VOCABULARY FOR WEEK October 25-29

APHORISM:
Etymology:
From the Greek, "to delimit, define"
1. A tersely phrased statement of a truth or opinion.
2. A brief statement of a principle.
Observations:
* "The word aphorism was first employed by Hippocrates to describe a collection of concise principles, primarily medical, beginning with the famous, 'Life is short, art is long, opportunity fleeting, experimentation dangerous, reasoning difficult. . . .' Eventually the term was applied to statements of principles in law and agriculture and extended to other areas."(G. A. Test, Satire: Spirit and Art. Univ. Press of Florida, 1991)
Examples:
* "Sits he on ever so high a throne, a man still sits on his bottom." (Montaigne)
* "All men should strive to learn before they die, what they are running from, and to, and why."
(James Thurber)
* "The first rule of Fight Club is--you do not talk about Fight Club." (Brad Pitt as Tyler Durden, Fight Club)
* "An idealist is one who, on noticing that a rose smells better than a cabbage, concludes that it will also make better soup." (H.L. Mencken)
* "Expect nothing. Live frugally on surprise." (Alice Walker)
* "We are what we pretend to be, so we must be careful what we pretend to be." (Kurt Vonnegut, Mother Night)

HYPOPHORA:
Definition: A rhetorical term for the strategy in which a speaker raises a question and then immediately answers it.
Examples:
* "What makes a king out of a slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage! What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage!" (The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, 1939)
* "You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalog of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory, victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be; for without victory, there is no survival.” (Winston Churchill, 13 May 1940)
* "What shall Cordelia speak?
Love, and be silent." (Cordelia in King Lear by William Shakespeare)
* "You boil it all down, what does a man really need? Just a smoke and a cup of coffee."
(Sterling Hayden as Johnny Guitar in Johnny Guitar, 1954)
* "Ask any mermaid you happen to see, 'What's the best tuna?' Chicken of the Sea."
(television commercial)
* "In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
(Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man, 1949)
* "What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children."
(John F. Kennedy, commencement address at American University, 1963)
* "What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."
(Kurt Vonnegut)

POLYPTOTON
Etymology: From the Greek, "use of the same word in different cases"
Definition: A rhetorical term for repetition of words derived from the same root but with different endings. Adjective: polyptotonic.
Observations:
* "It is sometimes the goal of an argument to take a concept accepted by an audience in one role or category of a sentence action and transfer it to others, an agent becoming an action or an action becoming an attribute and so on. This work is epitomized by polyptoton, the grammatical morphing of the word, as Aristotle explains repeatedly in the Topics. . . . He points out, for example, how people's judgments follow a term as it changes from one part of speech to another. So, for example, an audience who believes that acting justly is better than acting courageously will also believe that justice is better than courage and vice versa . . .. [T]he Topics is not concerned with immutable rules of validity but with the patterns of reasoning that most people follow most of the time, and most people will indeed follow the logic of polyptotonic morphing as Aristotle describes it."
(Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science. Oxford Univ. Press, 1999)
Examples:
* "Choosy Mothers Choose Jif" (commercial slogan for Jif peanut butter)
* ". . . love is not love
Which alters when it alteration finds,
Or bends with the remover to remove . . ." (Shakespeare, Sonnet 116)
* "Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired." (Robert Frost)
* "By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming idiotic oneself."
(Gustave Flaubert)
* "The things you own end up owning you."
(Brad Pitt in the movie Fight Club, 1999)
* "Morality is moral only when it is voluntary."
(Lincoln Steffens)
* "Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it."
(Joseph Conrad)
* "A good ad should be like a good sermon: it must not only comfort the afflicted; it also must afflict the comfortable."
(Bernice Fitzgibbon)
* "Friendly Americans win American friends."
(slogan of the United States Travel Service in the 1960s)
* "His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars."
(William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, December 1950)
* "Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment."
(Norman Mailer)
* "You can't keep blaming yourself. Blame yourself once, then move on."
(Homer Simpson)

ISOCOLON
Etymology: From the Greek, "of equal members or clauses"
Definition: A rhetorical term for a succession of clauses of approximately equal length and corresponding structure.
Observations:
* "Isocolon is a sequence of sentences of equal length, as in Pope's 'Equal your merits! equal is your din!' (Dunciad II, 244), where each sentence is assigned five syllables, iconizing the concept of equal distribution. . .
Examples:
* "Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get." (Mark Twain)
* "It takes a licking, but it keeps on ticking!" (advertising slogan of Timex watches)
* "An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered." (Gilbert Keith Chesterton)
* "I'm a Pepper, he's a Pepper, she's a Pepper, we're a Pepper--
Wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too? Dr. Pepper!" (advertising jingle for Dr. Pepper soft drink)

