50 Fun Facts About Rhetoric

Which of Aristotle's three modes of persuasion rests on the credibility and character of the speaker?

Ethos comes from the Greek word for character, which is also the root of the English word ethics. A speaker builds it by showing practical wisdom, virtue and goodwill toward the audience.

Which figure of speech, seen in 'bittersweet' and 'cruel kindness', takes its name from Greek words for sharp and dull?

Oxymoron is an example of itself, since a word meaning 'sharp-dull' is a contradiction in terms. Shakespeare's Romeo reels off a string of them in a single speech about love.

Which fallacy of distraction was popularised by William Cobbett's 1807 tale of a smelly lure dragged past hounds?

Red herring began as a real food, a kipper cured until its flesh turned reddish and pungent. Cobbett told the tale to mock English newspapers that had wrongly reported a defeat for Napoleon.

Which British prime minister won the 1953 Nobel Prize in Literature, with a citation praising his brilliant oratory?

Winston Churchill was also nominated twice for the Nobel Peace Prize, which he never won. The literature citation honoured his mastery of history and biography as well as his speeches.

Which figure of speech is at work when Jaques in As You Like It declares that all the world is a stage?

Metaphor is itself a metaphor: the Greek word means to carry over, as if meaning were cargo. Jaques goes on to divide a man's life into seven ages.

Which sound device drives the Peter Piper tongue twister, with its run of words that start with p?

Alliteration repeats the consonant sound at the start of nearby words. Old English poets built their verse on it instead of rhyme, which is how Beowulf holds together.

Which character in Shakespeare's Julius Caesar turns a Roman crowd against the conspirators with a funeral speech?

Mark Antony keeps calling Brutus an honourable man until the praise turns into an accusation. He had promised the assassins not to blame them, so irony had to do the work.

Which device, from the Greek for 'throwing beyond', is at work when a hiker claims to have walked a million miles?

Hyperbole is exaggeration that nobody is meant to take literally. US courts even have a term, 'rhetorical hyperbole', for extravagant exaggeration used for effect when they weigh First Amendment cases.

Which fallacy, known in Latin as argumentum ad populum, claims that an idea must be right because it is popular?

Bandwagon first meant the wagon that carried the band in a circus parade. Winning political campaigns paraded them too, and by 1899 Theodore Roosevelt was using the phrase for joining a likely winner.

Which Athenian orator is said to have cured a stammer by practising speeches with pebbles in his mouth?

Demosthenes also recited verses while running to strengthen his breath, in Plutarch's telling. The effort made him the voice of Athenian resistance to Philip II of Macedon.

Pathos, one of Aristotle's three modes of persuasion, is an appeal to what in an audience?

Emotions change people's judgments, Aristotle observed, so his Rhetoric studies them in opposing pairs such as anger and calmness. Anger, he wrote, springs from a feeling of being belittled.

A speaker using logos, as Aristotle described it in his Rhetoric, appeals chiefly to which faculty of the audience?

Reason is only one sense of logos, which in Greek also means word and discourse. It is the source of the English word logic.

Which foundation course of the medieval liberal arts grouped rhetoric with grammar and logic?

Trivium is Latin for a place where three roads meet, and it is also the root of the English word trivial. Students who finished it moved on to arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

Which US president declared solidarity with a divided city in his 1963 speech 'Ich bin ein Berliner'?

John F. Kennedy did not call himself a jelly doughnut: that story surfaced two decades later, and Berliners call the pastry a Pfannkuchen.

Which fallacy, known in Britain as an Aunt Sally, attacks a distorted version of an opponent's position?

Straw man arguments are easy to knock down because the speaker built them for that purpose. Debaters call the opposite habit steelmanning: answering the strongest form of the other side's case.

Which Latin-named fallacy attacks a speaker's character or motives instead of the substance of the claim?

Ad hominem means 'to the person', and a plain insult does not qualify: the fallacy lies in treating a flaw in the speaker as proof against the claim. John Locke revived its study in the 17th century.

Which travelling teachers of ancient Greece, Protagoras among them, charged high fees for lessons in rhetoric?

Sophists were accused by Athenian philosophers of prizing cleverness over knowledge, which is why sophistry now means a deceptive argument. Their clients were typically the wealthy.

