What an interesting question... (and welcome a-Board, billpy!)

i couldn't find anything (which isn't saying much ) but in my searches i did stumble upon this, which is at least tangentially correlated:


metastasis - casual mention of a subject as if it were unimportant; responding to a person's criticism or insult with a riposte that uses or plays on his or her words (rhetoric term)

i thought this was an intriguing twist of the more common meaning of metastasis, which deals with the transfer of cancerous cells to previously healthy sites. it reminds me of a Readers' Digest quote that my mom had displayed above the kitchen sink, where we were all sure to see it often: "Never answer an angry word with an angry word. It's the second one that makes the quarrel"


and BTW, can someone explain what dictionaries mean when they call a term "rhetoric"? are they using rhetoric to indicate that its use would be circumfloribus ?