Like Megan, I was interested in Augustine's insistence that rhetors (Christian rhetors specifically) use the appropriate language for their audiences. Augustine is fairly absolute about this. On page 116, he says, "There is no point in speaking at all if our words are not understood by the people to whose understanding our words are directed." This seems also to connect to Rick's post (in a vague kind of way). Rick mentioned that St. Patrick would have been killed for speaking the way that Augustine spoke. In a way, I see this as an expansion of Augustine's ideas about using language properly. While Augustine is specifically talking about the words a rhetor uses, we could probably read this a bit more broadly.
This section in Augustine also made me think about how the Catholic Church continued to use Latin as the language of the mass for years and years after attendees were no longer speaking Latin. I think Augustine would've said that the choice of language was similar to the choice of words here. That is, if your audience cannot at all understand the words, you are not being persuasive. And, it seems like Augustine would think that the mass was the rhetor's big chance at a captive audience. I suppose I wonder why these ideas of Augustine were forgotten over time?
On a different note, I found Augustine's perspective on imitation really interesting. Early in Book Four, Augustine says that it is better to imitate eloquent speakers then to try to learn eloquence from books. On page 144, he revisits this idea. Augustine talks about people who can give a good speech but not compose one. He goes on to say that it is fine to borrow someone else's speech, memorize it, and deliver it with eloquence. This made me think about the Obama controversy a few weeks ago (not the pastor controversy, but the one before that), in which Obama was 'caught' using the words Deval Patrick, the governor of Massachusetts. The public perceived Obama's use of Patrick's words as cheating or stealing, while Augustine may have simply said that it was a form of learning. I don't really have a conclusion about this point, but I did find this connection really interesting and I wanted to bring it up.