![]() ![]() "Thus, for example, Brutus asks the citizens of Rome: 'Who is here so base that would be a bondman?' adding at once: 'If any, speak, for him have I offended.' Again Brutus asks: 'Who is here so vile that will not love his country?' Let him also speak, 'for him I have offended.' Brutus dares to ask these rhetorical questions, knowing full well that no one will answer his rhetorical questions in the wrong way. In this sense, they are like the unmentioned premises in abbreviated reasoning, which can go unmentioned because they can be taken for granted as generally acknowledged. ![]() ![]() Rhetorical questions are those so worded that one and only one answer can be generally expected from the audience you are addressing. Rhetorical Questions in Shakespeare's "Julius Caesar" (Libby Gelman-Waxner, "Sex, Drugs, and Extra-Strength Excedrin." If You Ask Me, 1994) Do Indians enjoy being used this way, as spiritual elves or cosmic merit badges?" "The Indians serve the same function they did in Dances With Wolves: they make the far more highly paid white movie actors seem soulful and important and in touch with ancient truths."Am I alone in thinking it odd that a people ingenious enough to invent paper, gunpowder, kites, and any number of other useful objects, and who have a noble history extending back three thousand years, haven't yet worked out that a pair of knitting needles is no way to capture food?"."Isn't it a bit unnerving that doctors call what they do 'practice'?"."If practice makes perfect, and no one's perfect, then why practice?".(Letter from Sonus, a hearing-aid company, quoted in "Rhetorical Questions We'd Rather Not Answer." The New Yorker, March 24, 2003) "To actually see inside your ear canal-it would be fascinating, wouldn't it?".(1960s television advertisement for Dial soap) "Can I ask a rhetorical question? Well, can I?".( Shylock in William Shakespeare's Merchant of Venice) If you prick us, do we not bleed, if you tickle us, do we not laugh? ![]() Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? ( Frederick Douglass, "What to the Slave Is the Fourth of July?" July 5, 1852) "Must I argue the wrongfulness of slavery? Is that a question for republicans? Is it to be settled by the rules of logic and argumentation, as a matter beset with great difficulty, involving a doubtful application of the principle of justice, hard to understand?".(Michael Harrington, The Other America: Poverty in the United States, 1962) How long shall we ignore this under-developed nation in our midst? How long shall we look the other way while our fellow human beings suffer? How long" "The means are at hand to fulfill the age-old dream: poverty can be abolished.(Joan Didion, "Goodbye to All That." Slouching Towards Bethlehem, 1968) "It did not occur to me to call a doctor, because I knew none, and although it did occur to me to call the desk and ask that the air conditioner be turned off, I never called, because I did not know how much to tip whoever might come- was anyone ever so young?"." Marriage is a wonderful institution, but who would want to live in an institution?".(Irene Koshik, Beyond Rhetorical Questions. is that they are not asked, and are not understood, as ordinary information-seeking questions, but as making some kind of claim, or assertion, an assertion of the opposite polarity to that of the question." "Something questions all have in common. ![]()
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