| 词组 | rhetoric |
| 释义 | rhetoric In ancient times—in the days of Aristotle and before—rhetoric was simply the art of speaking and writing effectively, the art of persuasion. Rhetoric was a subject of study at least as early as the time of Socrates, when it was taught by itinerant teachers known as Sophists to any free male Athenian citizen who could afford it and who wanted to improve his powers of persuasion in the councils of the city-state. Rhetoric continued to be a subject of study into the Middle Ages, which was when the word rhetoric came into English. The study of rhetoric had by then, of course, long recognized certain standard methods of embellishment in speech and writing, and the word rhetoric in English soon began to be applied to those methods too, as in this 20th-century example: • The Senate soon found that if he spoke with studied elegance in favour of a motion he meant that he wanted it voted against, and that if he spoke with studied elegance against it this meant that he wanted it passed; and that on the very few occasions when he spoke briefly and without any rhetoric he meant to be taken literally —Robert Graves, I, Claudius, 1934 So if rhetoric could refer to the heightening of speech by the application of traditional devices, it would be no great stretch to use it to refer to that heightening or those devices in a depreciatory way, as belonging more to form than to substance. Such use began in the 17th century, according to evidence in the OED. It was still occurring in the late 19th and early 20th centuries: • He owes his superiority to a resolution to look facts in the face, instead of being put off by flimsy rhetoric —Leslie Stephen, History of English Thought in the 18th Century, 1876 • My brother Clarke uttered a larmoyant dissent that seemed to me more sentiment and rhetoric than reasoning —Oliver Wendell Holmes d. 1935, letter, 29 Mar. 1922 • It looks like mere "rhetoric," certainly not "deeds and language such as men do use." It appears to us, in fact, forced and flagitious bombast —T. S. Eliot, "Ben Jonson," in Selected Essays, 1932 • That passage, Sir, is not empty rhetoric —Virginia Woolf, Three Guineas, 1938 So far this use had not raised a single eyebrow. But then came the 1960s and its sometimes unruly and unkempt students demanding "relevance" and damning "rhetoric." Rhetoric became rather a vogue word, and commentators like Edwin Newman soon discovered it: • Still worse is the destruction of rhetoric. Rhetoric does not mean fustian, exaggeration, or grand and empty phrases.... Suddenly beloved of politicians and journalists, rhetoric is now used to mean something doubtful and not quite honest Its misapplication could hardly tell more than it does —Newman 1974 Newman obviously did not realize that his newly discovered misapplication had been recorded in dictionaries published well before he was born, such as the Century of 1897, Webster 1909, and the OED (the volume covering R was published in 1910). Other commentators who have largely repeated Newman's criticism include Bremner 1980, Kilpatrick 1984, and Harper 1975, 1985. Critical commentary in the newspapers has come from William Safire (N. Y. Times Book Rev., 6 June 1976) and Andrew Knight, a British writer, who in the New York Times for 7 May 1978 asserted that Americans had changed the meaning of rhetoric by using it only pejoratively—a curious assertion since Evans 1957, before the deluge, commented that the pejorative sense was primarily British. But you need not concern yourself greatly with this minor issue. The pristine old sense of rhetoric is still in respectable use, and so are the senses from which the depreciatory sense developed. Nothing has really happened except that the depreciatory sense has gained wider circulation than it used to have. |
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