Word: rhetorician
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...revulsion for "niggers" and "little Jews." Yet these juvenile scrawls and racist stereotypes cannot long suppress the great soul that was attempting to find its voice. With lively scholarship and none of the protection normally afforded fathers by their biographical daughters, Holly Stevens traces the origins of the rhetorician. The "green, hilly, sunny-cloudy place" becomes the setting for the quatrain known to all English majors: "I placed a jar in Tennessee,/ And round it was, upon a hill./ It made the slovenly wilderness/ Surround that hill...
Kahn's debut piece deals with the greatest performing rhetorician in sports history, World Heavyweight Champion Muhammad Ali. Kahn visited Ali at his training camp in the Catskills the week before the fight, and talked with him hours after he narrowly retained his title in a tenuous 15-round decision over Ken Norton. Says Kahn: The piece is a column on Ali, "the public image and the private...
...reputation or failings, to place blame on extenuating circumstances, bad information furnished by sly enemies, betrayal by subordinates or former friends"). Champion in this category is the well-known loser of the 1962 California gubernatorial race: "You won't have Nixon to kick around any more." Another master rhetorician, Spiro Agnew, has achieved signal results through oxymoron ("a figure designed to convey a truth by linking terms or phrases that are contradictory"). Example: "Protest is every citizen's right, but that does not ensure that every protest is right...
...people prefer summary condemnation to critical acceptance of monumental genius, it is as an influence on Mabler and certain of the later expressionist composers. But Bruckner can be dismissed as easily, and with as much in telligence, as can Beethoven or Chartres Cathedral. This image of an uninspired symphonic rhetorician of beleaguered loquacity, "tortive and errant" as Shakespeare's Agamemnon, must yield to a clearer portrait of a consummately endowed symphonist firmly in the classical tradition...
...spectacle of boredom and inarticulateness presented by Dietrich Wessel. It seems to me that Mr. Wessel's "history of German SDS" could have been better rendered by Michael Walzer in twenty minutes, or by a competent poet or film-maker in ten. Mr. Wessel was a failure as a rhetorician and as a disseminator of radical thought: that was the overriding reality of the Sept. 27 fiasco in Lowell Lec. He was simply out of touch with the mainstream spirit of the new radicalism. The kind of tiresome reasonableness and ponderous logic that oozed forth from him resonated well with...