ABSTRACT
In the previous chapter, I analyzed and commended Elizabeth’s methods of managing the descriptive attacks of Lady Catherine. This chapter returns to that battle in order to establish the surprising basis of rational description in irony, ambiguity, and judgment. Too often contests of redescription involve fraud, the deceptive and distorting elaboration of trivial things, bullying insults, illogical pseudo-inferences, lying, and the most dangerous of all, the augmentation or diminishment of actions and statement using, what Quintilian called, paradiastole, a kind of equivocation, commonly exploited by lawyers and salespersons, as well as by Lady Catherine. You describe yourself as kind, for example, while someone hostile to you counters by calling you spineless. Paradiastole, itself, is a mode of description, the analysis of which helps us see how we describe and how we get described. But it is more than just one mode amongst many. It is one of the central and most common ways we describe, or rather redescribe ourselves, each other, social situations, behavior, and life. When properly understood, it reveals the fundamental instability of our uses and involvement with words and description.
