Punctuation Marks + Comedy = Rhetoric (?)

Remember that rhetoric is, at its core, an examination of language (we'll leave the nonverbal out of it for now)--the words chosen, the meanings intended, the purposes achieved or not, etc. On the first day of the Rhetoric and Communication class we demonstrated this with the exercise in which we compared, say, what people mean when they say "euthanasia" as opposed to what other people mean when they say "doctor-assisted suicide."

But even smaller units of the sentence can have rhetorical weight...like my use of ellipses (the dot, dot, dot) just there or the question mark at the end of sentences, titles, even fragments. The Daily Show continues to offer some of the best rhetorical analysis around, as in this segment synopsized by one of the bloggers at Language Log thus:

Stewart observes that CNN uses question-marked story captions as a way to establish "existential" topics -- roughly Rumsfeld's method, though sometimes applied to flag outlandish subjects like "End Times" -- whereas Fox News uses rhetorical questions as a sneaky way to insinuate things that it doesn't dare assert.