Techniques of This Section
1. Emotional Terms | 2. Metaphor and Simile | 3. Emphasis | 4. Quotation Out of Context |
5. Abstract Terms | 6. Vagueness | 7. Ambiguity | 8. Shift of Meaning |
- Acme Paper Products President: “Our long term commitment is to increased growth.” Possible investor: “Does that mean you will expand your plants and cut more forests?” President: “Our growth program will expand throughout the decade.”
- Company representative to Senator: “This proposed law should cover only ultra-dense metals. By that I mean metals, such as iron, whose atomic weight is 80 or over.”
- You’ll love this girl. She’s neither short nor tall, nor fat nor thin; she’s just right.
- Man is the highest being on the evolutionary ladder, according to biology. That’s why women are inferior.
- Smith took 40 measurements of seven measuring tapes. None of them were exact enough.
- Smith: “For Cezanne (a 19th-century French painter) it’s pretty poor, but still it’s a whole lot better than a good many 20th-century French paintings.”
Jones: “You should have heard Smith rave about that painting. He said that it was ‘a whole lot better than 20th-century French paintings.'” - You students are so hard to handle. You all act like wound-up robots.
- Ad: “Blitz is brewed with tender loving care to give you real gusto in a great light beer.”
- “But Miss Buxley,” complained Tommy, “you forbade me to CALL Maggie a lying vixen. I just wrote it on the board.”