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The Elements of Eloquence

Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase

Mark Forsyth

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101 quotes

language-arts

Chapter 7

  • Rhetoric is a big subject. It consists of the whole art of persuasion. The lot. It includes logic (or the kind of sloppy logic most people understand, called enthymemes), it includes speaking loudly and clearly, and it includes working out what topics to talk about. Anything to do with persuasion is rhetoric, right down to the argumentum ad baculum, which means threatening somebody with a stick until they agree with you. One minuscule part of this massive subject is the figures of rhetoric, which are the techniques for making a single phrase striking and memorable just by altering the wording. Not by saying something different, but by saying something in a different way. They are the formulas for producing great lines.Feb 27 2024 10:10PM
  • So why, you may be asking, were you not taught the figures of rhetoric at school? If they make a chap write as well as Shakespeare, shouldn’t we be learning them instead of home economics and woodwork? There are three answers to that. First, we need woodworkers. Second, people have always been suspicious of rhetoric in general and the figures in particular. If somebody learns how to phrase things beautifully, they might be able to persuade you of something that isn’t true. Stern people dislike rhetoric, and unfortunately it’s usually stern people who are in charge: solemn fools who believe that truth is more important than beauty.Feb 27 2024 10:11PM
  • Third, the Romantic Movement came along at the end of the eighteenth century. The Romantics liked to believe that you could learn everything worth learning by gazing at a babbling mountain brook, or running barefoot through the fields, or contemplating a Grecian urn. They wanted to be natural, and the figures of rhetoric are not natural. They are formulas, formulas that you can learn from a book.Feb 21 2024 6:47AM
  • English teaching at school is, unfortunately, obsessed with what a poet thought, as though that were of any interest to anyone. Rather than being taught about how a poem is phrased, schoolchildren are asked to write essays on what William Blake thought about the Tiger; despite the fact that William Blake was a nutjob whose opinions, in a civilised society, would be of no interest to anybody apart from his parole officer. A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else.Feb 27 2024 10:12PM

Chapter 8

  • Similarly, there was once an old proverb, “An ynche in a misse is as good as an ell,” an ell being an old unit of measurement of 1.1 miles. So the ell was changed to a mile, and then the inch was dropped because it doesn’t begin with an M, and we were left with “A miss is as good as a mile,” which, if you think about it, doesn’t really make sense any more. But who needs sense when you have alliteration? Nobody has ever thrown a baby out with the bathwater, nor is there anything particularly right about rain. Even when something does make a bit of sense, it’s usually obvious why the comparison was picked. It takes two to tango, but it takes two to waltz as well. There are whole hogs, but why not pigs? Bright as a button. Cool as a cucumber. Dead as a doornail.Feb 27 2024 10:17PM
  • So popular is alliteration that in the 1960s it actually made a grab for political power. In the 1960s a vast radical youth movement began campaigning to do things for the sole reason that they began with the same letter. Ban the bomb. Burn your bra. Power to the people. For a moment there it seemed as though alliteration would change the world. But then the spirit of idealism faded and those who had manned the barricades went off and got jobs in marketing. They stopped telling people to ban the bomb and started telling them to put a tiger in your tank, chuck out the chintz and use Access—Your Flexible Friend, or perhaps PayPal. And all because the lady loves Milk Tray.Feb 27 2024 10:18PM
  • “Agent” seems a strange substitution for “friend.” But he probably had to do it as he couldn’t change “farewell farewells.” It’s much too clever to use a word as an adjective and then a noun. In fact, the trick has a name. It’s called polyptoton.Feb 27 2024 10:18PM

