Rhetoric: Don’t hate, appreciate

In the Vital Speech of the Week, lawyer Michael Geiser offered an aside, about rhetoric’s enemies: “the budget-cutting dean, the covetous colleague, the snide commentator, who never says rhetoric without the prefix mere or empty.”

Such foes “seem so small by comparison,” Geiser said. “I am reminded of Dr. Johnson’s observation that ‘A fly may sting a stately horse and make him wince; but one is but an insect and the other is a horse still.’”