I mourn the death of the rhetorical question

… which I chalked up to the irritations of simplified Internet-speak, but this tendency of annoying people to actually answer what is CLEARLY a rhetorical question shows up in Costa-Gavras’ State of Siege (1972). So those who refuse to recognize rhetorical questions will always be with us. And they make conversation infinitely less interesting. It’s so hard to have a deep and/or philosophical conversation without using rhetorical questions. I should put it in my Twitter bio: “That was a rhetorical question.”