Rhetorical Devices Assignment 10 Semester 2

Jacob Cole Period 1

12 April 2009 

Rhetorical Device #1: 

Metabasis: A brief statement summarizing what has been said, followed by another that indicates what will be spoken of next. 

Example:   

“Maxwell’s demon completes the discussion of entropy increase and entropy decrease for the moment. At bottom, as the statistical mechanicians of the late nineteenth century showed, the world is made up of bits. The second law of thermodynamics is a statement about information processing: the underlying physical dynamics of the universe preserve bits and prevent their number from decreasing. To fully understand these physical dynamics requires us to look at quantum mechanics, which describes how physical systems behave at their most fundamental level. Before turning to quantum mechanics however, let’s look briefly at the information-processing capacity of classical systems, such as atoms in a gas or snooker balls on a table” (Lloyd 96). 

Function: 

      Prologue

      The AP English student crept along the side of the edifice, changing shape and color moment by moment – somewhat like a cuttlefish – merging and blending with the undulating, moon-cast shadows that permeated his fevered and semiconscious mind.

      “The rhetorical devices were overfished, overhunted, and underprotected!”

      “It’s not my fault we each had to capture and eviscerate two a week!” protested another segment of his consciousness.

      “I saw this coming, a long way off, it’s what the theoretical models and countless computer simulations predicted: as time bears on, entropy increases irrevocably, and with it, free, usable energy – and number of available devices – diminishes. It’s an obvious corollary of the Second Law of Thermodynamics!” the first retorted.

      “But none expected the Heat Death to approach with such rapidity” the latter, perhaps more rational, part of his brain nagged. “And the Third Quarter isn’t even over yet! Surely, rapidly as they are becoming extinct, the kin of the Great Anacolouthon, cannot all have already perished from the Earth…”

      Somewhat perturbed, the student pushed aside this internal logomachy, confining it to the less prominent – and less civilized – regions of his subconscious. He could not afford to be unfocused to the slightest degree: the Hunt was foremost, futile as it increasingly seemed to be. Yet by some visceral intuition, he knew that this time, if never again, the quarry would approach. Soon. It had been scented by his mind. He put his ear to the coarse asphalt, listening for the signature gait of the elusive beast he sought. It lurked somewhere nearby, obscured in the ethereal mist that permeated the deserted cityscape…

      The budding writer roughly awoke; it was 4:00 am. A plethora of novels of great literary merit, musty newpapers, and yellowed magazines lay strewn in an undignified heap on the throw rug next to the bed. His gut instinct was, for the first time, ostensibly wrong: he had found not a single device. Thoroughly disheartened, he flicked off the lamp, and, stomach growling and mind echoing vacuously, he retired.

 
 
 

I

      Fundamental instincts however, are not so easily deceived. Perhaps to spite the unyielding, unrewarding – maybe even ungrateful – English homework, upon waking again, this time to the morning sun, he snatched a book on quantum computing that happened to be floating by atop the most nearby of the amorphous piles of junk that proliferated in his room (he dimly mused that perhaps the piles were breeding). He opened to the bookmarked page:

 

The Spin-Echo Effect

      A simple example of such reversible dynamics is the controlled-NOT operation described earlier…To undo the controlled-NOT, simply perform it a second time. After the first operation, the two bits are either both 0 or both 1. During the second controlled-NOT op, if the control bit is 0 the second bit remains 0. If the control bit is flipped from 1 to 0…

 

      A gleeful cackle escaped his lips, an insolent smirk lay plastered across his face. “Beautiful. Simply beautiful.” An escape, a departure, from the artistically crafted and disgustingly profound Shakespeare anthology that lay, cast aside, in a pile of rubbish. “Never will anything remotely literary appear in a work of Seth Lloyd, nerd extraordinaire and professor of quantum-mechanical engineering at MIT! O blunter than granite microchip-etching plane smoothed with the piezoelectric probe of a scanning-tunneling microscope is the language of this man! For a time, at least, I may relax my rhetorical device-sensing brain centers!” With that cheering thought, he jumped to his feet, invigorated.

      Five pages later, the student nearly fainted. A wild metabasis lept out of the page, fangs directed towards his blithely exposed jugular.

 

II

      “Ah, the elusive metabasis!” he exclaimed shakily, catching the beast across the head with a knife-hand block and wrestling it, with some difficulty, to the ground. “How could I have been so foolish! It is a device rather uncommon in classical literature due to its excessive literalness and according lack of panache, yet in the unkempt wilderness that is scientific writing, it is not altogether uncommon! Only due to my ignorance, and the narrowness of my reading, did it alone remain and undetected and unmarked on my weathered Rhetorical Device Project list! The Great Wordsmiths whose books I scoured so thoroughly would never deign, would never dare, to be so denotative. Doh!”

 
 

III

      That student, of course, was me, and these were my thoughts as I sat in front of the computer, remembering the long and devious path that had led me from cushy bed to wobbly office chair. How many centuries had elapsed over the course of my journey? Was it my place to know? Those were the questions the tormented me as I listened to the click of my weary fingers on the keyboard as I wrote up my newly captured rhetorical device. And what I said shall follow.

