Rhetoric – Charles McNamara

original public meaning

One of my side projects in 2026 has been to record brief audio essays about the rich histories of English words, particularly as they emerge from their Greek and Roman ancestors, for a new podcast called Original Public Meaning. I was inspired to create these recordings, at least in part, by how much I enjoyed producing a similar audio essay on the Latin verb proficio for the Thesaurus Linguae Latinae in 2025. And cultural-criticism-via-word-history has been a favorite beat of mine for many years.

I’ve been recording two episodes of this show per week. A few of my favorites are listed below.

“nostalgia” defined as a longing for one’s home, one’s past, and one’s own psychological space:

“convention” considered both as a meeting place and as a prevailing social practice:

“incandescent” viewed through the lenses of technological and moral development:

I’m also realizing how effective audio recordings can be for teaching: producing brief segments to reflect on a section of the Iliad that didn’t quite make it into lectures, for instance. Making these kinds of recordings for students is more knack than science, so the podcast is a good opportunity for practicing all kinds of skills: microphone technique, argumentative clarity, and refining prose for the ear rather than the eye.

You can find all the episodes at the show’s website. (And no, the podcast has nothing to do with originalism as a legal theory; Original Public Meaning is just a good title for a show about the complex histories of words.)

February 22, 2026

saint augustine on posting

“The sin of the sophist is that he denies the necessity of subject matter and believes that forma alone is desirable. An opposite vice, one to which historians of rhetoric have never given a name, depends upon the belief that the man possessed of truth will ipso facto be able to communicate the truth to others. It is a dependence upon materia alone. Its chief proponent in ancient times was the young Plato, and it would seem fair to label it the “Platonic rhetorical heresy” just as we apply the term “sophistry” to its opposite theory. This is not to say that the ecclesiastical writers of the fourth century looked to the Gorgias and Protagoras for a theory of communication, but rather that their reactions to the pagan culture of Rome led many of them to take up a somewhat similar attitude toward the rhetoric which was a part of that culture. Augustine apparently recognized a danger in this aspect of the cultural debate of his times, and used the De Doctrina [Christiana’s fourth book] to urge a union of both matter and form in Christian preaching.

Only if one views the book as part of the great debate of the fourth century, therefore, does its historical importance emerge clearly. The reader is struck by the author’s insistence upon the folly of abandoning a useful tool to the enemy.”

—James J. Murphy, “The Debate about a Christian Rhetoric,” in The Rhetoric of St. Augustine of Hippo, eds. Enos, Thompson, et al. (2008)

October 11, 2025

pure textualism and legal ambiguity

Commentators today have taken interest in a pointed footnote of Justice Jackson’s dissent in Stanley v. City of Sanford, Florida (p. 23, note 12). I’ve included below a screenshot of the note:

I find Jackson’s argument here fascinating (and compelling) in light of my recent writing on legal equity, particularly in the concept’s Aristotelian tradition. Above, Jackson criticizes the majority’s embrace of “pure textualism”—that is, the majority’s “refusal to try to understand the text of a statute in the larger context of what Congress sought to achieve.” Such “pure textualism,” in effect, closes off a major method of grappling with the “ambiguous text” of a statute, empowering the Court to “disguise” their own interpretive practices in order to “secure the majority’s desired outcome.” In other words, tossing out any investigation into legislative intent leaves judges with little else to work with aside from their own presuppositions and personal aims, changing linguistic ambiguity from a question for research into a moment to exploit.

What caught my eye here is how a “refusal to try to understand … what Congress sought to achieve” is a rejection of Aristotle’s approach to legal interpretation in the Nicomachean Ethics. In that text, Aristotle foresees how general laws will need to be applied to unforeseen, particular cases. We will be left, he argues, to “rectify the deficiency [of the law] by reference to what the lawgiver himself would have said if he had been there and, if he had known about the case, would have laid down in law.” (This principle of “rectifying” the law by excavating its intent and bending it around individual cases is what Aristotle calls epieikeia, later translated as aequitas or “equity.”)

As I lay out in the third chapter of my book, Americans of the 1780s similarly understood how a law’s “consequences were not foreseen by the Legislature” and that, therefore, judges would need to reinterpret laws according to legislative intent (p. 81). In fact, it was understood even in this post-Revolutionary period that attending just to the strict text of the law “resulted in a confusion that wicked men turned to their private advantage” (p. 80). The American Founders and their contemporaries, then, would seem to agree with Justice Jackson. Groveling before the “pure text” of the law and refusing to consider “Congress’s aims” runs against both Greco-Roman attitudes toward statutory ambiguity and an early American embrace of legal equity as a necessary check on judicial corruption.

June 20, 2025