RHETORICAL DEVICE TEST #2
Example of Antimetabole
"Fair is foul and foul is fair."
Example of Antimetabole
"He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions." - The Sphinx, Mystery Men (1999)
Example of Aphorism
"Life is a tale told by an idiot - full of sound and fury, signifying nothing." (Macbeth)
Example of Aphorism
"Lord, what fools these mortals be!" (A Midsummer Night's Dream)
Example of Aphorism
"Praise is the reflection of the virtue. But it is the reflection glass or body which giveth the reflection." (Of Praise)
Example of Antithesis
"Setting foot on the moon may be a small step for a man but a giant step for mankind."
Example of Aphorism
"Studies serve for delight, for ornament and for ability." (Of Studies)
Example of Aphorism
"To err is human, to forgive divine." (An Essay on Criticism)
Example of Antiphrasis
"Yes, I killed him. I killed him for money-and a woman-and I didn't get the money and I didn't get the woman. Pretty, isn't it..." (Double Indemnity, by Billy Wilder and Raymond Chandler).
Example of Antimetabole
"You stood up for America, now America must stand up for you." - Barack Obama, December 14, 2011.
Aphorism
A short, astute statement of a general truth.
Appositive
A word or phrase that renames a nearby noun or pronoun
Example of Appositive
Beauty: When the Other Dancer is the Self (By Alice Walker) "My father, a fat, funny man with beautiful eyes and a subversive wit, is trying to decide which of his eight children he will take with him to the county fair."
Example of Antithesis
Give every man thy ear, but few thy voice.
Example of Antimetabole
If you fail to plan, you plan to fail."
Example of Antithesis
Man proposes, God disposes.
Example of Aphorism
The Writing on My Forehead (By Nafisa Haji) "If? There is no if. There is only what is. What was? What will be."
Example of Aphorism
The man who removes a mountain begins by carrying away small stones. [William Faulkner]
Antecedent
The noun to which a later pronoun refers.
Example of Aphorism
Words are, of course, the most powerful drug used by mankind. [Rudyard Kipling]
Antithesis
parallel structure that juxtaposes contrasting ideas
Example of Aphorism
"'Tis education forms the common mind; just as the twig is bent, the tree's inclined." (Golden Treasury of the Familiar)
Example of Aphorism
"Act well your part; there all the honour lies." (An Essay on Man)
Example of Antimetabole
"Ask not what your country can do for you; ask what you can do for your country." - John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961.
Example of Antimetabole
"Eat to live, not live to eat." - Socrates
Example of Antimetabole
"If you can't be with the one you love, love the one you're with." - Billy Preston
Example of Antimetabole
"In America, you can always find a party. In Soviet Russia, Party always finds you!" - Yakov Smirnoff
Example of Aphorism
"To use too many circumstances, ere one come to the matter, is wearisome, to use none at all, is Blunt." (Of Discourse)
Example of Antimetabole
"We didn't land on Plymouth Rock. Plymouth Rock landed on us." Malcolm X, "Malcolm X"
Example of Antimetabole
"We do what we like and we like what we do." - Andrew W.K., "Party Hard"
Example of Appositive
"We were waiting outside the condemned cells, a row of sheds fronted with double bars, like small animal cages." (A Hanging, by George Orwell)
Example of Aphorism
"What Reason weaves, by Passion is undone." (Essay on Man and Other Poems)
Example of Aphorism
...even a proverb is no proverb until your life has illustrated it. [John Keats]
Example of Appositive
A Christmas Memory (By Truman Capote) "Christmas Eve afternoon we scrape together a nickel and go to the butcher's to buy Queenie's traditional gift, a good gnawable beef bone."
Example of Antecedent
A Comedy of Errors (By William Shakespeare) "There's not a man I meet but doth salute me As if I were their well-acquainted friend And every one doth call me by my name. Some tender money to me; some invite me ..."
Example of Antecedent
A Poison Tree (By William Blake) "... I was angry with my foe: I told it not, my wrath did grow. And I watered it in fears, Night and morning with my tears; And I sunned it with smiles ..."
Example of Apostrophe
A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (By James Joyce) "Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race."
Example of Antithesis
A Tale of Two Cities (By Charles Dickens) The opening lines of Charles Dickens' novel "It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way."
Aristotelian triangle
A diagram that represents a rhetorical situation as the relationship among the speaker, the subject, and the audience (see rhetorical triangle) They all relate in the ways that they are all used for persuasion, if you can create emotion in your audience you persuade them with ethos, if you can prove your argument is logical you use logos and if you can make your audience believe you're credible you have persuaded them with ethos.
Example of Antithesis
An Essay on Criticism (By Alexander Pope) "To err is human; to forgive divine."
Example of Appositive
Bronx Primitive (By Kate Simon) "Though her cheeks were high-colored and her teeth strong and yellow, she looked like a mechanical woman, a machine with flashing, glassy circles for eyes."
Example of Antithesis
Community (By John Donne) "Good we must love, and must hate ill, For ill is ill, and good good still; But there are things indifferent, Which we may neither hate, nor love, But one, and then another prove, As we shall find our fancy bent."
Example of Apostrophe
Death Be Not Proud (By John Donne) "Death be not proud, though some have called thee Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so, For, those, whom thou think'st, thou dost overthrow, Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me."
Example of Antiphrasis
Filthy Rich (By Dorothy Samuels) "I was awakened by the dulcet tones of Frank, the morning doorman, alternately yelling my name, ringing my doorbell, and pounding on my apartment door ..."