Chapter 9

  • In fact, Shakespeare was so fond of polyptoton that he just repeated himself wholesale. He had a trick and he liked it and he used it again and again. So in Richard II Bolingbroke, busy revolting, says “My gracious uncle,” but his uncle, the Duke of York replies: Tut, tut! Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle: I am no traitor’s uncle; and that word “grace” In an ungracious mouth is but profane. Which is three counts of polyptoton and jolly clever. In fact, Shakespeare was so pleased with himself that when he got round to writing Romeo and Juliet he (hoping nobody would notice that he’s just reusing his old lines) has Juliet’s dad tell her: Thank me no thankings, nor proud me no prouds.Feb 21 2024 7:03AM
  • “Hello me no hellos” or “How are you old chap me no how are you old chaps.”Feb 21 2024 7:06AM

Chapter 10

  • Polyptoton was complex. Antithesis is simple. Indeed, the only tricky thing about antithesis is how to punctuate it. Some insist that you should use a colon: others complain that you should use a full stop. But in essence antitheses are simple: first you mention one thing: then you mention another.Feb 21 2024 7:05AM
  • Oscar Wilde was the master of these, with lines like, “The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.” But we can’t all be Oscar Wilde, and it would be interminably dull if we were.Feb 21 2024 7:06AM
  • Wildean antitheses are not too hard. You make a first statement that is relatively obvious, for example, “If a man is a gentleman he knows quite enough.” The second half begins in an obvious way: “If he is not a gentleman” . . . and then takes an odd turn: “whatever he knows is bad for him.”Feb 21 2024 7:06AM
  • So “Wicked women bother one” looks as though it will be followed by “Good women console one,” but instead it is followed by “Good women bore one.” Or you have “Women represent the triumph of matter over mind; men represent the triumph of” . . . and again the reader expects mind over matter, but instead gets “mind over morals.” Or “Journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read,” or “If one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.” And so on and so forth. So you start with a simple statement—Some men invent epigrams—and then you add unexpected inversion—others are invented by them.Feb 21 2024 7:07AM
  • But these are all just plays on the basic formula of antithesis: X is Y, and not X is not Y. Wilde did a few of these: “Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.” This is the soul of antithesis, and this is what makes it so simple.Feb 21 2024 7:08AM
  • For though one antithesis is grand, a long list of antitheses is divine, and is technically known as a progressio. It was a favourite of God and Dickens: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way . . .Feb 21 2024 7:08AM
  • However, for some reason the great subject of antithesis seems to be marriage. If I were a philosophical kind of chap I would probably say something about how marriage itself is an antithesis, a union of opposites into a pleasing whole, that man and woman is the ultimate antithesis (and perhaps love and marriage). As I am not a philosophical chap, I shall merely observe that “Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures” (Samuel Johnson), “Kissing don’t last, cookery do” (George Meredith), and “For better for worse, for richer for poorer, in sickness and in health” . . . except that, really, that’s an example of merism.Feb 21 2024 7:09AM

Chapter 11

  • Merism, ladies and gentlemen, often looks like antithesis, but it’s different. Merism is when you don’t say what you’re talking about, and instead name all of its parts. Ladies and gentlemen, for example, is a merism for people, because all people are either ladies or gentlemen. The beauty of merism is that it’s absolutely unnecessary. It’s words for words’ sake: a gushing torrent of invention filled with noun and noun and signifying nothing. Why a rhetorical figure that gabs on and on for no good reason should be central to the rite of marriage is beyond me.Feb 21 2024 7:10AM
  • Merism searches for wholes, and leaves holes. Thus the most awkward and derided poetic figure is the extended merism, the dismemberment of the loved one: the blazon.Feb 21 2024 7:11AM

Chapter 12

  • When healthy people fall in love, they buy a bunch of flowers or an engagement ring and go and Do Something About It. When poets fall in love, they make a list of their loved one’s body parts and attach similes to them. Your lips are like cherries, your hair is like gold, and your eyes are like traffic lights that make my heart stop and go. These lists are almost universally awkward. Even the Bible starts to sound like the ravings of a lunatic.Feb 21 2024 7:11AM

