Definition:
(1) A speaker or writer. (2) A teacher of rhetoric.
Etymology:
From the Greek, "orator"Examples and Observations:
- "Since [Martin Luther] King was the ideal rhetor at a critical moment to pen the 'Letter [from Birmingham Jail],' it transcends the Birmingham of 1963 to speak to the nation as a whole and to continue speaking to us, 40 years later."
(Martha Watson, "The Issue Is Justice") - "How next can we define the rhetor? Essentially, he is a man skilled in the art of rhetoric: and as such he may impart this skill to others, or exercise it in the Assembly or the law courts. It is of course the first of these alternatives that interests us here; for . . . the sophist qualifies for the title of rhetor in this sense should one choose to describe him in purely functional terms."
(E.L. Harrison, "Was Gorgias a Sophist?" Phoenix, Autumn 1964) - "Plato shifted the meaning of sophia, wisdom. Prior to Plato, sophia had the same wide connotation as the Hebrew hokma: 'To be sophos . . . is to dominate one's activity, to dominate oneself and to dominate others. This is why a carpenter, a doctor, a diviner, a poet, a rhetor, a sophist, and the like could be labeled sophoi.' Anyone who learned a craft through apprenticeship to a master had learned a form of sophia."
(Peter J. Leithart at Leithart.com, review of How Philosophers Saved Myths, by Luc Brisson, 2004)
Pronunciation: RE-tor
