Words & WritingGreek → English
Rhetoric
/ˈrɛtərɪk/noun
The craft of persuasive speech and writing, or language judged to be showy and empty.
The Greek roots
ῥητορικὴ τέχνη
rhētorikḕ tékhnē
the speaker's craft
ῥήτωρ
rhḗtōr
public speaker
Literally: “the art of the orator”
The story of the word
In Athens a ῥήτωρ was a citizen who spoke in the assembly or the courts, and rhetoric was the trained technique for doing it well. Aristotle wrote a manual of it and treated it as a neutral skill, the counterpart of dialectic. English kept the old sense and added a sour one: since the eighteenth century, calling a speech mere rhetoric means it has style and no substance.
- How it travelled
- Ancient Greek → Latin → Old French → English
- First recorded
- 14th century
Same family
rhetoricalrhetorician
In a sentence
Strip out the rhetoric and the policy is two sentences long.