Chapter 15

  • John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a “green great dragon.” He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely couldn’t have a green great dragon, and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years. The reason for Tolkien’s mistake, since you ask, is that adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.Feb 21 2024 7:13AM
  • Have you ever heard that patter-pitter of tiny feet? Or the dong-ding of a bell? Or hop-hip music? That’s because, when you repeat a word with a different vowel, the order is always I A O. Bish bash bosh. So politicians may flip-flop, but they can never flop-flip. It’s tit-for-tat, never tat-for-tit. This is called ablaut reduplication, and if you do things any other way, they sound very, very odd indeed.Feb 21 2024 7:14AM
  • Hyperbaton is a slap in the face to any English speaker, and when it works it goes straight into the language. In 1642 a chap called Richard Lovelace was stuck in prison, pining for his girlfriend. He wrote her a poem about how he wasn’t really in prison, and proved it with metaphor. The last verse began: Stone walls do not a prison make, Nor iron bars a cage . . . Which is a) hyperbaton because make should come between not and a, b) technically untrue and c) quoted so much that it has become part of the language. And not just that exact line, any variant can be used: adjective noun does not a noun make.Feb 21 2024 7:16AM
  • Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown is one hell of a lot more memorable than The head that wears the crown lies uneasily.Feb 21 2024 7:16AM

Chapter 16

  • It is the anadiplosis, the repetition of the last word of one clause as the first word of the next, that gives both lines their power, whether they’re written by a saint or uttered by a small green alien. The content doesn’t matter much. In fact, anadiplosis doesn’t care what you say and will give its gravitas to a diametrically opposed opinion. Yoda seems to think suffering a bad thing, but there’s another semi-fictional American character called Jesse Jackson who observed that: Suffering breeds character; character breeds faith; in the end faith will not disappoint.Feb 21 2024 7:18AM
  • And anyway, Yoda’s lines look similar to those of Richard II (as set down by one William Shakespeare): The love of wicked men converts to fear; That fear to hate, and hate turns one or both To worthy danger and deserved deathFeb 21 2024 7:18AM
  • Malcolm X observed that: Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action.Feb 21 2024 7:18AM
  • Anadiplosis gives the illusion of logic. Like a conquering general it arrives at a word, plants a flag there, and then moves on. By doubling down it makes everything seem strong, structured and certain.Feb 21 2024 7:18AM
  • There’s simply a satisfaction, half logical and half beautiful, in seeing the same word ending one phrase and coming back to life at the start of the next. It is progression. Progression is a story. A story leads to a climax, just as here leads there and there leads everywhere. As the Emperor Commodus (didn’t actually) put it when chatting to the (utterly fictional) Maximus Decimus Meridius Russellus Crowus in the film Gladiator: The general who became a slave. The slave who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied an emperor. Striking story.Feb 21 2024 7:20AM

Chapter 17

  • So long as you remember not to blurt out your main verb too early, so long as you begin clause after clause with when or if or though or while or so long, so long as you have very large lungs that can keep you going through fourteen apposite clauses for England (despite the fact that you’re on your death bed), so long as you don’t mind being a tad artificial, periodic sentences are a doddle.Feb 21 2024 4:16PM

Chapter 18

  • Before we get to hypotaxis, we’ve got to go through parataxis. Parataxis is like this. It’s good, plain English. It’s one sentence. Then it’s another sentence. It’s direct. It’s farmer’s English. You don’t want to buy my cattle. They’re good cattle. You don’t know cattle. I’m going to have a drink. Then I’m going to break your jaw. I’m a paratactic farmer. My cattle are the best in England.Feb 21 2024 4:17PM

