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There are some of our favorite words that appeared in mental_floss stories in 2011. Some are foreign words. Others come from medical dictionaries.
Here are my top ten words, compiled from online collections, to describe love, desire and relationships that have no real English translation, but that capture subtle realities that even we English speakers have felt once or twice.
For all of you who have ever been involved in an online debate in any way, Arthur Schopenhauer’s “38 Ways To Win An Argument” is indispensable. Most of these techniques will seem familiar to you, right from questioning the motive of a person making the argument instead of the argument itself (No. 35), exaggerating the propositions stated by the other person (No. 1) , misrepresenting the other person’s words (No. 2) and attacking a straw man instead (No. 3).
Semiotics , also called semiotic studies or (in the Saussurean tradition) semiology , is the study of signs and sign processes ( semiosis ), indication, designation, likeness, analogy , metaphor , symbolism , signification, and communication. Semiotics is closely related to the field of linguistics , which, for its part, studies the structure and meaning of language more specifically.
Style and rhetoric are ancient arts--of persuasion, expression, and effective communication--that are just as valuable to writers today as they were to students in ancient Greece and Rome.
De litotes lijkt op een understatement.
A figure of speech is a rhetorical device that achieves a special effect by using words in distinctive ways. Though there are hundreds of figures of speech (many of them included in our Tool Kit for Rhetorical Analysis ), here we'll focus on just 20 of the most common figures. You will probably remember many of these terms from your English classes.
It should come as no surprise then that in our own time the classical figures have been adopted by advertisers to sell everything from soap and cigarettes to political causes and candidates. In this review quiz, we have collected 35 of the best known slogans (sometimes called taglines or straplines ) introduced by advertisers over the past century. Most have been drawn from American print and television ads, though a few are British and some are practically universal.