a camping and hiking trip.  They had gone to bed and were lying there looking up at the sky.  Holmes said, 'Watson, look up. What do you see?' 
'Well, I see thousands of stars.'
'And what does that mean to you?'
'Well, I guess it means we will have another nice day tomorrow.  What does it mean to you, Holmes?'
'To me, it means someone has stolen our tent.'"

dehortatio
Dissuasive advice given with authority.
[L. "urging"]
-"Chastisement of Jehovah, my son, despise not, And be not vexed with His reproof, For whom Jehovah loveth He reproveth, Even as a father the son He is pleased with."
(Book of Proverbs, Chapter Three)
-"Sow seed--but let no tyrant reap:
Find wealth--let no impostor heap:
Weave robes--let not the idle wear:
Forge arms--in your defense to bear."
(Shelly, "A Song: 'Men of England'")
-"Never give all the heart." (William Butler Yeats)

diacope
Repetition broken up by one or more intervening words.
(Pronunciation: "di AK oh pee")
[Gk. "a cutting in two"]
-"Put out the light, and then put out the light."
(Shakespeare, Othello V.ii)
-"Urge and urge and urge,
Always the procreant urge of the world."
(Walt Whitman)
-"I want to be alone. . . . I just want to be alone."
(Greta Garbo in the 1932 film Grand Hotel)
-"Someone ate the baby,
It's rather sad to say.
Someone ate the baby
So she won't be out to play.
We'll never hear her whiney cry
Or have to feel if she is dry.
We'll never hear her asking, 'Why?'
Someone ate the baby."
(Shel Silverstein, "Dreadful")

dialectic   
"Socratic method" of one-on-one question and answer. Plato's Socrates usually presents it as an interactive method of argument aiming at truth, as against the uninterrupted and noninteractive speech of an orator, which presumably aims only to bamboozle the audience. Thus, in a loose sense, dialectic has come to mean a logical argument as opposed to the emotional, crowd-pleasing persuasion of rhetoric. However, recent studies (e.g., Lanham, Ong) argue that dialectic was originally a sophistic method.
-"Socrates: Polus has been taught how to make a capital speech, Gorgias; but he is not fulfilling the promise which he made to Chaerephon.
Gorgias: What do you mean, Socrates?
Soc. I mean that he has not exactly answered the question which he was asked.
Gor. Then why not ask him yourself?
Soc. But I would much rather ask you, if you are disposed to answer: for I see, from the few words which Polus has uttered, that he has attended more to the art which is called rhetoric than to dialectic.
Pol. What makes you say so, Socrates?
Soc. Because, Polus, when Chaerephon asked you what was the art which Gorgias knows, you praised it as if you were answering some one who found fault with it, but you never said what the art was.
Polus: Why, did I not say that it was the noblest of arts?
Soc. Yes, indeed, but that was no answer to the question: nobody asked what was the quality, but what was the nature, of the art, and by what name we were to describe Gorgias. And I would still beg you briefly and clearly, as you answered Chaerephon when he asked you at first, to say what this art is, and what we ought to call Gorgias: Or rather, Gorgias, let me turn to you, and ask the same question what are we to call you, and what is the art which you profess?
Gor. Rhetoric, Socrates, is my art.
Soc. Then I am to call you a rhetorician?
Gor. Yes, Socrates, and a good one too, if you would call me that which, in Homeric language, "I boast myself to be."
Soc. I should wish to do so.
Gor. Then pray do.
Soc. And are we to say that you are able to make other men rhetoricians?
Gor. Yes, that is exactly what I profess to make them, not only at Athens, but in all places.
Soc. And will you continue to ask and answer questions, Gorgias, as we are at present doing and reserve for another occasion the longer mode of speech which Polus was attempting? Will you keep your promise, and answer shortly the questions which are asked of you?
Gor. Some answers, Socrates, are of necessity longer; but I will do my best to make them as short as possible; for a part of my profession is that I can be as short as any one.
Soc. That is what is wanted, Gorgias; exhibit the shorter method now, and the longer one at some other time.
Gor. Well, I will; and you will certainly say, that you never heard a man use fewer words.
(Plato, from the opening of Gorgias)

distinctio
Explicit references to various meanings of a word--usually for the purpose of removing ambiguities.
-"If by light you mean 'clear,'  I am glad you do see them; if by light you mean of 'no weight,' I am sorry you do not feel them."
(Hoskyns)
-"It depends on what the meaning of the word is is. If is means 'and never has been,' that is one thing. If it means 'there is none,'  that was a completely true statement."
(Bill Clinton, Grand Jury testimony, 1998)
-"Don Cognasso will tell you that this commandment prohibits envy, which is certainly an ugly thing.  But there's bad envy, which is when your friend has a bicycle and you don't, and you hope he breaks his neck going down a hill, and there's good envy, which is when you want a bike like his and work your butt off to be able to buy one, and it's good envy that makes the world go round.  And then there's another envy, which is justice envy, which is when you can't see any reason that a few people have everything and others are dying of hunger.  And if you feel this fine sort of envy, which is socialist envy, you get busy trying to make a world in which riches are better distributed."
(Umberto Eco, "The Gorge," in The New Yorker, 7 March 2005)

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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