Chapter 19

  • Diacope (pronounced die-ACK-oh-pee) is a verbal sandwich: a word or phrase is repeated after a brief interruption. You take two Bonds and stuff James in the middle. Bingo. You have a great line. Or if you like you can take two burns and stuff a baby in the middle, and you’ve got a political slogan and disco hit: burn, baby, burn (“Disco Inferno”).Feb 21 2024 8:43PM
  • Diacope comes in a number of forms. The simplest is the vocative diacope: Live, baby, live. Yeah, baby, yeah. I am dying, Egypt, dying. Game over, man, game over. Zed’s dead, baby, Zed’s deadFeb 21 2024 8:46PM
  • The other main form of diacope is the elaboration, where you chuck in an adjective. From sea to shining sea. Sunday bloody Sunday. O Captain! My Captain! Human, all too human. From harmony, from heavenly harmony . . . or Beauty, real beauty, ends where intellectual expression begins. This form gives you a feeling both of precision (we’re not talking about fake beauty) and crescendo (it’s not merely a sea, it’s a shining sea).Feb 21 2024 8:46PM
  • Finally there’s extended diacope. All the previous examples have had the structure ABA. But you can extend that to AABA. When Richard III is dying he shouts, “A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”Feb 21 2024 8:53PM
  • “Love me. Love me. Say that you love me.” —Cardigans, “Lovefool”Feb 21 2024 8:53PM
  • But the greatest example of this extended diacope is the immortal line of Julius Caesar in Carry on Cleo: “Infamy! Infamy! They’ve all got it in for me.”Feb 21 2024 8:53PM

Chapter 20

  • Epiplexis is a more specific form of this where a lament or an insult is asked as a question. What’s the point? Why go on? What’s a girl to do? How could you? What makes your heart so hard? When, in the Bible, Job asks: “Why died I not from the womb? why did I not give up the ghost when I came out of the belly?” it’s not a real question. It’s epiplexis. Epiplexis is the puzzled grief of “Why, God? Why?” in Miss Saigon; or it is the bemused disdain in the film Heathers that prompts the question: “Did you have a brain tumour for breakfast?”Feb 22 2024 8:57AM
  • The thing about anacoenosis is that it makes us realise how much we have in common. We both want to do it in the road. We can both see no serious practical obstacles to doing it in the road. I don’t need to tell you how close we are. I can simply ask you questions and we will both know that we have the same answer.Feb 22 2024 9:33AM
  • Can you go beyond hypophora? You can. What’s that called? Anthypophora. Where is it used? In the nursery rhyme “Who Killed Cock Robin?” Where else? Well, Winston Churchill rather liked it at times of crisis. When he addressed Parliament on May 13, 1940, with the British army nearly defeated in France and the question of whether to surrender to Germany still being asked, he dodged everything by asking his own questions. You ask, what is our policy? I will say it is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny, never surpassed in the dark, lamentable catalogue of human crime. That is our policy. You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory. Victory at all costs, victory in spite of all terror; victory, however long and hard the road may be, for without victory, there is no survival.Feb 22 2024 9:40AM
  • But there’s also something immensely powerful, something satisfying in a megalomaniacal, egocentric way, about forcing somebody to answer a question when you both know the answer already. Teachers do it. Policemen do it. Traffic policemen always bloody do it. “Is there any particular reason that you were doing 123mph . . . sir?” And then they wait for an answer. “Did you think that the speed limit didn’t apply to you?” And so on and so forth. The point of all this is not so that the copper in question can learn more about your motivations and beliefs. They lack such psychoanalytic curiosity. That’s why they’re traffic policemen. By making you answer a question to which they already know the answer, they are asserting their authority, and belittling yours. That’s also why they’re traffic policemen. That’s also why such a series of questions is called subjectio.Feb 22 2024 10:43PM

Chapter 21

  • The principle of hendiadys is easy. You take an adjective and a noun, and then you change the adjective into another noun. So instead of saying “I’m going to the noisy city” you say “I’m going to the noise and the city.” Instead of saying “I walked through the rainy morning” you say “I walked through the rain and the morning.” Got it? The adjective-noun noisy-city becomes the noun-and-noun noise and city. Instead of saying “I love your beautiful eyes” you say “I love your beauty and eyes.”Feb 23 2024 9:56AM

