From Richard Nordquist,
Your Guide to Grammar & Composition.
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Definition:

As defined by rhetorician Kenneth Burke in A Rhetoric of Motives (1950), "any of the wide variety of means by which an author may establish a shared sense of values, attitudes, and interests with his readers." Of course, as Burke goes on to maintain, "identification is affirmed with earnestness . . . precisely because there is division."

Etymology:

From Latin, "the same."

Examples:

• "Friendship, lust, love, art, religion--we rush into them pleading, fighting, clamoring for the touch of spirit laid against our spirit. Why else would you be reading this fragmentary page--you with the book in your lap? You're not out to learn anything, certainly. You just want the healing action of some chance corroboration, the soporific of spirit laid against spirit."
  (E. B. White, One Man's Meat)



• "It is amusing to discover, in the twentieth century, that the quarrels between two lovers, two mathematicians, two nations, two economic systems, usually assumed insoluble in a finite period should exhibit one mechanism, the semantic mechanism of identification--the discovery of which makes universal agreement possible, in mathematics and in life."
  (Alfred Korzybski)



• "Most writers find the world and themselves interchangeable."
  (E. B. White, Wild Flag)



• "That I should want you at all suddenly strikes me as the height of improbability, but that, in itself, is probably the reason. You're an improbable person, Eve, and so am I. We have that in common. Also a contempt for humanity, an inability to love and be loved, insatiable ambition--and talent. We deserve each other . . . and you realize and you agree how completely you belong to me?"
  (George Sanders as Addison DeWitt in the film All About Eve, 1950)

Pronunciation: i-DEN-ti-fi-KAY-shun

Also Known As: ethopoeia