Example of Apostrophe
Frankenstein (By Mary Shelly) "Oh! Stars and clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me; if ye really pity me, crush sensation and memory; let me become as naught; but if not, depart, depart, and leave me in darkness."
Example of Aphorism
Having nothing, nothing can he lose." (Henry VI)
Example of Antiphrasis
Home to Harmony (By Philip Gulley) "Owen would just smile and eat his eggs, and maybe reach over and slap Ernie's back and say, 'That's real funny, Ernie. You're pretty clever.' All the while thinking to himself, you moron. What do you know? ... Which, of course, he couldn't say out loud. He could think it, but he couldn't say it. When you're a public figure in a small town, you have to treat people with dignity, even Ernie Matthews ..."
Example of Antimetabole
I go where I please, and I please where I go." - Attributed to Duke Nukem
Example of Appositive
Inside Cape Town (By Joshua Hammer) "The Koeberg Nuclear Power Station, Africa's only nuclear power plant, was inaugurated in 1984 by the apartheid regime and is the major source of electricity for the Western Cape's 4.5 million population."
Example of Antiphrasis
Julius Caesar (By William Shakespeare) CASSIUS: "I did mark how he did shake ... tis true this god did shake ... His coward lips did from their color fly ..."
Example of Aphorism
Life's tragedy is that we get old too soon and wise too late. [Benjamin Franklin]
Example of Antithesis
Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing.
Example of Apostrophe
Macbeth (By William Shakespeare) "Is this a dagger which I see before me, The handle toward my hand? Come, let me clutch thee! I have thee not, and yet I see thee still."
Example of Antithesis
Money is the root of all evil: poverty is the fruit of all goodness.
Example of Antecedent
Ode to Autumn (By John Keats) "And still more, later flowers for the bees, Until they think warm days will never cease, For Summer has o'er-brimmed their clammy cell."
Example of Antecedent
Othello (By William Shakespeare) "Me thinks the wind has spoke aloud at land, A fuller blast ne'er shook our battlements If it hath ruffianed so upon the sea What ribs of oak, when mountains melt on them ..."
Example of Antiphrasis
Oyster Blues (By Michael McClelland) "He looked like a Vulcan fresh emerged from his forge, a misshapen giant not quite sure of how to maneuver in this bright new world ... His real name, the name given to him by his youthful mother before she abandoned him in a Brooklyn orphanage, was Thomas Theodore Puglowski, but his friends all called him Tiny ... At least, Tiny supposed, they would if he had any friends ..."
Example of Antithesis
Paradise Lost (By John Milton) "Better to reign in Hell than serve in Heav'n."
Example of Antithesis
Patience is bitter, but it has a sweet fruit.
Example of Aphorism
Pride goeth before a fall. [Proverb]
Example of Apostrophe
Sire (By W. S. Merwin) "Forerunner, I would like to say, silent pilot, Little dry death, future, Your indirections are as strange to me As my own. I know so little that anything You might tell me would be a revelation."
Example of Antithesis
Speech is silver, but silence is gold.
Example of Appositive
The Pride of the Yankees (By Gary Cooper as Lou Gehrig) "I have had the great honor to have played with these great veteran ballplayers on my left -Murderers Row, our championship team of 1927. I have had the further honor of living with and playing with these men on my right — the Bronx Bombers, the Yankees of today.
Example of Apostrophe
The Star (By Jane Taylor) "Twinkle, twinkle, little star, How I wonder what you are. Up above the world so high, Like a diamond in the sky."
Example of Apostrophe
The Sun Rising (By John Donne) "Busy old fool, unruly Sun, Why dost thou thus, Through windows, and through curtains, call on us? Must to thy motions lovers' seasons run? Saucy pedantic wretch ..."
Example of Antiphrasis
The Unknown Citizen (By W. H. Auden) "Our researchers into Public Opinion are content That he held the proper opinions for the time of year; When there was peace, he was for peace; when there was war, he went. He was married and added five children to the population, Which our Eugenist says was the right number for a parent of his generation. And our teachers report that he never interfered with their education. Was he free? Was he happy? The question is absurd: Had anything been wrong, we should certainly have heard ..."
Antimetabole
The repetition of words in an inverted order to sharpen a contrast.
Archaic Diction
The use of words common to an earlier time period; antiquated language
Example of Aphorism
To Kill a Mocking Bird (By Harper Lee) "You never really understand a person until you consider things from his point of view - until you climb into his skin and walk around in it."
Example of Apostrophe
To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now (By Billy Collins) "O stranger of the future! O inconceivable being! Whatever the shape of your house, However you scoot from place to place, No matter how strange and colorless the clothes you may wear, I bet nobody likes a wet dog either. I bet everyone in your pub, Even the children, pushes her away."
Antiphrasis
Use of words opposite to literal
Apostrophe
Where some absent or nonexistent person or thing is addressed as if present and capable of understanding
Example of Aphorism
Yesterday is but today's memory, and tomorrow is today's dream. [Khalil Gibran] The simplest questions are the hardest to answer. [Northrop Frye]
Example of Antithesis
You are easy on the eyes, but hard on the heart.
Example of Antimetabole
You like it; it likes you."
Example of Aphorism
Youth is a blunder; Manhood a struggle; Old age regret. [Benjamin Disraeli]
Anthorism
counter-definition; redefinition of opponent's term for rhetorical effect