Chapter 23

  • Tricolon I came; I saw; I conquered.Sun, sea and sex. Three is the magic number of literary composition, but to explain why that is you have to look at the much more boring number two. Whenever the average human sees two things together, they connect them. So if I say the words eat and drink, you will, unless you’re a bit weird, notice that those are the two major forms of ingestion.Feb 26 2024 9:17AM
  • Or the surprise can simply be for the sake of surprise. “It’s a bird! It’s a plane! It’s Superman!” The famous Superman opening is a whirl of tricolons, and tricolons planted within tricolons. It begins with a surprise one, and it ends with an extender: truth, justice and the American way.Feb 26 2024 9:17AM
  • But the longest bit of the tricolon must be saved for last, even if it’s the least important. Lady Caroline Lamb knew this when she called Byron “Mad, bad and dangerous to know.” And Shakespeare knew it when he wrote: “We few, we happy few, we band of brothers,” or “of graves, of worms and epitaphs,” or . . . when it comes to tricolons, Shakespeare had been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt.Feb 26 2024 9:21AM
  • That’s the final and most important aspect of the tricolon. The good and the bad together make up two sides of the moral coin. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly is a list of the major characters in a film. Eat and drink are two methods of ingestion. Eat, drink and be merry is a list of all the things you need to do this evening. Father and son is a generational pair: Father, Son and Holy Ghost is a list of all the aspects of God. When you finish a tricolon, you finish because there is nothing more to say. You’ve said it all. The list is complete. These are the final words.Feb 26 2024 9:22AM

Chapter 24

  • The great orator Demosthenes was once asked what the three most important things in rhetoric were, and he replied: “Action. Action. Action.” History does not record how he gestured as he said this. He may have punched the air or twiddled his thumbs. All we know is what he said, and how he said it: with epizeuxis. Epizeuxis (pronounced ep-ee-ZOOX-is) is repeating a word immediately in exactly the same sense. Simple. Simple. Simple. However, epizeuxis is not the easiest way to get into the dictionary of quotations. It’s like a nuclear bomb: immensely effective, but a bit weird if you use it every five minutes.Feb 26 2024 10:51AM
  • But the pure epizeuxis form is still around as well. Since the 1920s it has been a maxim of American real estate agents that the three most important things about a property are “location, location, location.”Feb 26 2024 10:52AM

Chapter 25

  • Syllepsis is when one word is used in two incongruous ways.Feb 26 2024 10:58AM
  • It’s on this principle that Rosamond Lehmann complained of her fellow novelist Ian Fleming: “The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can’t get on with them.”Feb 26 2024 10:53AM
  • There’s something ridiculous about syllepsis, which is probably what attracted Lewis Carroll to it. Lines like: You may seek it with thimbles—and seek it with care; You may hunt it with forks and hope; You may threaten its life with a railway-share; You may charm it with smiles and soap.Feb 26 2024 10:57AM
  • But the advantages of syllepsis are also its failings. Syllepsis makes the reader astonished and go back to check what the word was and how it’s working now. It’s terribly witty, but it’s terribly witty in a look-at-me-aren’t-I-witty sort of way.Feb 26 2024 10:58AM

Chapter 26

  • Isocolon Roses are red.Violets are blue.Feb 26 2024 10:59AM
  • That, at its simplest, is isocolon. Two clauses that are grammatically parallel, two sentences that are structurally the same. The Ancient Greeks were rather obsessed with isocolon, the modern world has rather forgotten it. The Greeks loved the sense of balance that it gave to writing, which reflected the sense of balance that they admired in thought. With isocolon one seems reasonable; without isocolon one seems hasty.Feb 26 2024 10:59AM
  • Similarity and difference, comparison and contrast, are the stock in trade of isocolon, and that’s how Shakespeare liked to use it. When Brutus is explaining why he killed Julius Caesar, he gives this reply: As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his ambition.Feb 26 2024 11:00AM
  • This also shows up isocolon’s weakness: people can hear it happening and it can all start to sound rather forced and artificial. Silly even. It’s very hard to work an extended isocolon in subtly. It’s strictly for the moment when you’re addressing the crowds in Rome or Washington, or trying to win the Second World War over the radio. It’s not the sort of trick you can use down the pub or try over dinner. If you do, Shakespeare makes fun of you thus: I praise God for you, sir: your reasons at dinner have been sharp and sententious; pleasant without scurrility, witty without affection, audacious without impudency, learned without opinion, and strange without heresy.Feb 26 2024 11:01AM
  • The isocolon is particularly useful to advertisers. The parallelism can imply that two statements are the same thing even if they aren’t. “Have a break. Have a Kit-Kat” is a clever little line because it uses isocolon to try to make two rather different things synonymous. The same goes for “The future’s bright. The future’s Orange.”Feb 26 2024 11:01AM

