Historians of rhetoric have largely neglected eighteenth-century Language Origins Theory (LOT). Yet, as a theory that interconnects language, human nature, and human difference, LOT is an important and central inquiry to modern formations of rhetoric, particularly in how they engage with ethics of difference. Examining how the Scottish rhetorician and Enlightenment intellectual, Lord Monboddo, bases his rhetoric on an ethically problematic version of LOT, this article urges historians and students of rhetoric to be wary of the traces of LOT in canonical rhetorical histories as well as in contemporary theories and pedagogical practices.

Margaret Himley and Christine Farris respond to Phillip Marzluf ’s article, “Diversity Writing: Natural Languages, Authentic Voices,” in the February 2006 issue of CCC. Phillip Marzluf responds to them, with his original article readily available through the CCC Online Archive (formerly CCC Online): http://inventio.us/ccc.

Though diversity serves as a valuable source for rhetorical inquiry, expressivist instructors who privilege diversity writing may also overemphasize the essential authenticity of their students’ vernaculars. This romantic and salvationist impulse reveals the troubling implications of eighteenth-century Natural Language Theory and may, consequently, lead to exoticizing and stereotyping students’ linguistic performances.

This essay interrogates the dominant conception of natural ability in classical rhetoric, the necessary-but-not-sufficient theory of aptitude. It describes articulations of this commonplace, by Quintilian and Plato, and then specifically examines Isocrates' problematic affirmation and resistance to a highly determinant version of aptitude. This essay suggests that in the context of contemporary composition studies, Isocratic ambivalence may represent a productive strategy in order to reinvigorate dormant inquiries in language, human nature, and ethics, and to contest powerful attitudes and assumptions that currently champion the primacy of natural ability over experience.