TRICOLON
Etymology: From the Greek, "three" + "unit"
Definition: A series of three parallel words, phrases, or clauses.
Examples:
* "I require three things in a man. He must be handsome, ruthless, and stupid." (Dorothy Parker)
* "You are talking to a man who has laughed in the face of death, sneered at doom, and chuckled at catastrophe." (The Wizard in The Wizard of Oz, 1939)
* "Tell me and I forget. Teach me and I remember. Involve me and I learn." (Benjamin Franklin)
* "Down, down, down into the darkness of the grave
Gently they go, the beautiful, the tender, the kind;
Quietly they go, the intelligent, the witty, the brave.
I know. But I do not approve. And I am not resigned." (Edna St. Vincent Millay, "Dirge Without Music")
* "Be sincere, be brief, be seated." (Franklin D. Roosevelt's advice to speakers)
* "Ours is the age of substitutes: instead of language, we have jargon; instead of principles, slogans; instead of genuine ideas, bright ideas." (Eric Bentley, "The Dramatic Event")
* "Eye it, try it, buy it." (Slogan for Chevrolet, 1940s)
* "And the fan takes over again, and the heat and the relaxed air and the memory of so many good little dinners in so many good little illegal places, with the theme of love, the sound of ventilation, the brief medicinal illusion of gin." (E.B. White, "Here Is New York")
* "She loved Maytree, his restlessness, his asceticism, his, especially, abdomen." (Annie Dillard, The Maytrees)
* "Tradition. Innovation. Service." (Slogan of First Chatham Bank)
* "The key to Springfield has always been Elm Street. The Greeks knew it. The Carthaginians knew it. Now you know it." (Herman, "Bart the General," The Simpsons)
* "I think we've all arrived at a very special place. Spiritually, ecumenically, grammatically."
(Jack Sparrow, Pirates of the Caribbean)

VOCABULARY FOR WEEK October 18-22

ANACHRONISM: Placing an event, person, item, or verbal expression in the wrong historical period. In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Shakespeare writes the following lines:

Brutus: Peace! Count the clock.
Cassius: The clock has stricken three (Act II, scene i, lines 193-94).

Of course, there were no household clocks during Roman times, no more than there were DVD players! The reference is an anachronism, either accidental or intentional. Elizabethan theater often intentionally used anachronism in its costuming, a tradition that survives today when Shakespeare's plays are performed in biker garb or in Victorian frippery. Indeed, from surviving illustrations, the acting companies in Elizabethan England appeared to deliberately create anachronisms in their costumes. Some actors would dress in current Elizabethan garb, others in garb that was a few decades out of date, and others wore pseudo-historical costumes from past-centuries--all within a single scene or play.

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.)

MEIOSIS (See tapinosis.)
To belittle, use a degrading epithet, often through a trope of one word.
[Gk. "lessening"]
"rhymester" for "poet"; "shrink" for "psychiatrist"; "treehugger" for "environmentalist."

EPIZEUXIS
Repetition of a word for emphasis (usually with no words in between).
[Gk. "A fastening together"]
-"And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button." (William Shakespeare, King Lear, V.3)
-"O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon." (Milton, Samson Agonistes, 80)
-"Break, break, break
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea:" (Tennyson)
-Waitress: Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Bloody vikings. You can't have egg, bacon, spam and sausage without the spam.
Mrs. Bun: I don't like spam!
Mr. Bun: Shh dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your spam. I love it. I'm having spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.
(Monty Python, "The Spam Sketch")

OXYMORON
The yoking of two terms that are ordinarily contradictory.
[Gk. "sharp-dull"]
-"That building is a little bit big and pretty ugly."
(James Thurber)
-"O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches!"
(Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions)
-"This woman had known the hot whispers of a man who loved her, entirely if not eternally. And that she had answered, fiercely soft." ("Chasing Down the Dawn," Jewel Kilcher)
-"Act naturally," "found missing," "alone together," '"peace force," "terribly pleased," "small crowd," "clearly misunderstood."

