ABSTRACT
With a writer’s love of language, Walter Nash’s work has bridged the fields of rhetoric, language study, and literature, from translations of Horace to appreciations of graffiti. In his interdisciplinary writing, Nash has analyzed all manner of texts, connecting linguistic and rhetorical patterns to their social functions and the process of writing. In his important 1985 study of comic discourse, The Language of Humour, he notes “in humour, the diversities of our living and thinking tumble together in patterns adventitious and freakish and elegant, like the elaborate conformations of a kaleidoscope.” 1 Rhetoric: The Wit of Persuasion (1989) defines rhetoric as an “ordinary human competence” 2 and emphasizes that it is an act of “witting” because “it seeks assiduously to involve an accomplice in its designs.” 3