Chapter 27

  • Enallage (e-NALL-aj-ee) is a deliberate grammatical mistake.Feb 26 2024 11:02AM
  • It wouldn’t have made the dictionary of quotations and T. S. Eliot wouldn’t have used it as the epigraph for “The Hollow Men.” Heart of Darkness is 39,000 words long, but everybody remembers those four. It’s the bad grammar what makes the phrase. That enallage.Feb 26 2024 11:02AM
  • And sometimes it is a little hard to say whether the enallage was deliberate or not. T. S. Eliot certainly knew the English language. He knew that we means you and I and that us means you and me.Feb 26 2024 11:03AM

Chapter 28

  • English verse is a reasonably simple business. Each English word has a stress on it. When a beggar starts work, he needs to begin beggin’. Begin has the stress on the second syllable—beGIN—and beggin’ has the stress on the first—BEGgin’. The same thing goes with the verb to rebel and the noun a rebel. A REBel reBELS. When you give a gift, you preSENT a PREsent. The only difference between the words is the stress.Feb 26 2024 11:04AM
  • There’s an old joke with many variations, all of which involve a Frenchman in pursuit of a penis, rather than happiness. That’s partially because the French don’t pronounce their Hs, but mainly because HAPpiness and a PEnis are stressed differently.Feb 26 2024 11:04AM
  • Of course, there are lots of other ways that you can write. The iamb is just one of the four basic feet: Iamb—te-TUM Trochee—TUMty Anapaest—te-te-TUM Dactyl—TUM-te-ty And the pentameter is one of the three basic meters: Pentameter—five in a row Tetrameter—four in a row Trimeter—three in a row So you can pick one from each list, and you’ve got yourself a verse form. Choose anapaest and tetrameter and you’ve got: te-te-TUM te-te-TUM te-te-TUM te-te-TUMFeb 26 2024 11:05AM

Chapter 30

  • Paradoxes are remarkably hard to define, but you know one when you see one. Mathematicians, logicians, psychologists, sociologists and poets all compete for the word. They all think they own it. But this is untrue. For paradoxes are quite paradoxical. Let’s start with Oscar Wilde, master of inversion. Most of Wilde’s paradoxes are not paradoxes at all. They are simply simple thoughts expressed in a terribly surprising way.Feb 26 2024 11:09AM
  • In this world there are only two tragedies. One is not getting what one wants, and the other is getting it. —Oscar Wilde, Lady Windermere’s Fan, 1892Feb 26 2024 11:09AM
  • There are two tragedies in life. One is to lose your heart’s desire. The other is to gain it. —George Bernard Shaw, Man and Superman, 1903Feb 26 2024 11:09AM
  • Really, there’s no paradox here. You or I might have said “screwed either way,” but not Wilde. He simply sets the sentence up as though it’s going to mention two separate things, and then doubles back on himself. The content is not paradoxical. The phrasing is.Feb 26 2024 11:10AM
  • But the pun leads us closer to the true paradox, because it at least looks like one. When Oscar Wilde said that “We live in an age when unnecessary things are our only necessities” he was still being veridical, but he was heading towards the central contradiction. Luxury is, for the human, a necessity; what are commonly called the necessities can usually be dispensed with. Chance is a certainty and living is only the slow process of dying.Feb 26 2024 11:11AM
  • The true paradox is one of the more peculiar points of rhetoric in its long war against reality. We will happily dream the impossible dream, even if logic and the laws of the universe say that it’s . . . impossible. The true paradox is arresting because it breaks all laws, but calming because that is so easy in language. It is easy to write that black is white, that up is down and that good is evil. It’s as easy as typing, and as difficult. I can’t do it, and I just did.Feb 26 2024 11:12AM
  • A well executed paradox stirs the soul and mixes language and philosophy in a way that no other figure does. Paul Simon was on to something when he titled his song “The Sound of Silence,” and his verse about people talking without speaking, and about people hearing without listening, was easy for him, but that makes it no less beautiful to us.Feb 26 2024 11:12AM

