Carolina QuotesIn recognizing that words have the power to define and to compel, the semanticists are actually testifying to the philosophic quality of language which is the source of their vexation. In an attempt to get rid of that quality, they are looking for some neutral means which will be a nonconductor of the current called “emotion” and its concomitant evaluation.
Richard M. Weaver Carolinian
Source
“The Power of the Word,” p. 37.
- work
- Language is Sermonic (1970)
- year
- 1970
- locator
- p. 37
Cite this record
“In recognizing that words have the power to define and to co…” Richard M. Weaver. Carolina Quotes, record CQ-E3DA302AC6. https://carolinaquotes.com/quote/e3da302ac6
More from Richard M. Weaver
Practically all traditional distinctions, whether economic, moral, social, or aesthetic, are today under assault as founded on a prejudice.
It is characteristic of the barbarian … to insist upon seeing a thing “as it is.” The desire testifies that he has nothing in himself with which to spiritualize it; the relation is one of thing to thing without the intercession of the imagination. Impatient of the veiling with which the man of higher type gives the world imaginative meaning, the barbarian and the Philistine, who is the barbarian living amid culture, demands the access of immediacy. Where the former wishes representation, the latter insists upon starkness of materiality, suspecting rightly that forms will mean restraint.
In any piece of rhetorical discourse, one rhetorical term overcomes another rhetorical term only by being nearer to the term which stands ultimate. There is some ground for calling a rhetorical education necessarily aristocratic education in that the rhetorician has to deal with an aristocracy of notions.