Definition:
A rhetorical term for the strategy in which a speaker raises a question and then immediately answers it.
See also:
- Erotesis
- Procatalepsis
- Rhetorical Question
- Stephen King's "Horror Movies"
- Twelve Types of Questions in Casablanca
Examples:
- "What should young people do with their lives today? Many things, obviously. But the most daring thing is to create stable communities in which the terrible disease of loneliness can be cured."
(Kurt Vonnegut) - "What makes a king out of a slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage! What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage!"
(The Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz, 1939) - "Do you know the difference between education and experience? Education is when you read the fine print; experience is what you get when you don't."
(Pete Seeger in Loose Talk, ed. by Linda Botts, 1980) - "You ask, what is our policy? I will say it is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalog of human crime. That is our policy.
"You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory, there is no survival."
(Winston Churchill, 13 May 1940) - "What shall Cordelia speak?
Love, and be silent."
(Cordelia in King Lear by William Shakespeare) - "You boil it all down, what does a man really need? Just a smoke and a cup of coffee."
(Sterling Hayden as Johnny Guitar in Johnny Guitar, 1954) - Harold Larch: What frees the prisoner in his lonely cell, chained within the bondage of rude walls, far from the owl of Thebes? What fires and stirs the woodcock in his springe or wakes the drowsy apricot betides? What goddess doth the storm toss'd mariner offer her most tempestuous prayers to? Freedom! Freedom! Freedom!
Judge: It's only a bloody parking offense.
(Eric Idle and Terry Jones in episode three of Monty Python's Flying Circus, 1969) - "Ask any mermaid you happen to see, 'What's the best tuna?' Chicken of the Sea."
(television commercial) - "In Switzerland, they had brotherly love, five hundred years of democracy and peace, and what did that produce? The cuckoo clock."
(Orson Welles as Harry Lime in The Third Man, 1949) - "Who wants to become a writer? And why? Because it's the answer to everything. To 'Why am I here?' To uselessness. It's the streaming reason for living. To note, to pin down, to build up, to create, to be astonished at nothing, to cherish the oddities, to let nothing go down the drain, to make something, to make a great flower out of life, even if it's a cactus."
(Enid Bagnold, Autobiography, 1969) - "There are those who are asking the devotees of civil rights, 'When will you be satisfied?' We can never be satisfied as long as the Negro is the victim of the unspeakable horrors of police brutality. We can never be satisfied as long as our bodies, heavy with the fatigue of travel, cannot gain lodging in the motels of the highways and the hotels of the cities. We cannot be satisfied as long as the Negro's basic mobility is from a smaller ghetto to a larger one. We can never be satisfied as long as our children are stripped of their self-hood and robbed of their dignity by a sign stating 'For Whites Only.' We cannot be satisfied as long as a Negro in Mississippi cannot vote and a Negro in New York believes he has nothing for which to vote. No, no, we are not satisfied, and we will not be satisfied until justice rolls down like waters, and righteousness like a mighty stream."
(Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have a Dream," August 1963) - "What kind of peace do I mean and what kind of a peace do we seek? Not a Pax Americana enforced on the world by American weapons of war. Not the peace of the grave or the security of the slave. I am talking about genuine peace, the kind of peace that makes life on earth worth living, and the kind that enables men and nations to grow, and to hope, and build a better life for their children."
(John F. Kennedy, commencement address at American University, 1963) - "Suppose that an adult man, in the full vigour of his faculties, could be suddenly placed in the world, as Adam is said to have been, and then left to do as he best might. How long would he be left uneducated? Not five minutes. Nature would begin to teach him, through the eye, the ear, the touch, the properties of objects."
(Thomas Henry Huxley, "A Liberal Education," 1868) - "The National Space Administration informs us that Uncle Sam's Com-Sat 4 satellite is in a rapidly decaying orbit. That's their way of saying a ton of angry space trash is heading back home at fifteen thousand miles an hour. What does that make me think of? Makes me think of a triceratops, innocently munching a palm frond when out of the sky, whammo, a meteor sucker punches old mother Earth. Next thing you know, that triceratops, along with a hundred and seventy-five million years of dinosaur evolution, is nothing but history. To that unsung triceratops and all its kin, here's a song for you."
(John Corbett as Chris Stevens, Northern Exposure, 1992)
Pronunciation: hi-PAH-for-uh
Also Known As: anthypophora, ratiocinatio, apocrisis, rogatio, subjectio
