Rhetorical Device Using Quotes

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It is the simplest phrase you can imagine,” Favreau said, “three monosyllabic words that people say to each other every day.” But the speech etched itself in rhetorical lore. It inspired music videos and memes and the full range of reactions that any blockbuster receives online today, from praise to out-of-context humor to arch mockery. Obama’s “Yes, we can” refrain is an example of a rhetorical device known as epistrophe, or the repetition of words at the end of a sentence. It’s one of many famous rhetorical types, most with Greek names, based on some form of repetition. There is anaphora, which is repetition at the beginning of a sentence (Winston Churchill: “We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields”). There is tricolon, which is repetition in short triplicate (Abraham Lincoln: “Government of the people, by the people, and for the people”). There is epizeuxis, which is the same word repeated over and over (Nancy Pelosi: “Just remember these four words for what this legislation means: jobs, jobs, jobs, and jobs”). There is diacope, which is the repetition of a word or phrase with a brief interruption (Franklin D. Roosevelt: “The only thing we have to fear is fear itself”) or, most simply, an A-B-A structure (Sarah Palin: “Drill baby drill!”). There is antithesis, which is repetition of clause structures to juxtapose contrasting ideas (Charles Dickens: “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times”). There is parallelism, which is repetition of sentence structure (the paragraph you just read). Finally, there is the king of all modern speech-making tricks, antimetabole, which is rhetorical inversion: “It’s not the size of the dog in the fight; it’s the size of the fight in the dog.” There are several reasons why antimetabole is so popular. First, it’s just complex enough to disguise the fact that it’s formulaic. Second, it’s useful for highlighting an argument by drawing a clear contrast. Third, it’s quite poppy, in the Swedish songwriting sense, building a hook around two elements—A and B—and inverting them to give listeners immediate gratification and meaning. The classic structure of antimetabole is AB;BA, which is easy to remember since it spells out the name of a certain Swedish band.18 Famous ABBA examples in politics include: “Man is not the creature of circumstances. Circumstances are the creatures of men.” —Benjamin Disraeli “East and West do not mistrust each other because we are armed; we are armed because we mistrust each other.” —Ronald Reagan “The world faces a very different Russia than it did in 1991. Like all countries, Russia also faces a very different world.” —Bill Clinton “Whether we bring our enemies to justice or bring justice to our enemies, justice will be done.” —George W. Bush “Human rights are women’s rights and women’s rights are human rights.” —Hillary Clinton In particular, President John F. Kennedy made ABBA famous (and ABBA made John F. Kennedy famous). “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind,” he said, and “Each increase of tension has produced an increase of arms; each increase of arms has produced an increase of tension,” and most famously, “Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country.” Antimetabole is like the C–G–Am–F chord progression in Western pop music: When you learn it somewhere, you hear it everywhere.19 Difficult and even controversial ideas are transformed, through ABBA, into something like musical hooks.
Derek Thompson (Hit Makers: Why Things Become Popular)
[Professor Greene's] reaction to GAMAY, as published in the Yale Daily News, fairly took one's breath away. He fondled the word "fascist" as though he had come up with a Dead Sea Scroll vouchsafing the key word to the understanding of God and Man at Yale. In a few sentences he used the term thrice. "Mr. Buckley has done Yale a great service" (how I would tire of this pedestrian rhetorical device), "and he may well do the cause of liberal education in America an even greater service, by stating the fascist alternative to liberalism. This fascist thesis . . . This . . . pure fascism . . . What more could Hitler, Mussolini, or Stalin ask for . . . ?" (They asked for, and got, a great deal more.) What survives, from such stuff as this, is ne-plus-ultra relativism, idiot nihlism. "What is required," Professor Greene spoke, "is more, not less tolerance--not the tolerance of indifference, but the tolerance of honest respect for divergent convictions and the determination of all that such divergent opinions be heard without administrative censorship. I try my best in the classroom to expound and defend my faith, when it is relevant, as honestly and persuasively as I can. But I can do so only because many of my colleagues are expounding and defending their contrasting faiths, or skepticisms, as openly and honestly as I am mine." A professor of philosophy! Question: What is the 1) ethical, 2) philosophical, or 3) epistemological argument for requiring continued tolerance of ideas whose discrediting it is the purpose of education to effect? What ethical code (in the Bible? in Plato? Kant? Hume?) requires "honest respect" for any divergent conviction?
