Defining Kairos

Do you have a friend or relative who says the right thing at the right moment all the time? Or, maybe, you have that one funny person in your life who just knows how to pick you up when it is appropriate? Or, maybe you read an article recently that perfectly summed up everything wrong with the world? Well, those are all examples of kairos, and today I am going to provide a brief definition and some examples.

Definition

As with most of rhetoric (where kairos comes from), you can define it a variety of different ways. For the purposes of this post, we are going to define it as โ€œtimeliness.โ€

Now, understandably (in a rhetorical sense) kairos is linked to ethos, pathos, and logos (credibility, emotion, and logic) and acts as a sort of extension of argument (it goes much deeper than this, but this is a post that speaks very generally). Mostly, itโ€™s a matter of appropriateness of speaking or writing.

โ€œKairos is knowing what is most appropriate in a given situation; for our purposes, letโ€™s think of it as saying (or writing) the right thing at the right time,โ€ states writer Kate Pantelides for Writing Commons. โ€œAppeals to kairos in written form try to make use of the particular momentโ€”attempting to capture in words what will be immediately applicable, appropriate, and engaging for a particular audience.โ€

In other words, there is a time and place for something to happen (a certain message, phrasing, praise, retribution, etc.) and we can define that as kairos.

Examples

The example that is often given is Martin Luther Kingโ€™s โ€œI Have a Dream Speech,โ€ but I also recall reading the โ€œLetter from Birmingham Jailโ€ piece by King in a political science course that works just as well for describing a kairotic moment because it tapped into the political and intellectual zeitgeist of the time.

Here are a few more examples:

  • Comebacks
  • Wit
  • Adaptability
  • Anticipation (rhetorical velocity)

Works Cited

Pantelides, Kate. โ€œKairos.โ€ Writing Commons. Web.

Spacey, John. โ€œ8 examples of kairos.โ€ Simplicable.com. Nov. 28, 2018. Web.


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