50 Fun Facts About Rhetorical Devices

Which Greek city-state, whose people were famed for pithy replies, gave English the word 'laconic'?

Sparta lies in Laconia, the region behind the word. When a Macedonian king warned what he would do if he invaded, the Spartans are said to have sent back a single word: 'If.'

Which device, Greek for 'sharp-dull', does Romeo pile up in cries like 'O brawling love! O loving hate!'?

Oxymoron joins two contradictory terms, and Romeo strings thirteen in a row in Romeo and Juliet. The word practises what it names, since its two halves mean keen and foolish.

Which term for a distraction comes from a pungent lure William Cobbett said could pull hounds off a scent?

Red herring is a strongly smoked kipper, and in 1807 William Cobbett told of using one to draw hounds away from their quarry. The story was probably invented, but the phrase stuck.

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

Demosthenes also strengthened his voice by speaking on the seashore over the roar of the waves. Or so the ancient lives say, and Plutarch adds that his pronunciation had been inarticulate and stammering.

Which device, Greek for 'name-making', gave the cuckoo, the chickadee and the whip-poor-will their names?

Onomatopoeia builds a word from the sound it describes, which is why so many birds are simply named after their calls. The cuckoo's two-note call gave it echoing names in French (coucou), German (Kuckuck) and Latin (cuculus) too.

Which US president's inaugural antimetabole urged Americans to ask what they could do for their country?

John F. Kennedy swapped 'your country' and 'you' around in back-to-back clauses in 1961. Antimetabole takes its name from Greek words for turning about in the opposite direction.

Which storytelling device, Greek for 'unpublished', is named after Procopius's Secret History of Byzantine court life?

Anecdote began as Anekdota, the title of Procopius's collection of short incidents from the private life of the Byzantine court. The word now covers any brief story told to make a point.

Which device do American tall tales rely on to establish the giant stature and abilities of Paul Bunyan?

Hyperbole comes from Greek words for 'beyond' and 'throw', and nobody is meant to take it literally. In everyday speech it is the heavy bag that 'weighed a ton'.

Which satirist's A Modest Proposal argues, straight-faced, that Ireland's poor should sell their children as food?

Jonathan Swift published the essay in 1729, complete with cooking methods and sums showing the profit. Its deadpan tone made 'a modest proposal' a lasting label for satire of this kind.

Which device, from the Latin for 'letter', drives the tongue-twister 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers'?

Alliteration was coined in a Latin dialogue by the Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano in the 15th century. Long before it had a name, it held together Old English poems such as Beowulf.

Which Greek philosopher's Rhetoric defines the art as seeing the available means of persuasion in each case?

Aristotle spread the Rhetoric over three books and opened it by calling rhetoric a counterpart of dialectic. Both, he argued, deal in probability and so suit human affairs.

Which device is named after the eiron, a stock character of Greek comedy who pretends to know less than he does?

Irony comes from the Greek eironeia, at first a word for lying. Socrates' habit of feigning ignorance in debate turned it into a pretence the listener is meant to see through.

Which Shakespeare character turns a Roman crowd against Brutus while repeatedly calling him 'an honourable man'?

Mark Antony had been allowed to speak at the funeral only if he did not blame the conspirators. So he praises them as honourable men again and again until the sarcasm is unmistakable.

Which device ties Martin Luther King Jr.'s 'I Have a Dream' to the Emancipation Proclamation and the US Constitution?

Allusion is a passing reference that only works if the audience catches it. King shaped the whole speech as a homage to Lincoln's Gettysburg Address, a century after emancipation.

Which classical appeal, from a Greek word for 'suffering', works on an audience's emotions rather than its reason?

Pathos shares its root with sympathy, empathy and pathetic. A speaker who uses it is drawing out feelings the audience already holds, not planting new ones.

Which classical appeal, from the Greek for 'character', persuades through the speaker's own credibility?

Ethos is the root of ethikos, the Greek word for showing moral character. A speaker earns it through three things: practical wisdom, virtue and goodwill towards the audience.

Which classical appeal, from the Greek for 'word' or 'reason', persuades with facts, figures and sound argument?

Logos could mean word, speech, account or judgment in Greek, and New Testament writers later used it for the divine Word. In persuasion it asks listeners to follow the argument, not the speaker.