William F. Buckley Jr. (God and Man at Yale: The Superstitions of 'Academic Freedom')
Darwin singled out the eye as posing a particularly challenging problem: 'To suppose that the eye with all its inimitable contrivances for adjusting the focus to different distances, for admitting different amounts of light, and for the correction of spherical and chromatic aberration, could have been formed by natural selection, seems, I freely confess, absurd in the highest degree.' Creationists gleefully quote this sentence again and again. Needless to say, they never quote what follows. Darwin's fulsomely free confession turned out to be a rhetorical device. He was drawing his opponents towards him so that his punch, when it came, struck the harder. The punch, of course, was Darwin's effortless explanation of exactly how the eye evolved by gradual degrees. Darwin may not have used the phrase 'irreducible complexity', or 'the smooth gradient up Mount Improbable', but he clearly understood the principle of both. 'What is the use of half an eye?' and 'What is the use of half a wing?' are both instances of the argument from 'irreducible complexity'. A functioning unit is said to be irreducibly complex if the removal of one of its parts causes the whole to cease functioning. This has been assumed to be self-evident for both eyes and wings. But as soon as we give these assumptions a moment's thought, we immediately see the fallacy. A cataract patient with the lens of her eye surgically removed can't see clear images without glasses, but can see enough not to bump into a tree or fall over a cliff. Half a wing is indeed not as good as a whole wing, but it is certainly better than no wing at all. Half a wing could save your life by easing your fall from a tree of a certain height. And 51 per cent of a wing could save you if you fall from a slightly taller tree. Whatever fraction of a wing you have, there is a fall from which it will save your life where a slightly smaller winglet would not. The thought experiment of trees of different height, from which one might fall, is just one way to see, in theory, that there must be a smooth gradient of advantage all the way from 1 per cent of a wing to 100 per cent. The forests are replete with gliding or parachuting animals illustrating, in practice, every step of the way up that particular slope of Mount Improbable. By analogy with the trees of different height, it is easy to imagine situations in which half an eye would save the life of an animal where 49 per cent of an eye would not. Smooth gradients are provided by variations in lighting conditions, variations in the distance at which you catch sight of your prey—or your predators. And, as with wings and flight surfaces, plausible intermediates are not only easy to imagine: they are abundant all around the animal kingdom. A flatworm has an eye that, by any sensible measure, is less than half a human eye. Nautilus (and perhaps its extinct ammonite cousins who dominated Paleozoic and Mesozoic seas) has an eye that is intermediate in quality between flatworm and human. Unlike the flatworm eye, which can detect light and shade but see no image, the Nautilus 'pinhole camera' eye makes a real image; but it is a blurred and dim image compared to ours. It would be spurious precision to put numbers on the improvement, but nobody could sanely deny that these invertebrate eyes, and many others, are all better than no eye at all, and all lie on a continuous and shallow slope up Mount Improbable, with our eyes near a peak—not the highest peak but a high one.
Richard Dawkins (The God Delusion)
The efforts to trace formal rhetorical devices back to Homer produced results conveniently available in the work known as De Vita et Poesi Homeri, which has come down to us among Plutarch's Moralia. The author sets out to prove that essentially everything in the form and content of literature, as well as in philosophical thought, was anticipated by Homer: figures of speech, adaptations of regular grammatical usage, figures of thought, styles of rhetoric, types of speech, and much else. The treatise lists about thirty-eight figures of speech and thought (there is some overlap between the two), and provides Homeric examples of each. It is significant that with a few exceptions (falling in the areas of military strategy and other practical aspects of culture) the author achieves his purpose without undue strain: all the figures identified by later teachers of rhetoric do occur in Homer, and the study testifies to the richness of the decorative features of Homeric style. This richness need not, of course, be the product of a sophisticated m d highly developed literary style, still less of a formal rhetorical teaching, and many of the figures are natural features of speech, found in the ordinary discourse of uneducated people. However, the frequency and variety of their occurrence within the conventional epic diction suggests that in this respect, as in all others, Homer is both making the fullest use of techniques developed by his predecessors and surpassing their achievement.
Geoffrey S. Kirk (The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume 5: Books 17-20)
The first text book on the subject was Aristotle's Rhetoric which was written sometime between 322 and 320 B.C. In this book Aristotle defined rhetorical discourse "as the art of discovering all the available means of persuasion in any given case." During the Roman period great orators like Cicero and Quintilion also wrote some important books on the subject. They also agreed with Aristotle and defined rhetoric as the art of persuading an audience. At first it also included logic, that is, valid reasoning and the tricks or devices used in argument so as to produce intellectual and emotional effect on the audience in order to make them veer round the speaker's point of view. But today it means mostly the tricks.