TROPE
Rhetorical device that produces a shift in the meaning of words-- traditionally contrasted with a scheme, which changes only the shape of a phrase. Sixteenth-century rhetorician Peter Ramus identified four major tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Post-Saussurean theorists have challenged such distinctions between the tropological and "literal" aspects of language, arguing that the rhetorical and metaphorical dimension of language is integral to all discourse, not just poetic and literary language.
[Gk. "a turn"]

NO VOCABULARY FOR THE TWO-DAY WEEK!!!

VOCABULARY FOR WEEK Act. 4-8

DISSONANCE
A mingling or union of harsh, inharmonious sounds, often deliberately used for effect, as in the lines from Whitman's "The Dalliance of Eagles:"

The clinching interlocking claws, a living, fierce, gyrating wheel,
Four beating wings, two beaks, a swirling mass tight grappling,
In tumbling turning clustering loops, straight downward falling,

Sidelight: The term, dissonance, can also refer to any elements of a poem which are discordant in the context of their use.

Sidelight: Although often considered synonymous with cacophony, the term dissonance more strongly implies a deliberate choice.

CACOPHONY (cack-AH-fuh-nee or cack-AW-fuh-nee)
Discordant sounds in the jarring juxtaposition of harsh letters or syllables which are grating to the ear, usually inadvertent, but sometimes deliberately used in poetry for effect.

Sidelight: Sound devices are important to poetry. To create sounds appropriate to the content, the poet may sometimes prefer to achieve a cacophonous effect instead of the more commonly sought-for euphony. The use of words with the consonants b, k and p, to cite one example, produce harsher sounds than the soft f and v or the liquid l, m and n.

EUPHONY (YOO-fuh-nee)
Harmony or beauty of sound which provides a pleasing effect to the ear, usually sought-for in poetry for effect. It is achieved not only by the selection of individual word-sounds, but also by their arrangement in the repetition, proximity, and flow of sound patterns.

Sidelight: The consonants considered most pleasing in sound are l, m, n, r, v, and w. The harsher consonants in euphonious texts become less jarring when in the proximity of softer sounds. Vowel sounds are generally more euphonious than the consonants, so a line with a higher ratio of vowel sounds will produce a more agreeable effect; also, the long vowels in words like moon and fate are more melodious than the short vowels in cat and bed. But the most important measure of euphonic strategies is their appropriateness to the subject.

VOCABULARY FOR WEEK September 27-October 1

Just THREE new words this week:

BANDWAGON APPEAL – the belief that something should be done because the majority of people do it (or wish to do it).
Ad populum is the original Latin term, meaning “to the people,” suggesting that a person yields his opinion to the will of the public majority rather than to logic. Bandwagon appeals are arguments that urge people to follow the same paths that others do. In old-time political campaigns, politicians used to travel literally on horse-drawn bandwagons, urging citizens to “jump on the bandwagon” — or join the crowd — to vote for them.
People can be like sheep, and most of us can be attracted to strong, charismatic leaders who make us feel wanted or important. Although Americans like to think of themselves as “rugged individuals,” we are often easily seduced by ideas endorsed by popular culture and the mass media that prey upon our desires to belong to a herd.
-- Peer pressure is a type of bandwagon appeal – you may do something that others are doing simply because others are doing it. “Because everyone else does it” is a favorite reason cited by young teens who are looking for reasons to do something more grown up.
EXAMPLE
Radio Ad: “Zippo – the grand old lighter that’s made right here in the good old U.S. of A.”
This ad implies that Zippo brand cigarette lighters are the American standard, like Marlboro and the Dallas Cowboys (dubbed “America’s Team”). The Zippo company’s warrant is this: If everyone else is buying this brand, then we all should too. Logic, however, tells us that we need a better reason than peer pressure or popularity.

HYPERBATON: This includes several rhetorical devices involving departure from normal word order. In some cases, hyperbaton involves the separation of words normally belonging together, done for effect or convenience:
•In this room there sit twenty (though I will not name them) distinguished people.
Or it can emphasize a verb by putting it at the end of the sentence:
•We will not, from this house, under any circumstances, be evicted.

COGNITIVE DISSONANCE: Cognitive Dissonance Theory argues that the experience of dissonance (or incompatible beliefs and actions) is adversive and people are highly motivated to avoid it. In their efforts to avoid feelings of dissonance, people will avoid hearing views that oppose their own, change their beliefs to match their actions, and seek reassurance after making a difficult decision.

