rhetoric

Nowadays, when we say something is ‘rhetoric’, we usually mean it’s a load of bollocks designed to manipulate whoever’s unlucky enough to be listening to it. But this much-maligned word didn’t always have such a negative meaning. In fact, ‘rhetoric’ used to simply refer to the art of persuasion. Throughout Classical Antiquity, the Middle Ages and the Renaissance, ‘rhetoric’ was a prestigious and essential academic discipline, and one of three ancient arts of discourse (also called trivium) along with grammar (yay!) and logic (boo!).

Rhetoric, innit

The word ‘rhetoric’ has a Proto-Indo-European root, *werh₁, which means ‘to speak’ or ‘to say’. This appeared during the Late Neolithic to Early Bronze Age, i.e. bloody ages ago (about 6,500 to 4,500 years ago, if you want actual numbers. Oh, and if you’re wondering about the weird notation, the asterisk means the word was never written down, and the small 1 marks a soft throat sound, apparently). *werh₁ evolved into an Ancient Greek word, eírein, also meaning ‘to speak’, which then produced rhētōr meaning a public speaker or orator (although I’m not sure how – it’s something to do with the Greek letter for W vanishing, I think, but much too boring to go into here, which is saying something). To further complicate things, the Greeks then took the root of rhētōr and added the adjective ending -ikē (meaning ‘pertaining to’ or ‘the skill of’) which created a new adjective, rhētorikē, meaning ‘oratorical’. This clearly wasn’t complicated enough though, so they stuck tékhnē (‘art’, ‘craft’ or ‘technique’) on the end to make it mean ‘the oratorical craft’ or ‘the art of the public speaker’.

Understandably, as time passed people stopped bothering with the tékhnē bit, and just used rhētorikē on its own to mean ‘the art of speaking’. This made its way into Latin as rhētorica, then into 12th-century Old French as retorique, and finally into Middle English in the early 14th century as rethoryke or rhetorik.

Annnnnnd relax.

Now we all know too much about rhetoric, let’s have a look at the tools and techniques that people use when they’re trying to be good at it, AKA rhetorical devices. There are bloody loads of these, and they all have very long complicated names, so I’ll just give you a few. I can almost certainly guarantee you’ve used at least some of them in everyday speech.

Complicated name	Sounds like…	Actually is…	In action
Epizeuxis	Something that hangs at the back of your throat	Repeating a word or phrase back-to-back with no other words in between to make a point	‘Location, location, location.’
Anaphora	A shop that sells overpriced makeup	Repeating a phrase at the start of sentences or clauses for emphasis	‘We shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields…’
Tricolon	A bowel complaint	Grouping things in threes to add rhythm and punch	‘Life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.’
Hyperbole	An American sports event that no one outside America cares about	Deliberate, extreme exaggeration used to make a point or emphasise a feeling, and not meant to be taken literally (and pronounced ‘hy-PER-buh-lee’, confusingly)	‘I’m so hungry I could eat a horse.’

What about rhetorical questions, I hear you ask in a not-rhetorical way. Yes, rhetorical questions come directly from the study of rhetoric. They’re called that because they were traditionally used to make a point or persuade an audience, with the answer either immediately given by the speaker, or being so bleedin’ obvious that they didn’t need to. In speechmaking, posing a question forces the listener’s brain to process the thought actively rather than just listening (or drifting off…). Rhetorical questions also subtly steer an audience’s thinking without explicitly telling them what to think. Sneaky, huh?

bathetic

No, I haven’t spelled ‘pathetic’ wrong, honest. ‘Bathetic’ is an adjective describing an abrupt turn from something serious and poetic to something regular and silly, either on purpose or unintentionally. A great example of bathos (the noun) comes in the film Castaway, when Tom Hanks’ character gets incredibly upset over the loss of his only friend while stranded on a desert island: a Wilson brand volleyball: ‘Wilson, I’m sorry! WIIILLLSSSOOONNN!’ (That made me well up just writing about it.)