Which device did Martin Luther King Jr. use in I Have a Dream by opening successive sentences with the same words?

Anaphora here was partly improvised: King left his prepared text for the dream passage after the singer Mahalia Jackson called out from behind him, urging him to tell the crowd about the dream.

Paronomasia is the formal name for which kind of wordplay, found an estimated 3,000 times in Shakespeare's plays?

A pun was Shakespeare's fatal weakness in the eyes of Samuel Johnson, who complained that he would chase one anywhere. Even the dying Mercutio gets one, joking that tomorrow he will be a grave man.

Which device ends successive phrases with the same words, as the Gettysburg Address does with 'the people'?

Epistrophe is the mirror image of the device that repeats words at the start of clauses. Lincoln needed few words of any kind: the whole address ran to ten sentences and took about two minutes to deliver.

Which Athenian statesman's Funeral Oration for the war dead is preserved in the history written by Thucydides?

Pericles may not have phrased it this way: Thucydides set the speech down in the first person but almost certainly edited it. Scholars have traced its parallels with Lincoln's Gettysburg Address.

Which abolitionist's 1851 speech in Akron, Ohio, is known by the rhetorical question 'Ain't I a Woman?'

Sojourner Truth never asks the question in the first full report of the speech. It appears in a version printed twelve years later, which also gave the New York-born speaker a Southern dialect.

Which Roman consul denounced Catiline's plot in four speeches of 63 BC and later wrote the dialogue De Oratore?

Cicero had five of the conspirators executed without trial, and the decision caught up with him: he was exiled in 58 BC and recalled the following year.

Which philosopher wrote the dialogue Gorgias, in which Socrates likens rhetoric to pastry baking rather than a true art?

Plato has Socrates call rhetoric mere flattery, saying it is to politics what pastry baking is to medicine. His pupil Aristotle later treated the subject far more seriously.

Which Virginian is credited with a 1775 speech demanding liberty or death, reconstructed in 1817 by William Wirt?

Patrick Henry left no script, so the text everyone knows was pieced together from the memories of elderly witnesses, eighteen years after his death. The speech still swung Virginia toward raising troops.

Which term, from the Greek for 'name-making', covers words such as beep, splash and cuckoo that imitate sounds?

Onomatopoeia changes with the language even when the noise does not: a frog says ribbit in American English but brekekekex koax koax in Aristophanes' Greek comedy The Frogs.

Which term, from Greek words for 'good' and 'speech', describes saying 'passed away' in place of 'died'?

Euphemism began as one: for the ancient Greeks the word could mean keeping a holy silence, speaking well by not speaking at all.

Which fallacy, also called the thin edge of the wedge, claims one small step must lead to disaster?

Slippery slope arguments travel under vivid nicknames, among them the camel's nose in the tent and the parade of horribles. They fail when nothing shows that each step really causes the next.

Which device of contrast shapes the opening of Dickens's A Tale of Two Cities, pairing the best of times with the worst?

Antithesis comes from Greek words for 'setting opposite'. Dickens keeps the pattern running through wisdom and foolishness, belief and incredulity, Light and Darkness, hope and despair.

Which Greek word, also the name of a minor god of opportunity, means the right moment to speak or act?

Kairos is time as a moment to be seized, while chronos is time that can be counted. Greek writers pictured it through archery: the instant an arrow can be loosed with enough force to pierce the target.

Which of the five canons of classical rhetoric deals with a speaker's voice, gestures and posture?

Delivery covered far more than volume: Roman handbooks set rules for pitch, pace, stance and even facial expressions. Its Latin name was pronuntiatio.

Aristotle split oratory into deliberative, epideictic and which third branch, practised in courts of law?

Forensic meant courtroom speaking long before it meant crime labs: the science borrowed the word. Aristotle tied this branch to the past, since courts judge what has already been done.

Which Roman teacher, born in Hispania, wrote the twelve-volume Institutio Oratoria on training the ideal orator?

Quintilian ran a public school of rhetoric in Rome and counted Pliny the Younger among his pupils. His textbook insists that a good orator must above all be a good man.

