Our favourite Chomsky stalker has been rather 'too generous' in providing further fodder for my occasional ‘notes on rhetoric’ series. Actually, the first example I’m not too sure about. The author refers to the most influential linguist of the last 50 years, whose theories of transformational grammar and linguistic universals have provoked radical re-thinking in and beyond his own field, as “an intelligent man who knows how to use language”? Now, is this a shrewd rhetorical put-down or a patronising banality? You decide. Anyway, from the same article on Chomsky, a little device I completely missed in my “Notes on Rhetoric”:
‘It would be tempting to attribute the use Chomsky makes of this material to intellectual idleness and incompetence, but I fear this is too generous a judgement.’
Here, one gets to level a choice insult, only to withdraw it as ‘too generous’ thus congratulating yourself in the process (i.e. on your inclination to generosity and your integrity in putting aside such inclinations in deference to the Truth). Any one of a number of variants are possible: e.g. “It would be tempting to attribute the writer’s lexical ostentation to a too patent need to assert his cultural credentials/ an autodidactic zeal to display the fruits of his lexicological and bibliophilic labours/ social insecurity, and a frustrated desire to be admitted to the universe of Belles Lettres, but that would be too generous”. One has one’s cake and eats it. A rhetorical cousin of ‘but that would be too easy.”
By all means, install these pieces of equipment in your head along with the others; they will help to do your writing for you, functioning autonomously whilst you get on with more interesting matters. Like thinking.
See also here.