Rhetorical situations are essentially those that involve the act of persuasion. Keeping this in mind, I recently was in one with my mom while we were eating at a restaurant.
We were discussing cars- my grandfather got a new Lexus convertible recently- which prompted my mother to call it an "old -man car". Her boyfriend (let's call him Bob) and I looked at each other and attempted to explain to her why that terms was misleading. As a background, she in a native French speaker, and English is her second language, so occasionally some underlying meaning gets confused.
Her support was that because old men were the ones with money, so they could drive nice cars. Therefore, nice cars were old-people cars. Her support was a bit of anecdotal evidence that she had seen old men driving those kinds of cars.
Bob and I's stance was that while it may be true that old men are more likely to be wealthy, that did not make the Lexus an "old-man car". It simply made it a "wealthy" or even "rich-people" car, and that calling it an "old-man car" carried certain connotations of being slow, ugly, etc. that she was not trying to express. Our support was our own experience with the language, and that we understood the underlying meaning of the phrase better than her because we were native speakers.
The audience of the situation was just my mother, Bob, and I, as we were the only one's involved in the discussion. It was not a very successful argument on either side, as by the end neither side had the other convinced that they were right.
