Performing a Fallacious Act

Quote:
Bad logic wastes time, and it ruins our health and our budgets. Children use it to torture their parents. (“All the other kids get to.”) Parents respond with bad logic. (“If your friends told you to go jump in a lake…”) Doctors kill patients with it. (“There’s nothing wrong with you; the tests came back negative.”) It can make you fat. (“Eat all of it — children are starving in Africa.”) Candidates base their campaigns on it (John Kerry: “Every American family has to live within their means. Their government should, too.”) We even wage wars over bad logic. (“If we pull out now, our soldiers will have died in vain.”) Push polls — fake surveys with loaded questions — are bad logic. (“Do you support government-financed abortions and a woman’s right to choose?”) These are no mere logical punctilios. We’re talking credit lines and waistlines, life and death, the future of human existence!
Jay Heinrichs, in his book Thank You for Arguing.

Figure of Speech: hyperbole (hy-PER-bo-le), the figure of exaggeration.

 Hyperbole (“exaggeration”) is an incredibly useful figure (to coin a hyperbole); to make it easier to swallow, start small and work your way up—budget and diet, life and death, and the future of humanity. One Ivy League slogan—“God, man and Yale”—got it backwards. But perhaps they thought otherwise.

Forgive us for the shameless self promotion, but there has to be some catch to getting all these free figures. Our book is now available for pre-order on Amazon. It offers cures for what ails us: instant wit, a way out of our political problems, seduction techniques, and fallacy inoculation. Figaro will make himself available to book clubs, and if you ask him really nicely, he may speak to your school

Snappy Answer: “Isn’t hyperbole a kind of fallacy?”

Comments

[ashling]

yes
especially
when its accompakneed
by how longer wait ? 8 mths ?
holey hannas pajamas jay heinrich
i woodnt want to be hangin by my short & curlies
witch i am ... tee hee hee

[Fia]

I want that book! I wish I could order it now. Alas, it might have to wait a couple of months.

But I do want it, mind you.

[dogscratcher]

I was able to order through Amazon, though they say it won't ship until 2/2007. I'm sure it is the greatest, most important, life changing, nay, society changing book ever written, so I don't know if I can wait (how was that for hyperbole?).

[Figaro]

I know I'm trying loyal subscriber's patience by putting up the Amazon link so early. But a book like this has a two-week window on bookstore shelves when it publishes. If "Thank You for Arguing" doesn't sell big over that period--or before publication--it gets booted to make way for the next "How to Dominate Everyone While Getting Laid and Losing Weight in Three Seconds" kind of book. That would just break Figaro's figurative heart.

[dogscratcher]

Figaro:
"How to Dominate Everyone While Getting Laid and Losing Weight in Three Seconds"

Do you have a link where I can buy that book?

[Figaro]

See?