Chocolate for the Mind

Any child knows how to play the classic game hide-and-seek.  Close your eyes…count to ten…ready or not, here I come!  Finding examples of rhetoric is much like playing hide-and-seek.  Rhetoric is hiding everywhere, and readers are “it” and have to hunt out good examples.  Rhetoric can be found in books, movies, advertisements, and many other texts.  I have managed to seek out some of my own examples.

1. Antimetabole:  “I am stuck on Band-Aid, and Band-Aid’s stuck on me.” (jingle from Band-Aid advertisement)
2. Oxymoron:  “O, happy dagger, this is thy sheath…” (Juliet in Shakespear’s Romeo and Juliet)
3. Simile:  “The kingdom of heaven is like a mustard seed,” (from the Bible, Matthew 13:31, New King James Version)
4. Onomatopoiea:  “I’ll huff, and I’ll puff, and I’ll blow your house in!” (the big bad wolf in The Three Little Pigs)
5. Pun:  “Nothing runs like a Deere.” (John Deere slogan)

As you can see, examples of rhetoric can come from a wide variety of sources.  Finding them is really just child’s play.

This entry was posted on Saturday, November 29th, 2008 at 10:39 pm and is filed under rhetoric. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.