Chapter 31

  • Socrates may or may not have said, “Eat to live, not live to eat.” We remember the line because the two thoughts are held up as in a mirror: one reversing the other. It also, I suspect, reflects the fact that the Ancient Greek diet involved a lot of porridge.Feb 21 2024 6:51AM
  • As Keats put it, “Beauty is truth, truth beauty.” Or as Edward Fitzgerald said: “The moving finger writes; and, having writ; / Moves on.”Feb 21 2024 6:52AM
  • Byron pointed out that “Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure,” which I suppose was a subject on which he was the expert. Oscar Wilde said that “All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime,” and then got sent off to Reading Gaol to reconsider and write ballads. Both these lines use chiasmus to get around one of the problems of precise logic: if all tomatoes are red, does that mean that all red things are tomatoes? Chiasmus lets you explain, and sound rather elegant while you’re doing so.Feb 21 2024 6:52AM
  • One of the things that makes Dorothy Parker’s chiasmus a trifle unlikely is that a good chiasmus needs to be thought out. Chiasmus is clever, but not natural. Kennedy’s inauguration speech could never have been improvised and Mae West, one suspects, took a while to work hers out. Chiasmus is the grand statement, it’s the victory of symmetry, it’s the Taj Mahal. There is, though, a more subtle form: the grammatical chiasmus.Feb 21 2024 6:53AM

Chapter 33

  • Some people think that the number thirteen is unlucky. Why they should think this is utterly unclear. All sorts of explanations get offered—thirteen people at the Last Supper, thirteen steps to the gallows—but they all look like nonsense. You might as well believe that seven is lucky or that the answer to the question of life, the universe and everything is 42.Feb 26 2024 11:13AM

Chapter 34

  • A dutiful son has to remember not to slouch or swear or, in Hamlet’s case, murder the old bat. So he gives himself a pep talk full of reminders: . . . now to my mother. O heart, lose not thy nature; let not ever The soul of Nero enter this firm bosom: Let me be cruel, not unnatural: I will speak daggers to her, but use none. Nero was notorious for putting his own mother to death, among other indiscretions, and Hamlet’s words would make a wonderful Mother’s Day card. Yet the important phrase here is the catachresis “I will speak daggers.” If you stop and think about it, the sentence doesn’t make sense. You can’t speak a dagger. You can speak any adverb. You can speak loudly, softly, gradually, democratically and deliciously. You can speak a few nouns: English and the truth. Or you could speak words as sharp as daggers, or as cruel. But you can’t speak daggers any more than you can speak grenades or bullets or blunderbusses. And that’s why the phrase stuck. Speaking daggers is so unusual that it became part of the language. And then it became usual. And a couple of hundred years later we got looking daggers (1834) and nobody really notices any more.Feb 21 2024 6:56AM
  • A catachresis is any sentence that makes you stop, scratch your head and say “that’s wrong,” before you suddenly realise that it’s right. It’s Andrew Marvell in “The Garden”: Annihilating all that’s made To a green thought in a green shade.Feb 21 2024 6:57AM