Which device, Greek for 'carrying back', opens A Tale of Two Cities with clause after clause starting 'it was'?

Anaphora repeats the same words at the start of neighbouring clauses to build rhythm and emphasis. Martin Luther King Jr. used it too, returning to the title phrase of 'I Have a Dream' eight times.

Which device, Greek for 'setting opposite', powers Patrick Henry's cry 'Give me liberty or give me death!'?

Antithesis sets two opposites side by side in matching grammar so that each sharpens the other. A proverb manages it in four words: 'Man proposes, God disposes.'

Which fallacy, called an Aunt Sally in Britain after a pub game, attacks a distorted version of an opponent's argument?

Straw man suggests a figure that is easy to knock down, such as a scarecrow or a military training dummy. The arguer flattens that stand-in and then claims to have beaten the real position.

Which fallacy, often mistaken for a simple insult, attacks whoever makes an argument instead of the argument itself?

Ad hominem is short for a Latin phrase meaning 'argument directed at the person'. The word 'hominem' covers anyone, though some writers have used 'ad feminam' when the target is a woman.

Which extended device shapes John Bunyan's The Pilgrim's Progress, whose hero Christian walks to the Celestial City?

Allegory comes from Greek words meaning 'speaking about something else'. Bunyan began the book in a Bedfordshire prison, jailed for holding religious services outside the Church of England.

Which quality of words makes 'pig-headed' an insult and 'strong-willed' a compliment for the same stubborn person?

Connotation is the emotional or cultural association a word carries on top of its literal meaning. Both labels describe someone stubborn, but one signals admiration and the other frustration.

Which device is Oscar Wilde using when a character claims he can resist anything except temptation?

Paradox is a statement that seems to contradict itself yet makes a point once it is unpicked. G. K. Chesterton was another master of it, observing that spies do not look like spies.

Which device, Greek for 'a turning back', inverts normal word order the way Yoda does throughout the Star Wars films?

Anastrophe moves a word out of its usual place for emphasis, as when Yoda puts the object first and the verb last. Latin poets leaned on it, and Virgil uses it in the first line of the Aeneid.

Which abolitionist's speech at a women's convention in Akron, Ohio, is known by a repeated rhetorical question?

Sojourner Truth gave the speech without a title in 1851. The famous question, 'Ain't I a Woman?', comes from a very different version published in 1863 and is missing from the earliest transcript.

Which Roman orator lamented 'O tempora, o mores!' in a speech exposing Catiline's plot to overthrow the republic?

Cicero used the cry, meaning 'Oh the times, oh the customs', in four surviving speeches. The best known opens his first attack on Catiline, delivered to the conspirator's face before the Senate.

Which device, Greek for 'a change of name', lets 'the crown' stand for a monarchy and 'the press' for journalists?

Metonymy names a thing by something closely tied to it. Monarchs really do wear crowns, so the link already exists, whereas a metaphor borrows its comparison from an unrelated field.

Which device lets a part name the whole, as when soldiers become 'boots' and business executives become 'suits'?

Synecdoche also runs the other way, with the whole standing for a part. The two directions go by the Latin names pars pro toto and totum pro parte.

Which device has Abraham Lincoln finish three phrases in a row with 'the people' in the Gettysburg Address?

Epistrophe, from a Greek word for 'return', repeats the same words at the end of successive clauses. Its mirror image repeats them at the start, and a speaker who does both is using symploce.

Which device, Greek for 'unconnected', strips the conjunctions from Julius Caesar's boast 'Veni, vidi, vici'?

Asyndeton leaves out the 'and' a list would normally carry, which makes it sound fast and final. Caesar's three words mean 'I came, I saw, I conquered'.

Which device, from the Greek for 'simplicity', praises by denying the opposite, as when 'not bad' means good?

Litotes is a hallmark of Old English poetry and the Icelandic sagas, where it conveys stoical restraint. Tone decides the meaning: 'not bad' can come out as mediocre or as excellent.

Which device, named like a piece of punctuation, lets John Donne scold Death itself in the sonnet 'Death, be not proud'?

Apostrophe turns away from the audience to address someone absent, dead or not human at all. In English verse it often arrives with the exclamation 'O', as when Juliet hails a 'happy dagger'.

Which device, from the Greek for 'ladder', arranges words or clauses so that each step outweighs the one before?