Example: Cognitive dissonance is what the mainly Democratic audience of journalists experienced at the White House correspondents' dinner on April 30, 2005, when a supposedly straightlaced Republican first lady made suggestive wisecracks about her husband. "For the mainly Democratic audience - this was a crowd of Washington journalists and luminaries from Hollywood and Manhattan - it was an evening of cognitive dissonance. How to reconcile this charming image on stage with the Bush they love to bash?"

VOCABULARY FOR WEEK September 20-24

ASYNDETON - The omission of conjunctions between related clauses.
Ex: "This is the villain among you who deceived you, who cheated you, who meant to betray you completely." (Aristotle)
POLYSYNDETON - Repetition of conjunctions in close succession.
Ex: "We have ships and men and money and stores."
COMPOUND SENTENCE - A sentence with two or more independent clauses.
Ex: Canada is a rich country, but it still has many poor people.
COMPOUND-COMPLEX SENTENCE - A sentence with two or more independent clauses and one or more dependent clauses.
Ex: The package arrived in the morning, but the courier left before I could check the contents.
LOOSE SENTENCE - A sentence that adds modifying elements after the subject, verb, and complement.
Ex: "Bells rang, filling the air with their clangor, startling pigeons into flight from every belfry, bringing people into the streets to hear the news."
TAUTOLOGY - A group of words that merely repeats the meaning already conveyed.
Ex: "If you don't get any better, then you'll never improve."
ANTITHESIS - The juxtaposition of contrasting words or ideas, often in parallel structure.
Ex 1: "Extremism in defense of liberty is no vice, moderation in the pursuit of justice is no virtue." (Barry Goldwater)
Ex 2: "…found her lying on her bed as lovely as the June night in her flowered dress--and as drunk as a monkey" (Fitzgerald 81).
VERISIMILITUDE - The quality of a text that reflects the truth of actual experience.
Ex: The Amazing Adventures of Kavalier and Clay by Michael Chabon has medium verisimilitude.
DIALECT - The describable patterns of language--grammar and vocabulary--used by a particular cultural or ethnic population.
Ex: A Caribbean dialect is often "sing-songish" and leaves out words from sentences.
PACE - The speed with which a plot moves from one event to another.
Example: In The Grapes of Wrath, John Steinbeck paces the story somewhat slowly, interspersing it with main-idea chapters.

VOCABULARY FOR WEEK September 13-17

Hasty generalization

Definition: Making assumptions about a whole group or range of cases based on a sample that is inadequate (usually because it is atypical or just too small). Stereotypes about people ("librarians are shy and smart," "wealthy people are snobs," etc.) are a common example of the principle underlying hasty generalization.

Example: "My roommate said her philosophy class was hard, and the one I'm in is hard, too. All philosophy classes must be hard!" Two people's experiences are, in this case, not enough on which to base a conclusion.

Post hoc (also called false cause)

This fallacy gets its name from the Latin phrase "post hoc, ergo propter hoc," which translates as "after this, therefore because of this."

Definition: Assuming that because B comes after A, A caused B. Of course, sometimes one event really does cause another one that comes later—for example, if I register for a class, and my name later appears on the roll, it's true that the first event caused the one that came later. But sometimes two events that seem related in time aren't really related as cause and event. That is, correlation isn't the same thing as causation.

Examples: "President Jones raised taxes, and then the rate of violent crime went up. Jones is responsible for the rise in crime." The increase in taxes might or might not be one factor in the rising crime rates, but the argument hasn't shown us that one caused the other.

Slippery slope

Definition: The arguer claims that a sort of chain reaction, usually ending in some dire consequence, will take place, but there's really not enough evidence for that assumption. The arguer asserts that if we take even one step onto the "slippery slope," we will end up sliding all the way to the bottom; he or she assumes we can't stop halfway down the hill.

Example: "Animal experimentation reduces our respect for life. If we don't respect life, we are likely to be more and more tolerant of violent acts like war and murder. Soon our society will become a battlefield in which everyone constantly fears for their lives. It will be the end of civilization. To prevent this terrible consequence, we should make animal experimentation illegal right now." Since animal experimentation has been legal for some time and civilization has not yet ended, it seems particularly clear that this chain of events won't necessarily take place. Even if we believe that experimenting on animals reduces respect for life, and loss of respect for life makes us more tolerant of violence, that may be the spot on the hillside at which things stop—we may not slide all the way down to the end of civilization. And so we have not yet been given sufficient reason to accept the arguer's conclusion that we must make animal experimentation illegal right now.

