Are you good with rhetorical questions?

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I think I do good with them. I can tell which questions are meant to be answered and which ones aren't.

I know I have answered some before because I can remember being 17 and I was in my IEP meeting and my English teacher said I blurt out answers when she asks a question and she holds her hand up to let me know it is not for anyone to answer and she is going to answer it. I then learned what the hand was for.

I can't think of other times when I answered a question that wasn't meant to be answered.

Last edited by Spokane_Girl on 13 Dec 2008, 7:34 pm, edited 1 time in total.

I am quite good at those type of questions myself, which I take pride in

I have always had trouble understanding why anyone would ask a question which they did not want an answer.

My boyfriend definitely has troubles with this. He often answers my questions that are rhetorical. It gets real annoying. Then when he does try to not answer them he ends up ignoring the ones that are not rhetorical

I'm not sure how to help him.

Answering rhetorical questions is one of my typical social faux pas.

Uhh ... do these trousers make my butt look big?

Now that I don't understand. Those questions really get to me. I know they are meant to be answered. I answer them honestly.

Aren't all questions ultimately rhetorical?

Is it not a rhetorical answer that you seek to question, rather than a rhetorical question that you seek to answer?

Are you good with rhetorical answers?

I thought a rhetorical question meant you don't answer it because it's not meant to be answered, you ignore the question because it wasn't meant to be answered. Sometimes people ask a question and answer it themselves.

What are rhetorical answers?

Yeah. I already know the answer to that one. You will never hear me ask. What is a rhetorical answer? An answer which requires no question? Your post makes no sense to me.

I always answer rhetorical questions, even if I know that they were not intended to be answered.

I think most people have a sense of whether it was meant to be answered. I don't

LOL. I didn't mean to be difficult. I'm listening to a U.C. Berkeley course on Rhetoric and the lecturer spends a lot of the first class on What is Rhetoric? He claims it's a way to position or posture yourself (relative to a subject or issue or conflict), not really language.

I'm trying to improve language skills.

I was also joking by asking you rhetorical Q in response, thereby implicitly answering your Are You Good w/Rhetorical Questions as if you were asking if we can ask them, not answer them. Guess it wasn't a great joke.

That would be another class...

According to the class I'm listening to, that would be answering with a posit that has no literal meaning, which I was attempting to do.

I do that too, mainly because I like to annoy people :p

Not proud of it, but I do too sometimes. Usually either "How the hell would I know" or "So what's your theory?" Sometimes I make up an authoritative-sounding answer. I tend more towards rhetorical statements, myself, such as "I wonder why (insert pithy observation here)?" Even NTs will try to answer frequently though it isn't a question.