A friend of mine who rarely, if ever, gets angry, wrote this to me in an email a little while ago:

Can someone tell those guys at WordArc that "rhetoric" is not a dirty word. It really irks me when people ask for truth instead of rhetoric, or accuse someone of using rhetoric, and then try to persuade you of their argument. I'm getting pissed-off right now! Stop fucking the English language -- it's the only one I have! So tell Alamir or anyone else culpable of being a smug dumbass that they ain't credible if they continue to degrade the only tool they don't know how to use.

Before I get into my own thoughts on "rhetoric" I have to repeat that my friend, quoted above, is not a temperamental guy. He's one of the most down-to-earth, caring, and forgiving people I know. So I thought I should take up his complaint.

The stereotype nowadays is that "rhetoric" is the fancy and fatuous icing on the cake of plain language, a distraction from the "real issue". "Rhetoric" is what cheap politicians use to "spin" the "truth"; or the salesman to sell you a crappy car. What the "truth" actually is, who knows. We just know it's not "rhetorical".

Of course, rhetoric has had many meanings throughout history, including public discourse and persuasion (as practiced since the Ancient Greeks, notably the Sophists, and later with Romans like Cicero), subject of study (again the Sophists, Plato, Aristotle, and the Medieval Scholastics through to Bacon, Hobbes, Milton, and Erasmus). But in more modern times, with the burgeoning of academic disciplines - from social science to deconstruction - rhetoric comes to cover the use words anywhere: in novels, law, science, advertising and public relations, religion, you name it. You could write an article on just about anything and call it, "The Rhetoric of (insert topic here)".

The common view that rhetoric is just style trumping substance has some odd assumptions built into it. Two obvious, though opposing assumptions, are that, on the on hand, there is a pure "truth" that, if we could only burn off or strip away that pesky rhetoric, we would get at it; and, on the other, that there is no objective truth, only better or worse (more and less persuasive) rhetoric. For the latter, truth is merely what you can convince people of.

I assume that Alamir is closer to the former than the latter, that is, that he believes rhetoric clouds the facts, rather than truth simply belonging to the most eloquent, charismatic speaker. I know Alamir well enough to know that he's not a relativist, so I don't think he subscribes to the sophistry of the Protagorean "Man is the measure of all things", especially being the scientifically inclined guy that he is.

The problem here, then, is the debasement of "rhetoric", as if non-rhetorical speech were more desirable, that is, if it were even possible. I understand and even agree with the use of the word "rhetoric" to mean mere cheap flourish. We need a word for it. But "rhetoric" is too broad a term to denote just empty oratory flare.

We run a risk, I think, in romanticizing "knowledge", "truth", or "logic" when we artificially oppose them with "rhetoric". It's hard to say whether anything can be expressed except "rhetorically". A mathematical equation is rhetoric-free, but as Wittgenstein pointed out, all mathematical propositions are tautologies, and therefore express no thought. So anything that expresses an actual thought will be bound, at least in part, by rhetoric.

One use of words that almost fully escapes rhetoric is an instruction manual, which doesn't try to "convince" you of anything, and doesn't try to argue that its way of putting together the Ikea table is better than your way. It's just the way, just as there is no argument implied by 2+2=4. It's just the way it is.

So we can see the temptation in trying to erase rhetoric from language. We think by stripping it away we might get down to the pure, "bare" facts, even though the bodily metaphor of "bare facts" carries its own rhetorical weight. You can only get rhetoric-free writing in something like an instruction manual, or any other piece of writing that lacks ethical content.

"Rhetoric", we tend to think, appeals to the passions, those darn irrational emotions, whereas the appeal to reason or the intellect is what language should do. But, as Northrop Frye (who, along with Oscar Wilde, I'm far too fond of quoting) said, "It is very dangerous to assume that only the emotions can stampede the mind."

Frye, a literary critic, took up the problem of rhetoric, as he did elsewhere, in his monumental Anatomy of Criticism, notably in its closing essay, "Rhetorical Criticism: Theory of Genres". Near the end of the book (where all the juicy stuff is) he compares what he calls "persuasive" and "conceptual" rhetoric.

Persuasive rhetoric, claimed Frye, taken to the extreme, ends up in "emotional jargon, which consists largely in an obsessive repetition of verbal formulas. Not far removed is the kind of vulgar inarticulateness that uses one word, generally unprintable, for the whole rhetorical ornament of the sentence, including adjectives, adverbs, epithets, and punctuation. Finally, words disappear altogether, and we are back to a primitive language of screams and gestures and signs."

