Wednesday, March 10, 2021

Rhetorical Terms - Langham via Michael Rosen

 chleuasmus - a sarcastic reply that mocks an opponent and leaves him with no answer. (This makes me think of some of Dorothy Parker's one-liners like the one she threw at the person who had been going on and on about having a baby. When it was born and the woman told Parker,  Parker said, 'We always knew you had it in you.'


eidolopoeia - presenting a dead person as speaking or the speech of a dead person, not so much as a ghost but in an argument or description. The example Lanham gives is of the speech in Henry V where the dead men's arms and legs and heads on the battlefield are imagined as speaking.


"But if the cause be not good, the king himself hath
a heavy reckoning to make, when all those legs and
arms and heads, chopped off in battle, shall join
together at the latter day and cry all 'We died at
such a place;' some swearing, some crying for a
surgeon, some upon their wives left poor behind
them, some upon the debts they owe, some upon their
children rawly left."

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