The Rhetorical Intricacies of a Liberal Curse
THOMAS F. BERTONNEAU, a professor of English literature, writes in response to the previous post, which is a curse upon the author of this site:
The writer A.C.’s contribution (as one could call it) to The Thinking Housewife interests me as a specimen of contemporary liberal rhetoric – I am particularly struck by the perverse use of the verb to hope in the first, controlling sentence, of the item, ramped up in its perversity by her coupling it with the verb to do, which she uses modally for emphasis. (“Hope” appears again without the modal verb in the second sentence and becomes “to wish” in the second paragraph.) Talk about “the audacity of hope”! A.C. is, of course, trying to be ironic; but irony is a tricky device that requires mastery of understatement, a quality conspicuously missing in the actual construction. I would guess that A.C. is incapable of irony, an intuition that I base on the naked brutality of what amount to invidious curses, offered without embarrassment in a public forum, or let us say a public discussion. What those who cannot bring forth irony invariably conjure when they think they are being ironic is: sarcasm – a Greek term meaning “to beat a victim” or “to flog a corpse.” (The element sarc, in sarcasm, refers to the body, as such.) In modern English usage, sarcasm refers to a low, scapegoating type of verbal behavior in which the speaker feels free to indulge in abuse on the assumption that, for whatever reason, the abused party will not respond in kind. (more…)

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