Rhetorical Questions & Lagoon

My previous post reminded me of an idea I noted 2/2/2012, including examples of rhetorical questions:
Why fight it? (thought of our changing English language)
What's the use?
Are you kidding?
What in the world ...?
[Added since the 2012 elections:]  Is the world going crazy or what?!

A quick review before the final week of school in our district.  (“Where’s the verb?” -- alluding to an old Wendy’s ad about beef.)  Who's going to take this seriously, the last week of school?  Fun and games -- what is the purpose of the last week of school, anyway?
No need to go into fascinating details now.  Take this wiki website as my recommendation for summer reading while (also see YouTube video of) waiting in line at Lagoon:
en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Rhetorical_question

"Rhetorical question"

From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
“A rhetorical question is a figure of speech in the form of a question that is asked in order to make a point.  …  For example, the question ‘Can't you do anything right?’ [a question Kay is tempted to ask some of her English students] is asked not to gain information about the ability of the person being spoken to, but rather to insinuate that the person always fails.”  (It goes on; why stop here?)
Wikipedia has everything I'd ever want to know about rhetorical questions, which isn't an awful lot -- all FREE without obligation.  (Merriam-Webster requires sign-up for a free 14-day trial.  Do I look stupid?)  Question: Is Wikipedia awesome or what!
 

Just for fun, regarding the aforementioned Lagoon: (What was he thinking?)

youtube.com/watch?v=peWvyae1C44

How One Woman Reads It

“Do you know what the members of educational establishment have done in order to minimize failure at reading?”  The rhetorical question is posed by Deborah Blake in a Standard-Examiner newspaper commentary 6/27/2000, titled “We don’t give kids the power of words.”  (I was so impressed then, I saved it in my WWII file cabinet to be re-enlisted years later.)  Her answer: “They’ve cut down the vocabulary in our textbooks so the students don’t have to deal with it.  The dummyng-down of our vocabulary hasn’t just come in our elementary and secondary schools; a college-level technical-writing course taught us to write at a sixth-grade level, ‘because that’s what the majority of workers can understand.’  … I mentioned the reading level requirement to my husband, an engineer at one of the local aerospace firms … [and learned] his superiors had also told them to write to the same level so that the technicians could understand their instructions.”

The writer goes on to recommend as a solution that adults and children “read more of everything … morally acceptable …”

The article concludes with her personal experience: “One spring day long ago, I took a copy of Euripides’ play Medea [an ancient Greek tragedy] to a little league game to read.  This was a book I’d first read in eighth grade.  …  Eventually, one mother asked what I was reading.  I showed her.  …  Her response was immediate and typical, ‘You’re just too intellectual for the rest of us.’  I learned to take ‘easy’ reading to the games; a romance novel was typically the most accepted.”

 

In light of the topic, it’s interesting that the profile added by the newspaper staff reveals common, blind faith in their spell-check software:  “Deborah Blake of Bear River City [Utah] is a free-lance technical writer and poet.  …  He column runs every other Tuesday.”

Have we come a long way, Baby, in thirteen years?  Or in thirty-plus years since my wife Kay stitched her adorable ABC’s?  -- a sign of her lifelong engagement in youth education.