Over the Christmas holidays, I traveled back east to visit my parents. I carried Lanhams "A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms." One night my mom and I sat up talking about everything from Picasso to metaphysics and at some point we got to talking about Shakespeare. I tried to explain to her why Shakespeare is rhetorically reveered, and at one point I climbed downstairs to the guest room and retrieved Lanhams book. She -- like most of us -- hears the word "rhetoric" and thinks of politicians and empty promises, or phrasing so complicated as to render simple fact obscure.I think the first word in "Handlist" we got a chuckle over was "chiasmus" and some of the examples like "Its not whether grapenuts are good enough for you, but whether youre good enough for grapenuts!" And the famous "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." The one that gave her the best chuckle though was an editors advice to a young writer "Youre writing is both original and interesting; unfortunately the part thats original is not interesting and the part that is interesting is not original."
The great thing about this book is that it gives name to a great many devices we already use in everyday speech, and for a writer this information is invaluable. The better facility a writer has with these devices the better he or she can express our endless human emotions.
A good many of the examples give the Latin or Greek root word, but the definitions are in English. Many of them have example usage along with the definition.
E.g., "Insultatio": derisive, ironical abuse of a person to his face. As Hamlet says to his mother:
Look on this picture, and on this,
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See what a grace was seated on this brow:
Hyperions curls, the front of Jove himself...
This was your husband. Look you now what follows.
Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear
Blasting the wholesome brother. Have you eyes?
Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed,
And batten on this moor? Ha! Have you eyes?
(Hamlett, III, iv)
All in all, I think this handlist -- as much a dictionary as a "handlist" of rhetorical devices -- is a rich resource for writers, law students, political science majors, and young English scholars. Indeed, with this handlist, you could begin your own "Progymnasmata"!
Stacey
Samuel Butler once wrote that "All a rhetoricians rules teach nothing but to name his tools." Classical and Medieval rhetoricians named, renamed, parsed, and cataloged all these tools with a bewildering sesquipedalian nomenclature. "Handlist" almost succeeds in its attempt to make sense of this thorny thicket of jargon.Chapter 1 of "Handlist" is a dictionary style listing of all the various names of the rhetorical devices. Each name is individually entered, but only the main name is defined. Each of the lesser names simply has cross references. The merely-cross-referenced names outnumber the actually-defined names by about 3 to 1. The actually-defined names should have been set in a bolder type than the merely-cross-referenced names.
Chapter 2 consists of an excellent review of the divisions of rhetoric. Read Chapter 2 first.
Chapter 3 takes the more common rhetorical devices and catalogs them by type, giving brief definitions. It catalogs only one name for each device, and is much more user friendly than Chapter 1. Read Chapter 3 second.
My suggestion for the third edition: Reorder the chapters. Put Chapter 2 first and Chapter 1 last.
Its Just Fun!
poorly organized