| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. |
A Practical and Authoritative Guide to Contemporary English. 1996.
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2. Style: Parallelism, Passives, Redundancy, and Wordiness
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| § 16. empty rhetoric |
| In the ancient and medieval world, rhetoric, the study of persuasive argumentation, was an important branch of philosophy and a crucial skill to professional advancement. In recent years, however, people have been using the term chiefly in a pejorative sense to refer to pompous and devious language. This suspicion of rhetoric may result from a modern belief that language used in legitimate persuasion should be plain and free of artifice—which is itself an argument from rhetoric. Thus, according to the newer sense of the term, you could construe as redundant the phrase empty rhetoric, as in The politicians talk about solutions, but they usually offer only empty rhetoric. It appears that the traditional meanings of rhetoric still carry a lot of weight, for only 35 percent of the Usage Panel judged this example to be redundant. Presumably, therefore, rhetoric can be other than empty. | 1 |
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| The American Heritage® Book of English Usage. Copyright © 1996 by Houghton Mifflin Company. All rights reserved. |
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