rhetoric

noun

1)

a form of rhetoric

Syn:

oratory, eloquence, command of language, way with words

2)

empty rhetoric

Syn:

bombast, turgidity, grandiloquence, magniloquence, pomposity, extravagant language, purple prose; wordiness, verbosity, prolixity; informal hot air; rare fustian

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rhetoric

Rhetoric = (1) the art of using language persuasively; the rules that help one achieve eloquence; (2) the persuasive use of language; (3) a treatise on persuasive language; (4) prose composition as a school subject. These are the main senses outlined in the Oxford English Dictionary. There should probably be added a new sense, related to but distinct from the first sense: (5) the bombastic or disingenuous use of language to manipulate people.

Older books defined rhetoric in line with sense 1:

• "Rhetoric is the Art of speaking suitably upon any Subject." (John Kirkby, A New English Grammar; 1746.)

• "Rhetoric is the art of adapting discourse, in harmony with its subject and occasion, to the requirements of a reader or hearer." (John F. Genung, The Working Principles of Rhetoric; 1902.)

But the slippage toward the pejorative sense 5 began early. In "Some Fruits of Solitude" (1693), William Penn suggested its iniquitous uses: "There is a Truth and Beauty in Rhetorick; but it oftener serves ill Turns than good ones." (Charles W. Eliot, ed., Harvard Classics; 1909.) By the twentieth century, some writers with a classical bent were trying hard to reclaim the word — e.g.: "No one who reads [ancient authors] can hold the puerile notions of rhetoric that prevail in our generation. The ancients would have made short work of the cult of the anti-social that lies behind the cult of mystification and the modern hatred of rhetoric. All the great literary ages have exalted the study of rhetoric." (Van Wyck Brooks, Opinions of Oliver Allston; 1941.) But T. S. Eliot probably had it right when he acknowledged that the word is essentially ambiguous today — generally pejorative but with flashes of a favorable sense: "The word [rhetoric] simply cannot be used as synonymous with bad writing. The meanings which it has been obliged to shoulder have been mostly opprobrious; but if a precise meaning can be found for it this meaning may occasionally represent a virtue." (" ‘Rhetoric’ and Poetic Drama", in The Sacred Wood, 7th ed.; 1950.) — BG