‘Bathos’, as you can probably guess from the ending, comes from Ancient Greek. Then it simply meant physical depth, like a valley, trench, the sea, etc (you know what ‘deep’ means, sorry). We have satirist and writer Alexander Pope to thank for turning it into a literary joke though, which he did back in 1792. For centuries, critics had used the Greek word ‘hypsos’ (meaning ‘height’ or ‘loftiness’) to describe grand and beautiful poetry. Pope argued that if great writing reaches the heights, then terrible writing does the exact opposite: it plunges into the depths, AKA bathos.

Jane Austen was a big fan of bathos which she used to mock the overly dramatic Gothic romance novels that everyone was reading at the time. In ‘Northanger Abbey’, Austen ratchets up the tension as our protagonist, Catherine Morley, creeps into a spooky room where she opens an ancient, mysterious cabinet expecting to discover dark family secrets. And she finds… ‘[a]n inventory of linen’.

Douglas Adams was another master of bathos, and ‘The Hitchhiker’s Guide to the Galaxy’ is full of it. For example, ‘The ships hung in the sky in much the same way that bricks don’t’. And, of course, Deep Thought (the second-greatest supercomputer in the universe) who, when tasked with finding the answer to the great question of life, the universe and everything, takes 7.5 million years to reply with ‘42’.

Warning – will make you bawl over a ball

barbarian

You know what a barbarian is – someone who pillages villages (and other places that don’t rhyme). The word has an origin that you might not know though. It comes from ancient Greece where the term ‘barboros’ was used to refer to any non-Greek-speaking bunch of people, or anyone those high-falutin’ Greeks thought inferior. ‘Barboros’ is literally based on the sound ‘bar-bar’ which is the Greeks taking the piss out of other languages by imitating what sounded like gibberish to them. I imagine it was probably accompanied by a ‘blah-blah-blah’ hand gesture as well.

Over time, the term ‘barbarian’ evolved to cover not only linguistic differences, but also cultural, social and perceived intellectual disparities between the Greeks and everyone else. It wasn’t long before the Romans picked up on the term, using it to describe non-Romans, particularly those outside the Roman Empire.

My favourite historical barbarians are the Vandals, a Germanic tribe who played a big part in the fall of the Western Roman Empire. Believed to have originated from the area around modern-day Poland and Ukraine, in the early 5th century AD they established a powerful kingdom in North Africa. They also formed alliances with other groups, including the Alans, an Iranian nomadic tribe with the best name ever.

In 455AD, under the rule of King Genseric, the Vandals invaded Rome. There’s a story that they ended up in the imperial wine cellars. Instead of looting them as they were supposed to do, they decided to have themselves a little tipple. As anyone who’s gone to the pub after work for ‘just one drink’ has experienced, this ended up in a raucous party that including parading around the city streets wearing posh Roman clothes, and even crowning one of their own as the ‘Vandal King of Rome’. We’ve all been there.

Although the Vandals sacking of Rome wasn’t as devastating as earlier barbarian invasions (like the one by the Visigoths in 410AD), it did show the rest of the world that the Empire was in trouble. Combined with their conquest of North Africa (an important source of grain and revenue for the Romans), the Vandals were the beginning of the end for the Romans.

Despite this, the Vandal kingdom in North Africa didn’t last an awful lot longer. It fell in 534AD when the Byzantine Emperor Justinian I got the better of our tribe in the Vandalic War. Their most enduring legacy is probably (as I imagine you’ve guessed) the word ‘vandalism’, which is based on their reputation for looting and generally making a big old mess.

palimpsest

A palimpsest is a manuscript or scroll that someone’s written something on, which someone else has later scraped off and then written on again. So it’s very environmentally friendly, but also means that lots of historic words were destroyed just so some arsehole had a fresh piece of paper.

Etymology wise, this one’s really straightforward. ‘Palimpsest’ comes from a Latin word ‘palimpsestus’. And that comes from an Ancient Greek word, ‘palímpsēstos’, which literally means ‘again scraped’. That doesn’t leave me very much to say here, sorry.