Which future saint taught rhetoric in Carthage, Rome and Milan before his conversion to Christianity?

Augustine of Hippo left Carthage because his students were unruly, then found that pupils in Rome attended all term and vanished on the day fees fell due.

Which former slave asked a Rochester audience in 1852 what the Fourth of July meant to those still enslaved?

Frederick Douglass gave the speech on July 5, not the Fourth, to the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. Its title is itself a rhetorical question.

Which figure of speech has a speaker pose a question aloud and then immediately supply the answer?

Hypophora lets a speaker raise an objection and knock it down before anyone else can voice it. Unlike an ordinary rhetorical question, it never leaves the answer hanging.

Which form of understatement affirms something by denying its opposite, as when 'not bad' is used to mean excellent?

Litotes comes from a Greek word meaning simplicity. Tone does the work: the same two words can signal either mediocre or superb, depending on how they are said.

Which figure of speech names a part to mean the whole, as in 'boots' for soldiers or 'wheels' for a car?

Synecdoche also runs the other way, letting the whole stand for a part. Its Greek name means 'simultaneous understanding', and office slang supplies another example: suits for businessmen.

Which figure of speech replaces a thing with something closely linked to it, as in 'the Crown' for the monarchy?

Metonymy means 'a change of name' in Greek. Newsrooms rely on it daily, letting 'the press' stand for reporters, though there is nothing press-like about a journalist.

Which device, named from the Greek for shaping like the letter X, mirrors ideas in an A-B-B-A pattern?

Chiasmus was a favourite of ancient writers in Hebrew, Greek and Latin, and long examples run through the Bible. Its close cousin antimetabole repeats the very same words in reverse order.

Julius Caesar's boast 'veni, vidi, vici' is a classic example of which rhetorical pattern of parallel clauses?

Tricolon suited the boast: Caesar is said to have sent the three words to Rome in 47 BC after a swift victory over Pharnaces II of Pontus at the Battle of Zela.

Which device strings clauses together with repeated conjunctions, as in 'we ate and drank and sang and danced'?

Polysyndeton comes from Greek for 'many' and 'bound together', and it slows a sentence to a solemn beat. The King James Bible is full of it, with 'and' rendering a Hebrew connective word for word.

Which device, sharing its name with a punctuation mark, has a speaker break off to address someone absent?

Apostrophe often announces itself in English verse with a single exclamatory 'O'. The one addressed need not be a person at all: it can be an object or an abstract idea.

Which device, from the Greek for 'yoking', makes one verb govern two objects, as in 'she broke his car and his heart'?

Zeugma gets its snap from making one word serve two senses at once. Dickens used it in The Pickwick Papers, sending a lady home in a flood of tears and a sedan chair.

Which device raises a subject by pretending to pass over it, as in 'I won't even mention my rival's debts'?

Apophasis is also known as paralipsis or praeteritio. Pushed to its limit, it lets a speaker recite every damaging detail while claiming to be too gracious to bring any of it up.

Which mirror-image question mark did printer Henry Denham introduce in the 1580s to end a rhetorical question?

Percontation point is the modern name for Denham's mark, known in Latin as the punctus percontativus. It was never widely used and died out in the 17th century.

On which Mediterranean island is Corax, a legendary founder of Greek rhetoric, said to have lived?

Sicily had just overthrown the tyrant of Syracuse, and citizens whose land had been seized were flooding the courts to win it back. Corax is said to have devised rhetoric to help ordinary men plead.

Which Latin-named fallacy assumes that because one event followed another, the first must have caused the second?

Post hoc ergo propter hoc is Latin for 'after this, therefore because of this'. Superstitions thrive on it: a player wins while wearing a particular pair of socks and gives the socks the credit.

Which figure of speech deliberately breaks a sentence off unfinished, as King Lear does when words fail his fury?

Aposiopesis comes from the Greek for 'becoming silent'. Virgil gave the trick to Neptune, who starts to threaten the storm winds in the Aeneid and stops himself mid-sentence.

Which figure of speech gives human form to things or ideas, as when death appears as the Grim Reaper?

Personification is common for places as well as ideas: cities, countries and continents are routinely drawn as people, and the nine Muses give creative expression a human face.