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)
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.
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")
--"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)
chreia (Pronounced "CRAY-yuh") Chreia
Contributed by Megan Motlagh
Acropolis at night.
Definition
Chreia is but one facet of the progymnasmata, or exercises that prepare a student of rhetoric for his or her own effective speeches. Originating in Athens, it is an “exercise in which students amplify a short narrative, usually taken from history, that points up a moral or teaches a lesson.” [1] Chreia is not the same as a fable with a moral at the end, it is simply (or not so simply) used to put upon a pedestal some lesson that has been presented based on one’s actions. The ultimate goal of a young rhetorician utilizing chreia would be to craft an intricate intensification of said narrative in order to demonstrate mastery of memory and study. Beyond this goal, a masterful speaker could weave elaborate additions into the simplest of narratives with which to sway even the most hardened of audiences. Many times, the chreia would evolve from a statement provided from someone famous, and the rhetorician built upon that saying by implementing methods he or she had learned from the chreia. Hermogenes, a Greek philosopher, and Aphthonius, a Greek sophist and rhetorician, “both supplied a list of instructions for amplifying on a simple account of a historical event or speech.” [1]
The list is as follows: [1]
· Begin with praise of a famous speaker or doer of deeds.
· Provide an explanation or paraphrase of the famous saying or action.
· Supply a reason for the saying or doing.
· Compare and contrast the famous saying or doing to some other speech or event.
· Add an example and support the saying or doing with testimony.
· Conclude with a brief epilogue.
The Porch of the Caryatids.
Chreia is a flexible rhetorical exercise that allows for ease of change according to the setting and environment in which the rhetorician is speaking. It is also used in literary works, where the exercise is meant to sharpen wit and parody figureheads.[2] In this way, chreia is used frequently in "sharp responses to powerful figures," which enables the speaker to comment truthfully in an "incisive and disarming manner."
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.