How To Beat Rhetoric

Let's see how Mr. George Orwell manages rhetoric. I hope he has less fallacies than Gandhi! Perhaps he had a better introduction than Gandhi. After reading a whole paragraph I found the first one:

"I was young and ill-educated and I had had to think out my problems in the utter silence that is imposed on every Englishman in the East."

Hasty generalization right here! Just because the silence was imposed on him doesn't mean it was imposed on every Englishman in the East.

"Feelings like these are the normal by-products of imperialism; ask any Anglo-Indian official, if you can catch him off duty."

This is an example of reductio ad absurdum because obviously an Anglo-Indian official will take a break sometime. Wow, this one is harder! I bet it's because this is an expository text. 

A little out of the topic, in Deb Unferth's revolution I used the word garish and now remember it means showy. By the way, as I read the following fragment I almost cried with sympathy:

"But I did not want to shoot the elephant. I watched him beating his bunch of grass against his knees, with that preoccupied grandmotherly air that elephants have."

Back to fallacies. Or maybe not yet (or not ever)

"When I pulled the trigger I did not hear the bang or feel the kick — one never does when a shot goes home — but I heard the devilish roar of glee that went up from the crowd. In that instant, in too short a time, one would have thought, even for the bullet to get there, a mysterious, terrible change had come over the elephant. He neither stirred nor fell, but every line of his body had altered. He looked suddenly stricken, shrunken, immensely old, as though the frightful impact of the bullet had paralysed him without knocking him down. At last, after what seemed a long time — it might have been five seconds, I dare say — he sagged flabbily to his knees. His mouth slobbered. An enormous senility seemed to have settled upon him. One could have imagined him thousands of years old. I fired again into the same spot. At the second shot he did not collapse but climbed with desperate slowness to his feet and stood weakly upright, with legs sagging and head drooping. I fired a third time. That was the shot that did for him. You could see the agony of it jolt his whole body and knock the last remnant of strength from his legs. But in falling he seemed for a moment to rise, for as his hind legs collapsed beneath him he seemed to tower upward like a huge rock toppling, his trunk reaching skyward like a tree. He trumpeted, for the first and only time. And then down he came, his belly towards me, with a crash that seemed to shake the ground even where I lay."

What an accurate title. As I read this and pictured it in my mind I must accept I did shed a tear. The advantages of reading and imagery.

THE END

I reached this pair of words and am sorry to say I failed. Just as that man failed to kill the elephant  without agony, it pains me to accept the world of rhetoric beat me once more. 2 - 0 and more will come.