Like post hoc, slippery slope can be a tricky fallacy to identify, since sometimes a chain of events really can be predicted to follow from a certain action. Here's an example that doesn't seem fallacious: "If I fail English 101, I won't be able to graduate. If I don't graduate, I probably won't be able to get a good job, and I may very well end up doing temp work or flipping burgers for the next year."


Straw man

Definition: One way of making our own arguments stronger is to anticipate and respond in advance to the arguments that an opponent might make. In the straw man fallacy, the arguer sets up a wimpy version of the opponent's position and tries to score points by knocking it down. But just as being able to knock down a straw man, or a scarecrow, isn't very impressive, defeating a watered-down version of your opponents' argument isn't very impressive either.

Example: "Feminists want to ban all pornography and punish everyone who reads it! But such harsh measures are surely inappropriate, so the feminists are wrong: porn and its readers should be left in peace." The feminist argument is made weak by being overstated—in fact, most feminists do not propose an outright "ban" on porn or any punishment for those who merely read it; often, they propose some restrictions on things like child porn, or propose to allow people who are hurt by porn to sue publishers and producers, not readers, for damages. So the arguer hasn't really scored any points; he or she has just committed a fallacy.

Red herring

Definition: Partway through an argument, the arguer goes off on a tangent, raising a side issue that distracts the audience from what's really at stake. Often, the arguer never returns to the original issue.

Example: "Grading this exam on a curve would be the most fair thing to do. After all, classes go more smoothly when the students and the professor are getting along well." Let's try our premise-conclusion outlining to see what's wrong with this argument:

Premise: Classes go more smoothly when the students and the professor are getting along well.

Conclusion: Grading this exam on a curve would be the most fair thing to do.

When we lay it out this way, it's pretty obvious that the arguer went off on a tangent—the fact that something helps people get along doesn't necessarily make it more fair; fairness and justice sometimes require us to do things that cause conflict. But the audience may feel like the issue of teachers and students agreeing is important and be distracted from the fact that the arguer has not given any evidence as to why a curve would be fair.


Begging the question

Definition: A complicated fallacy; it comes in several forms and can be harder to detect than many of the other fallacies we've discussed. Basically, an argument that begs the question asks the reader to simply accept the conclusion without providing real evidence; the argument either relies on a premise that says the same thing as the conclusion (which you might hear referred to as "being circular" or "circular reasoning"), or simply ignores an important (but questionable) assumption that the argument rests on. Sometimes people use the phrase "beg the question" as a sort of general criticism of arguments, to mean that an arguer hasn't given very good reasons for a conclusion, but that's not the meaning we're going to discuss here.

Examples: "Active euthanasia is morally acceptable. It is a decent, ethical thing to help another human being escape suffering through death." Let's lay this out in premise-conclusion form:

Premise: It is a decent, ethical thing to help another human being escape suffering through death.

Conclusion: Active euthanasia is morally acceptable.

If we "translate" the premise, we'll see that the arguer has really just said the same thing twice: "decent, ethical" means pretty much the same thing as "morally acceptable," and "help another human being escape suffering through death" means "active euthanasia." So the premise basically says, "active euthanasia is morally acceptable," just like the conclusion does! The arguer hasn't yet given us any real reasons why euthanasia is acceptable; instead, she has left us asking "well, really, why do you think active euthanasia is acceptable?" Her argument "begs" (that is, evades) the real question.

Here's a second example of begging the question, in which a dubious premise which is needed to make the argument valid is completely ignored: "Murder is morally wrong. So active euthanasia is morally wrong." The premise that gets left out is "active euthanasia is murder." And that is a debatable premise—again, the argument "begs" or evades the question of whether active euthanasia is murder by simply not stating the premise. The arguer is hoping we'll just focus on the uncontroversial premise, "Murder is morally wrong," and not notice what is being assumed.

False dichotomy

Definition: In false dichotomy, the arguer sets up the situation so it looks like there are only two choices. The arguer then eliminates one of the choices, so it seems that we are left with only one option: the one the arguer wanted us to pick in the first place. But often there are really many different options, not just two—and if we thought about them all, we might not be so quick to pick the one the arguer recommends!

Example: "Caldwell Hall is in bad shape. Either we tear it down and put up a new building, or we continue to risk students' safety. Obviously we shouldn't risk anyone's safety, so we must tear the building down." The argument neglects to mention the possibility that we might repair the building or find some way to protect students from the risks in question—for example, if only a few rooms are in bad shape, perhaps w