Sam Leith, former literary editor of the Daily Telegraph, novelist, and contributor to the Wall Street Journal
and other publications, is cheeky, talented, smart, and a fine and easy
writer, intoxicated by words and the way we arrange them to sell,
persuade, praise, explain, attack. In Words Like Loaded Pistols, he
sets out to share his enthusiasm for rhetoric, and, with only an
occasional misfire, he succeeds admirably, in large part because of his
unflagging good nature and offbeat sense of humor.
“Explaining rhetoric to a human being,” he writes, “is, or should be, like explaining water to a fish.” In both cases, explanations aren’t really necessary. We swim in rhetoric from the moment we turn on the news until we log off at night, and the whole time there’s someone making a rhetorical pitch, trying to sell us something.
Rhetoric “isn’t an academic discipline or the preserve of professional orators,” Leith writes. “It’s right here, right now, in your argument with the insurance company, your plea to the waitress for a table near the window, or your entreaties to your jam-faced kiddies to eat their damn veggies.”
True enough, although in the U.S. it would probably be something other than jam. Nor, despite the comfortable way he eases us into his subject, is he really interested in discussing insurance, kids, or veggies. His intention is to analyze and instruct us in the way the world’s movers and shakers—among them Milton’s Satan, Cicero, Lincoln, Churchill, Hitler, Martin Luther King, Obama—have used rhetoric for achieving their ends. Each of these figures is given a chapter-long section (for no good reason, all in italics) as a “Champion of Rhetoric,” within discussions of what he names as the five parts of rhetoric—Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/swimming-in-rhetoric/
“Explaining rhetoric to a human being,” he writes, “is, or should be, like explaining water to a fish.” In both cases, explanations aren’t really necessary. We swim in rhetoric from the moment we turn on the news until we log off at night, and the whole time there’s someone making a rhetorical pitch, trying to sell us something.
Rhetoric “isn’t an academic discipline or the preserve of professional orators,” Leith writes. “It’s right here, right now, in your argument with the insurance company, your plea to the waitress for a table near the window, or your entreaties to your jam-faced kiddies to eat their damn veggies.”
True enough, although in the U.S. it would probably be something other than jam. Nor, despite the comfortable way he eases us into his subject, is he really interested in discussing insurance, kids, or veggies. His intention is to analyze and instruct us in the way the world’s movers and shakers—among them Milton’s Satan, Cicero, Lincoln, Churchill, Hitler, Martin Luther King, Obama—have used rhetoric for achieving their ends. Each of these figures is given a chapter-long section (for no good reason, all in italics) as a “Champion of Rhetoric,” within discussions of what he names as the five parts of rhetoric—Invention, Arrangement, Style, Memory, and Delivery.
Read more: http://www.theamericanconservative.com/articles/swimming-in-rhetoric/
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