 

IV

      At the point in the book where the quoted passage originated, Lloyd wraps up his discussion of thermodynamic entropy, or universal disorder, and its relation to information registered by quantum mechanical systems. Essentially, he writes, the two ideas are congruent yet inverted relative to one another; they represent the same idea, but from the opposite direction. When one system observes another (which occurs during any interaction) the entropy of the system being observed can be thought of as decreasing with respect to the observing system. Were we to have complete knowledge of the velocities and positions of all particles in an evenly dispersed gas, we could, with negligible energy (with the proper device), separate it into a distinct region of hot and cold; this is more “orderly” than the dispersed state so it is possessed of less entropy. But without that information, it would be impossible to do so; thus, information and entropy are inversely correlated quantities. This relationship is extremely important to the science of quantum computing, especially when seeking to relate it to cosmology.

      What does this mean you may ask? That’s precisely what I asked myself the first time I read this chapter. To many, myself included, technical explanations such as this (and the book was far more technical) are often indecipherable at first reading; we have trouble accurately filing the information into the framework of our brain because, until we understand a concept fully, we know not where or how to extend or reconfigure our mental scaffolding. Thus, we often find it necessary to reread an entire chapter after ruminating on it a while. However, Lloyd, in his brilliance, constructed his book in a very systematic way that makes it unnecessary to do this. At the start of every chapter or section, he outlines what he will discuss in a manner that is not specific or scientific but easy to comprehend intuitively. Often, he alludes to major concepts, topics and themes established earlier in the book to achieve this (“By now, you know that the central theme of this book is that all physical systems register information…” he writes at the beginning of this chapter). This tactic is so successful in minimizing the headaches of readers that the entire book takes this orderly structure. In fact, the whole first chapter, titled “The Big Picture”, gives a metaphorical explanation of what will be discussed throughout the entire book.

      In addition, at the end of every chapter and section, Lloyd recapitulates what has just been said in a condensed manner, this time using as much of the new vocabulary and evoking as many of the newly taught concepts as possible instead of speaking in metaphors and generalities. Now, at the end, he speaks concretely of “Maxwell’s demon,” the imaginary device that, with perfect knowledge of the equilibrated gas, could separate it into regions of hot and cold. He talks of the “second law of thermodynamics” now, not the abstract notion that the overall disorder of the universe must increase. These new concepts, by means of this reiterative device are reinforced, solidified in the readers’ minds.

      Often, as in the above quote, he combines summary and (at least part of the) forecast in a metabasis. By doing so, he adds even more structure to the already neatly ordered book, further increasing its comprehensibility. Instead of leaving readers with a definite stopping point, a solid conclusion, by combining the two, he keeps the book lively and forward-looking. This helps to link the ideas presented in earlier sections with those in later ones – yes, the concepts were here introduced, but “[t]o fully understand [them]” requires further investigation in so-and-so direction (here, the “information-processing capacity of classical systems”). By doing so, he makes cohesive what would otherwise be a somewhat incongruous-seeming piece of work due to its breadth (it covers the principles that govern the transfer of heat to those that control the behavior of snooker balls to those that underlie quantum mechanics).

      Certainly, the metabasis doesn’t make the book florid and poetic (like many of the other devices I have this year discussed), but then again, I realized, that’s not Lloyd’s rhetorical purpose! The work is designed to convey heady information as clearly as possible, not to entertain the reader with its eloquence. And well, it seemed to have worked: the book is highly acclaimed even by nontechnical critics such as those at The New York Times.

 

Epilogue

      I will not again be so naïve as to assume that devices of rhetoric can only be found in English-class-style literature; they prowl about even in works whose audiences, for the most part, scorn the study of them. And although more than two months remain in this school year, during which a non-negligible number of rhetorical analyses remain to be written, I feel, for the first time in many weeks, the golden touch of hope on my knitted brow, this time to stay. Distant though it may be, the end of the quest is now in mind, if not yet in sight.

 

 

Rhetorical Device #2:

 

Eponym: Replacing the description of an attribute with the name of a person (or object) famous for that attribute. 

 

Example:

      “If you want to talk about being irresponsible, this Mother Hubbard is the Cadillac of not thinking about anyone but herself” (Statsky).

 
 

Function:

 

      “Shakespeare’s principle” as I call it, the idea that “a rose by any other name would smell as sweet,” while certainly accurate for material objects, is ineffective when the “roses” in question are words. For this reason, word choice is an extremely important part of writing. And one of the choices a writer has when describing a facet of an object, is to employ an eponym. That was the choice a certain Jen Statsky made in “Classic Nursery Rhymes, Updated and Revamped For The Recession, as Told to Me by My Father.”

      As a whole, the piece is a whimsical commentary on the way our current economic crisis has impacted our daily lives. It rephrases traditional nursery rhymes as faux-invective protests about the stupidity of their characters using clichéd phrases of the recession. The above quote comes from the revamped version of “Old Mother Hubbard,” which argues that she was quite irresponsible owning a dog she could not feed “in this economy.” (The real rhyme reads:

 
 

).

      To convey the magnitude of Old Mother Hubbard’s prodigality and establish the hyperbolic tone of the piece, Statsky proclaims that Hubbard was the “Cadillac of not thinking about anyone but herself.” No, she was not simply “selfish” but the “Cadillac,” the epitome, the quintessential lowriding, old-fashioned, luxury car, of selfishness whose bare cupboards were made of “mahogany…[and had] gold-plated handles.” No car, no person, on Earth could be more decadently roomy, more shockingly solipsistic, than this! Clearly, this is the opposite of the standard portrayal of Ms. Hubbard: picture books depict her as a poor yet benevolent grandmotherly woman. From this stark juxtaposition is derived on an obvious level the irony and humor – and on a deeper level, strength – of the piece. Such a dramatic change in image could only be caused by an incredibly powerful force. That is the force of economic decline.