At the opposite end is the appeal to the intellect rather than the emotions, which philosophers typically put to use, in the form of, as Frye lists them, "the dialectic dialogue of Plato and the Upanishads, the closely related question-objection-answer scheme of St. Thomas, the quasi-mathematical arrangements of ideas in Spinoza, the aphorisms of Bacon (who remarks that aphorisms are a sign of vitality in philosophy), and...the numbered propositions of Wittgenstein's Tractatus. All of these," Frye wrote, "are clearly at least in part endeavors to purify verbal communication of the emotional content of rhetoric; all of them, however, impress the literary critic as being themselves rhetorical devices."

"The implication," Frye went on, "is that there is a conceptual rhetoric aimed, like persuasive rhetoric, at separating emotion and intellect, but attempting to throw away the emotional half."

As an example of this emotionless style Frye cites a single but very convoluted paragraph-sized sentence of James Mill's and comments that it is "finally discovered to mean, after one has worked it all out like a crossword puzzle, that those who have a stake in one form of government are likely to resist the introduction of another. The critic, searching for the reasons why, if James Mill meant that, he could not have said it, eventually realizes that the style is motivated by a perverse, bristly intellectual honesty. He will not condescend to employ any of the pretty arts of persuasion, sugar-coated illustrations or emotionally-loaded terms; he will appeal only to the cold logic of reason itself, reinforced, to be sure, by a peculiarly Victorian sense that the more difficult the style, the tougher the moral and intellectual fibre one develops in wrestling with it." The basis of James Mill's rhetoric, Frye said, "is the imitation of legal style, with its careful qualifying inclusiveness"

Today, the debasing use of the word "rhetoric", it seems to me, is connected with that "perverse, bristly intellectual honesty", the desire to "appeal only to the cold logic of reason itself".

Frye calls this non-emotional rhetoric "gobbledygook" or "officialese: "a naive intensification of Mill's desire to speak with the voice, not of personality, but of Reason itself. The jargon of government reports, inter-office memoranda, and military instructions is motivated by a wish to be as impersonal as possible, to represent verbally the Institution or some anonymous cybernetic deity functioning in a state of 'normalcy'". This "gobbledygook" tries to give the impression that, as Frye said in his The Educated Imagination, "the social machine...is running smoothly, and that no human factors are going to disturb it (my emphasis)."

The danger, as I see it, is in thinking that if we get rid of enough of the rhetoric we can get at the truth. A safer bet, a more balanced take, is to realize that "anything which makes a functional use of words", as Frye pointed out, "will always be involved in all the problems of words." That is, everything we say, no matter how clear or "objective" or "scientific" it is, is always put and seen through a lens, through the filter of rhetoric.

But this isn't a bad thing. It's just a language thing. Language constantly mixes style and form with concrete content, just as the mind constantly mixes emotion and intellect. If you were either purely emotional or purely intellectual you'd hardly be half a human. And since so much of our cognition we are less than fully conscious of, it's almost arrogant to think that we can be fully aware of the emotional roots to our intellectual beliefs. As David Hume famously put it, "Reason is and ought to be the slave of the passions and can never pretend to any other office than to serve and obey them."

And just for good measure, here's Frye again, on the indispensable value of rhetoric: "A good deal of the strategy of teaching is rhetorical strategy, choosing words and images with great care in order to evoke the response: 'I never thought of it that way before," or 'Now that you put it that way, I can see it.' What distinguishes, not simply the epigram, but profundity itself from platitude is very frequently rhetorical wit. In fact it may be doubted whether we ever really call an idea profound unless we are pleased with the wit of its expression. Teaching, like persuasion, employs a dissociative rhetoric aimed at breaking down habitual response".

So rhetoric can go both ways. It can distract and disguise, or it can penetrate and enlighten. It's up to the user, and their decision is an ethical one. Therefore, I agree with Alamir. I just think the word "rhetoric" isn't the best word to use to get at the problem, considering that "rhetoric" is a broad, neutral term, and only colloquially (and recently) a pejorative one.

Alamir, in his most recent article, 10 Worst Clichés By Journalists, and Alisha, in his I'm Always Right - If You Think About It, go after the needless rhetorical flare in journalism and in ordinary speech respectively. And they're both right, up to a point. I think we should try to separate good from bad rhetoric, not try to eradicate rhetoric completely; that's impossible, and therefore reckless, and a little arrogant.

Alisha's complaint about the "If you think about it" rhetorical device is a valid one. I myself hate when people say, as if it made their argument indubitable, "Well, at the end of the day", or, "When the chips are down", or, "What it all comes down to is...". Alamir is right as well, when he points out the vacuous language in journalism. I thought number 3) "Lessons will be learned", was particularly interesting. Seems like the counterpart to the equally passive voice of Reagan's famous, "Mistakes were made".

Anyway. I said I'd take up my friend's complaint, and that's what I tried to do. So, Alamir, don't write back starting out with, "That's not what I meant", etc., because my article obviously went beyond simply a response to your anti-"rhetoric" piece, and you probably have something more interesting to add than a simple rebuttal. Besides, it wasn't me that implied you were a "smug dumbass"...that was my friend.