Climax once meant the whole rising staircase of ideas. Its use for the single highest point dates from 1789, a shift the Oxford English Dictionary put down to popular ignorance.

Which three-part form of argument reasons that all men are mortal, Socrates is a man, so Socrates is mortal?

Syllogism draws a conclusion from two premises, one major and one minor. Its earliest form was defined around 350 BC in the Greek treatise Prior Analytics.

Which Latin name, meaning 'the place where three roads meet', covered grammar, logic and rhetoric in medieval schools?

Trivium was the lower division of the seven liberal arts, taken before the harder quadrivium. That upper course moved on from words to numbers: arithmetic, geometry, music and astronomy.

Which fee-charging travelling teachers of ancient Greece lent their name to a word for clever but deceptive argument?

Sophists such as Protagoras, who boasted of making the weaker argument the stronger, taught for pay. Critics said they prized clever speech over knowledge, so 'sophistry' became an insult.

Which word for a fiery attack speech comes from an Athenian orator's blasts at the father of Alexander the Great?

Philippic began with speeches of 351 BC denouncing the ambitions of Philip II of Macedon. The label was later borrowed in Rome, and it now fits any damning tirade against a political figure.

Which former slave asked 'What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?' in a speech given in Rochester, New York?

Frederick Douglass spoke on July 5, 1852, the day after the holiday, at a meeting of the Rochester Ladies' Anti-Slavery Society. The speech is among the most widely known of all his writings.

Which device, named after an X-shaped Greek letter, mirrors two phrases in a criss-cross ABBA pattern?

Chiasmus was a favourite of ancient Hebrew, Greek and Latin writers. Shakespeare builds one in Othello: 'Who dotes, yet doubts; suspects, yet strongly loves.'

Which device piles up conjunctions for a slow, solemn rhythm, as the King James Bible does with its repeated 'and'?

Polysyndeton takes its name from Greek words for 'many' and 'bound together'. The King James translators arrived at it by rendering a Hebrew connective literally, one 'and' at a time.

Which canon of classical rhetoric did one Athenian orator reportedly name three times over as the key to oratory?

Delivery covers the voice and gestures a speaker uses, and Roman teachers called it pronuntiatio or actio. For all its importance, the classical handbooks wrote little about it.

Which term for a short, pointed saying was first used as the title of a medical work by Hippocrates?

Aphorism comes from a Greek word for definition, and the Aphorisms of Hippocrates open with the best-known one: life is short, art is long. Latin reversed the order as 'Ars longa, vita brevis'.

Which Roman poet's Ars Poetica gave critics the phrase 'purple prose' for writing that is too ornate?

Horace mocked weighty openings that have one or two purple patches tacked on to gleam far and wide. Critics still call an overwritten stretch of a book a purple patch or purple passage.

Which philosopher's dialogue Gorgias has Socrates dismiss rhetoric as flattery, no more an art than pastry baking?

Plato has Socrates argue that rhetoric is to politics what pastry baking is to medicine: a knack for pleasing people, not a craft that does them good.

Which Greek term for the opportune moment to speak was linked by ancient writers to an archer's perfectly timed shot?

Kairos was one of two Greek words for time, the other being chronos. Weavers used it too, for the instant the shuttle could pass through the threads on the loom.

Which device, Greek for 'a yoking together', sends a Dickens character home 'in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair'?

Zeugma lets one word govern two others, often in clashing senses. The traveller is Miss Bolo in The Pickwick Papers, and Alexander Pope has Queen Anne take counsel and tea the same way.

Which device, also called paralipsis, raises a point by denying it: 'I'm not going to say that I told you so'?

Apophasis lets a speaker plant a charge while seeming too polite to make it. Even 'needless to say' is a mild case, since the speaker goes on to say it anyway.

Which device has St Paul ask in Romans whether God is the God of the Jews only, then answer the question himself?

Hypophora answers its own question on the spot, unlike a rhetorical question, which leaves the reply hanging. Speakers use it to change direction and to settle doubts before listeners voice them.

Which US president coined 'bully pulpit' for the presidency, using 'bully' in its old sense of superb or wonderful?

Theodore Roosevelt meant that the office was a superb platform for arguing his agenda. The phrase now covers any prominent position that guarantees its holder a hearing.