M. Chakraborti (Principles of English Rhetoric and Prosody)
Ian Bogost writes about a ‘rhetoric of failure’ in games designed so that the player cannot win (2007, 85). One could put Tetris or Space Invaders in such a category – the blocks or missiles keep falling until the player fails to keep them at bay, meaning that you will always, ultimately, lose the game. The winning situation, if there is one, is to get a higher score than your friends. Perhaps, as Janet Murray wrote of Tetris, this is a metaphor for a typical American life (1997, 144).
Jill Walker Rettberg (Seeing Ourselves Through Technology: How We Use Selfies, Blogs and Wearable Devices to See and Shape Ourselves)
As I read on, however, the prose itself rather than the content became the center of my attention. It was unlike the books they had made me read at school and had nothing to do with the mysteries I used to check out of the library. Later, when I finally went to college, I would be able to trace Vanner’s literary influences and consider his novel from a formal point of view (even if he was never assigned reading for any of the courses I took, since his work was out of print and already quite unavailable). Yet back then I had never experienced anything like that language. And it spoke to me. It was my first time reading something that existed in a vague space between the intellectual and the emotional. Since that moment I have identified that ambiguous territory as the exclusive domain of literature. I also understood at some point that this ambiguity could only work in conjunction with extreme discipline—the calm precision of Vanner’s sentences, his unfussy vocabulary, his reluctance to deploy the rhetorical devices we identify with “artistic prose” while still retaining a distinctive style. Lucidity, he seems to suggest, is the best hiding place for deeper meaning—much like a transparent thing stacked in between others. My literary taste has changed since then, and Bonds has been displaced by other books. But Vanner gave me my first glimpse of that elusive region between reason and feeling and made me want to chart it in my own writing.
Hernan Diaz (Trust)
The efforts to trace formal rhetorical devices back to Homer produced results conveniently available in the work known as De Vita et Poesi Homeri, which has come down to us among Plutarch's Moralia. The author sets out to prove that essentially everything in the form and content of literature, as well as in philosophical thought, was anticipated by Homer: figures of speech, adaptations of regular grammatical usage, figures of thought, styles of rhetoric, types of speech, and much else. The treatise lists about thirty-eight figures of speech and thought (there is some overlap between the two), and provides Homeric examples of each. It is significant that with a few exceptions (falling in the areas of military strategy and other practical aspects of culture) the author achieves his purpose without undue strain: all the figures identified by later teachers of rhetoric do occur in Homer, and the study testifies to the richness of the decorative features of Homeric style. This richness need not, of course, be the product of a sophisticated and highly developed literary style, still less of a formal rhetorical teaching, and many of the figures are natural features of speech, found in the ordinary discourse of uneducated people. However, the frequency and variety of their occurrence within the conventional epic diction suggests that in this respect, as in all others, Homer is both making the fullest use of techniques developed by his predecessors and surpassing their achievement.
Geoffrey S. Kirk (The Iliad: A Commentary: Volume 5: Books 17-20)
Cr nn bsio t, Philaen? Calva es. Cr nn bsio t, Philaen? Rfa es. Cr nn bsio t, Philaen? Lusca es. Martial Epig. 2.33: The Epigrams are usually referenced, as here, by book and poem number; this poem, targeted at poor Philaenis, had an obscene denouement in its fourth and final verse, which I have dutifully omitted! The striking repetition, the technical term for which is ANAPHORA, was a favorite poetic and rhetorical device, typically used to achieve some sort of emphasis. Meter: hendecasyllabic, an “11-syllable” verse rhythm often employed by Catullus and Martial.
Richard A. LaFleur (Scribblers, Sculptors, and Scribes: A Companion to Wheelock's Latin and Other Introductory Textbooks)
was a rhetorically deft presentation, delivered by a master storyteller. But there were problems with the story. Keynes himself had predicted a postwar boom, not a depression (so had Galbraith, in “194Q”). He had never claimed that monetary policy didn’t matter. He had opposed using high interest rates as a policy device because they were the most socially destructive method available for bringing down prices. He never claimed it didn’t work. And although it was true that Keynes had
Zachary D. Carter (The Price of Peace: Money, Democracy, and the Life of John Maynard Keynes)