It's the Word of the Day podcast for February 19th.
Today's word is syllogism, spelled S-Y-L-L-O-G-I-S-M.
Syllogism is a noun.
It refers to a formal argument in logic that is formed by two statements and a conclusion which must be true
if the two statements are true.
Here's the word used in a sentence from The New Yorker.
The Dallas area was a hotbed of competitive debate,
and at first, the oratorical polish of Rebecca F.
Clang's teammates was intimidating.
She spent months being coached on the art of the syllogism,
a kind of logical argument in which one deduces a conclusion from a set of premises.
The idea that you could take something that seemed up to personal charisma or rhetorical choice and map it to this very rigid argumentative structure was mind-blowing,
she said.
For those trained in formal argument, the syllogism is a classical form of deduction,
specifically an argument consisting of a major and a minor premise and a conclusion.
One example is the inference that kindness is praiseworthy from the premises Every virtue is praiseworthy,
and kindness is a virtue.
Syllogism came to English through Anglo-French from the Latin noun Syllogismus,
which in turn can be traced back to the Greek verb Syllogizisthi,
which combines logizisthi, meaning to calculate,