Customer Reviews

A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms

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Over the Christmas holidays, I traveled back east to visit my parents. I carried Lanham's "A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms." One night my mom and I sat up talking about everything from Picasso to metaphysics and at some point we got to talking about Shakespeare. I tried to explain to her why Shakespeare is rhetorically reveered, and at one point I climbed downstairs to the guest room and retrieved Lanham's book. She -- like most of us -- hears the word "rhetoric" and thinks of politicians and empty promises, or phrasing so complicated as to render simple fact obscure.

I think the first word in "Handlist" we got a chuckle over was "chiasmus" and some of the examples like "It's not whether grapenuts are good enough for you, but whether you're good enough for grapenuts!" And the famous "When the going gets tough, the tough get going." The one that gave her the best chuckle though was an editor's advice to a young writer "You're writing is both original and interesting; unfortunately the part that's original is not interesting and the part that is interesting is not original."

The great thing about this book is that it gives name to a great many devices we already use in everyday speech, and for a writer this information is invaluable. The better facility a writer has with these devices the better he or she can express our endless human emotions.

A good many of the examples give the Latin or Greek root word, but the definitions are in English. Many of them have example usage along with the definition.

E.g., "Insultatio": derisive, ironical abuse of a person to his face. As Hamlet says to his mother:
Look on this picture, and on this,
The counterfeit presentment of two brothers.
See what a grace was seated on this brow:
Hyperion's curls, the front of Jove himself...
This was your husband. Look you now what follows.
Here is your husband, like a mildewed ear
Blasting the wholesome brother. Have you eyes?
Could you on this fair mountain leave to feed,
And batten on this moor? Ha! Have you eyes?
(Hamlett, III, iv)

All in all, I think this handlist -- as much a dictionary as a "handlist" of rhetorical devices -- is a rich resource for writers, law students, political science majors, and young English scholars. Indeed, with this handlist, you could begin your own "Progymnasmata"!

Stacey

Samuel Butler once wrote that "All a rhetorician's rules teach nothing but to name his tools." Classical and Medieval rhetoricians named, renamed, parsed, and cataloged all these tools with a bewildering sesquipedalian nomenclature. "Handlist" almost succeeds in its attempt to make sense of this thorny thicket of jargon.

Chapter 1 of "Handlist" is a dictionary style listing of all the various names of the rhetorical devices. Each name is individually entered, but only the main name is defined. Each of the lesser names simply has cross references. The merely-cross-referenced names outnumber the actually-defined names by about 3 to 1. The actually-defined names should have been set in a bolder type than the merely-cross-referenced names.

Chapter 2 consists of an excellent review of the divisions of rhetoric. Read Chapter 2 first.

Chapter 3 takes the more common rhetorical devices and catalogs them by type, giving brief definitions. It catalogs only one name for each device, and is much more user friendly than Chapter 1. Read Chapter 3 second.

My suggestion for the third edition: Reorder the chapters. Put Chapter 2 first and Chapter 1 last.

It's hard to describe how valuable this book is. Simply put, it changed my life. The title is both perfect and a little misleading: yes, it's a handlist, but that gives little sense of the breadth and scholarship of Lanham's work. Yes, you'll find incredibly useful definitions of the most recondite, as well as the most everyday, tropes and schemes. But embedded within his exposition Lanham gives us an argument for rhetoric: its complexity, historical richness, and value. Lanham's touch is very personal, offering a collection of definitions that are at once eclectic and definitive. If you need to buy one book on rhetoric, this should be it. If it intrigues you as much as it did me, follow up with Lanham's _The Electronic Word: Democracy, Technology, and the Arts_. There you'll see the very practical implications of the study of rhetoric framed through historical and theoretical debates. Two thumbs up.

I keep 5 reference books on writing w/in arms reach of my desk; this is one of them. The book catalogs every rhetorical flourish I've ever heard of, provides vivid examples of each, and witty and insightful commentary on many of them.

This book--this excellent book--puts a name on just about every literary device, rhetorical term, and classical trope a writer could ever use, and by doing so allows writers and fans of the English language an opportunity to become more aware of what they write and more attuned to how their writing can be improved.
If you fancy yourself a writer, you need this. Get it. Now.
The book is well-organized, easily acccessible, loaded with great quotes, and a treasure trove of unique terms and devices. Some of these you've no doubt used and will be happy to hear these labeled and defined. Others will be new to you but will certainly be of use to you in the future. Chiasmus, anyone?
This was assigned as a textbook for Jerome Shea's classical tropes class at the University of New Mexico, but I would never even consider selling this back at the end of the year. Having been introduced to this, I can no more imagine my writing den without it than I can imagine it without a dictionary or a thesaurus or a hidden drawer full of treats.

How could anyone who loves words be without this book?

I cherish my copy. For someone like me who so often thinks, "There must be a name for that" -- prompted by an object, concept, or figure of speech -- this book is a boon and a blast.

I encourage songwriters and lyricists to look over the classic suggestions for rhetorical approach, contained in the appendix. Every item on the list is a line of attack for a song or a poem. I find this inspiring.

This and Schott's Almanac have been kept for months in the bathroom reading bin.

I opened this book and it exploded in my face! No, not from some terrorist device, but from the contents. I have not been able to put it down, and as a student of classical rhetoric, this book is absolutely invaluable. The quips and quotes are marvellous and the terms put into the Greek and Latin I also found to be excellent. I highly reccomend this book to anyone for any reason. Books like this are valuable for reasons other than just rhetoric. You learn something new on every page, and often it can have meaning outside the rhetorical topic.

I had high hopes for this well-established entry in the strikingly limited field of guides to rhetorical terms. I am disappointed on several counts. Firstly, the total number of Latin terms is disproportionate to the definitions and examples on offer. On any given page approximately half the entries are uninformative redirects that pair different spellings of the same word--e.g., "Mezozeugma - Mesozeugma" I understand that the need to account for variant spellings in the book's source materials necessitates some redundancy, but for most users this type of entry is a waste of space. Second, and more serious, is the lack of consistency or precision in the way terms are defined. Take "prolepsis," a term one would expect to occupy the core mission of such a book. Lanham has "foreseeing and forestalling objections in various ways" as primary, and "Propounder. A general statement is amplified by dividing it into parts." followed by a block quote from Gilbert and Sullivan's Patience describing the recipe for a Heavy Dragoon. Where is "the representation or assumption of a future act or development as if presently existing or accomplished"--Merriam-Webster sense "a" never mind "the application of an adjective to a noun in anticipation of the result of the action for the verb"--Merriam-Webster sense "b"? And what has "Propounder" got to do with it? In typical fashion, the entry goes on to assimilate "prolepsis" to "procatalepsis" and invoke "Lewis and Short" and Quintilian without once supplying either of the top two relevant rhetorical meanings. Finally, there is a persistently intrusive first-person aspect to the presentation that further undermines the volume's credibility. There are many students and teachers out there for whom a reliable and informative guide to rhetorical terms would be of use. Unfortunately, Lanham's "Handlist" is not that guide.

Although this text is not presented in an entirely accessible way, the depth of the book makes up for it. Most terms are explained in detail and some have pronunciation guides. So, for a more-involved reference on rhetorical terms, this one is good. Be warned, though, some explanations get a bit erudite.

The problem that I have with this book is that often the words that it defines tells me to go look up another fine. That would be fine, except that I go to the word it said to look up and discover that I either have to look up another word. This book is not helpful in that respect, and given that a lot of PCs run Windows, it doesn't really make sense to release a hypertext version for the Mac but not one for Windows. So the Windows users are stuck with a book that really isn't that good.