Apophasis, as students of rhetoric know, is the speechmaker’s trick of raising a nasty subject by saying you’re not going to talk about it. But it isn’t easy to pull off. It requires a light touch; ...

My dad sent me an email the other day; a link to a word-of-the-day sort of tweet by a guy named Bryan A. Garner. “Apophasis,” Garner tweeted. “The less said about it the better!” I’d heard the term ...