In reply to:

I have never had a good grasp of what rhetoric is, anyway.


Part of the problem is the meaning of the term has undergone changes in emphasis. Rhetoric can be a very formal, quite complex study as are other formal classical studies, such as ethics. But the term rhetoric can simply mean the language you use to persuade or influence whoever your audience is.

Then there are the linguistic terms that are subsumed by rhetoric, such as ones that appear on the site wwh provided and other such rhetoric sites. These terms are tools of the trade -- tricks that enable the speaker or writer to catch your ear and sometimes your mind. Some of them are pretty hard to use and require practice and application. We had a discussion this week about enthymemes, the rhetorical syllogisms Aristotle examines in his Rhetoric. Those syllogisms, arranged in many ways as Aristotle describes them, with their parts left out present a challenging study of how thought and language may be arranged, again with the purpose of catching the audience's ear, thought process, and, finally, being persuaded to the speaker's view.

So, there's really overall rhetoric--a very involved study of the art of persuasion, with in-depth examination of audience, speech, the speaker's/writer's persona, the time in which the speech is given, and so on.

Then there's rhetoric used loosely--just you own kind of language that you use. Or the overall language used by people in a field: "I feel your pain." [And someone hearing this leaning over to a friend and responding, "I can't stand his rhetoric."]

And then there's rhetorical terms--the tools of the trade that have been classified.

We use the term a lot more broadly and loosely today than it was used a century ago.