ABSTRACT
This chapter provides a brief and selective history of footprints in the sand that indicate the unnoticed presence in twentieth-century rhetorical theory of vernacular rhetoric as a significant mode of influence. It discusses the texture and promise of vernacular rhetoric for joining the work of ethnographers and rhetoricians in a new domain of investigation under the banner of rhetoric culture. Ordinary people, whether they are neighbors or a class, develop and rely on a vernacular with rhetorical salience. The urban vernacular also holds news for understanding quotidian rhetoric. The speech of leaders is always at odds with that of those they seek to dominate. These intellectual developments during the first half of the twentieth century reflect an organic attitude toward language. Language in practice transported a history of usage—some shared by those who were part of the speech community and some unique to the speaker—into meaning.