Lots of palimpsests came about due to the Greeks and Romans doing their writing on wax tablets. When they didn’t need the words anymore they’d scrape them off and start again. Kinda like ye olde Etch-a-Sketch, if you will. Later on people used parchment made of lamb, calf or goat kid’s skin which was expensive, hence reusing it wherever possible.

The most famous (relatively speaking) palimpsest is the Archimedes (yes, he of ‘eureka’ and naked bum fame) Palimpsest. It’s a 13th-century prayer book which contains several erased texts that were written hundreds of years before that. That includes two treatises by Archimedes that have never turned up anywhere else, ‘The Method’ and ‘Stomachion’ (good name for a band). You can find out more about how a team of scholars recovered these, and other texts, here. Oh, and it only took them 12 bloody years.

Name and shame time. The scribe who erased Archimedes’ writings only went and wrote his name on the first page of the palimpsest. He was called Johannes Myronas, and he overwrote Archimedes’ words in Jerusalem, finishing up on 14 April 1229. What an idiot.

ostracise

To be ostracised is to be exiled or excluded from a group, who all have a chat and decide you can’t hang around with them anymore, the utter bastards. Like a lot of our words it comes from a Greek word, ostraka, which refers to a shard of pottery. But what does that have to do with being exiled by a bunch of people, I hear you ask?

Well, imagine you’re a VIP in Athens in Ancient Greece. But you’re a bit of a renegade. A lone wolf, marching to the beat of your own drum. If all that rebelliousness meant you proved to be a bit too much of a thorn in the side of the powers that be, they’d get together and have a Big Brother-style vote to decide whether to get rid of you or not. But instead of going to ye olde diary room to cast their vote, they’d write your name down on, you’ve guessed it, a bit of pottery (also called a ‘potsherd’). And if you got enough pieces of pottery with your name on then you got exiled from Athens i.e. ostracised, for TEN WHOLE YEARS.

Why did they use broken pottery? Because there was a shit tonne of it hanging around, basically. Paper obviously wasn’t readily available and papyrus had to be imported from Egypt, making it much too expensive to be used for something like this.

These ostraka are from 482 BC, and were found in a well near the Acropolis. The name on them is ‘Themistocles’ who, after he was ostracised, defected to Persia where he was made governor of Magnesia (where ‘milk of’ comes from presumably?).

idiot

Alongside ‘moron’*, ‘idiot’ is one of my favourite non-sweary insults. But where does it come from? Turns out it’s derived from an Ancient Greek word, idiōtēs, which means ‘private person’. That doesn’t mean that idiōtēs didn’t want to go out (remember going out?), but that they didn’t have much to do with public affairs and the government. ‘Idiom’ (i.e. a word or phrase which is unique to a group of people or a place) also comes from the same root, as does ‘idiosyncrasy’ (a quirky thing that’s unique to one person), which makes sense when you think about the whole ‘private’ meaning.

Back to idiōtēs. As I said, an idiōtēs was basically just a normal – anyone who wasn’t a soldier, scribe, judge, politician, etc. But, people who weren’t idiōtēs saw them as the opposite of ‘citizens’. And because of this, ye olde Greeks soon started using the term to refer to people who they thought weren’t clever enough to talk about politics and public affairs. From this, it wasn’t long until ‘idiot’ began to take on the meaning we know today.

So, idiot. More than just a stupid person.

* While writing this post I discovered that ‘moron’ has some slightly shady origins. It, alongside ‘imbecile’, ‘cretin’ and ‘retard’, were once scientific terms used in psychology and psychiatry for people with mild intellectual disabilities. And they were also favourite terms of the American eugenics movement when pushing for enforced sterilisation. So that’s nice. With the exception of ‘retard’ (which most people now agree is pretty offensive), these have now slipped into the vernacular. But does that mean they’re okay to use? I DON’T KNOW.