Chapter 35

  • Litotes is affirming something by denying its opposite. It’s not difficult. Supposing you’re writing a song about something that happens every day. You could start each line with the words “It’s usual,” or you could use litotes and start them with the words “It’s not unusual.” Litotes is a form of understatement-by-negative, and is not without its uses.Feb 26 2024 11:14AM
  • Understatement is a tricky business, because it works only if you know the truth. If Franz Liszt told you that he played the piano a little, it would be an understatement. If I said the same it would just be true. So, in a sense, understaters need you to know what they’re saying before they say it. Or, at the very least, they need you to get it instantly.Feb 26 2024 11:14AM
  • Litotes is a special kind of understatement that happens to use negatives. And understatement is a kind of irony.Feb 21 2024 6:58AM
  • Irony is an odd fish because, contrary to popular belief, irony draws people together. Irony is an untruth that both parties know is untrue, that both parties agree is untrue. When two strangers meet in the pouring rain and one says to the other, “Lovely weather we’re having,” he’s appealing to the one thing that he knows they both have in common and the one truth they both recognise. When a couple are arguing furiously and one says sarcastically to the other, “Oh, because you’d know all about being faithful,” they may be arguing, but that statement appeals to knowledge they share.Feb 21 2024 6:59AM
  • Irony is always about what people have in common, and so is litotes. It’s a sociable figure. Though it can be used to end wars, bury generals and crush courtiers, litotes is most at home among friends. It is a gentlemanly figure, a civilised figure, an agreeable one. It is the sort of figure you should toss out with an amiable smile and a raised eyebrow.Feb 21 2024 6:59AM
  • However, there are those who don’t like litotes at all, and they are not without their reasons. George Orwell wrote a long essay attacking hackneyed metaphors and language that wasn’t crystal clear—or, as he would have put it, diamond clear. His general theory was that unclear language reflected unclear thought, which allowed evil politicians to oppress people. So litotes is a dictator’s henchman.Feb 21 2024 6:59AM

Chapter 36

  • Metaphor is when two things are connected because they are similar, metonymy is when two things are connected because they are really physically connected. It’s the favourite rhetorical figure of Fleet Street. Consider the following news report: Downing Street was left red-faced last night at news that the White House was planning to attack the British Crown with the support of Wall Street. Number said it was “unacceptable” though the Vatican refused to get involved. Meanwhile, the army’s top brass have been ordered to send in the Green Jackets, which will confuse the Americans as they were expecting the Redcoats. Rather than mentioning people, you mention something that they are physically touching. You are no longer you. You are your clothes, you are the building you’re standing in, the medals pinned to your chest or the hat on your head. You are a suit, a blue-stocking, a bit of skirt.Feb 21 2024 7:01AM

Chapter 37

  • A transferred epithet is when an adjective is applied to the wrong noun. So instead of writing “The nervous man smoked a cigarette” you write “The man smoked a nervous cigarette.” Cigarettes, of course, do not have feelings; yet we understand immediately what that second sentence means. A transferred epithet is a good thing, or, rather, a good epithet is a transferred thing.Feb 26 2024 11:16AM
  • Epithets are almost always transferred between humans and their surroundings, and it’s almost always a one-way street. The emotions leak out from us. The loneliness seeps through the soles of our shoes onto the road. Our clumsiness springs from our fingers onto the recalcitrant helmets. Wordsworth wrote of lonely rooms, but he never wrote about third-floor people containing en-suite bathrooms.Feb 26 2024 11:16AM

Chapter 38

  • Pleonasm is the use of unneeded words that are superfluous and unnecessary in a sentence that doesn’t require them. It’s repeating the same thing again twice, and it annoys and irritates people.Feb 26 2024 11:17AM
  • There are three different varieties of pleonasm: the tiny, the lazy, and the lovely.Feb 26 2024 11:17AM
  • We are all casual creatures and we say things that we don’t really mean; so, when we really mean a thing, we say it twice. Or three times. Or sixteen times in a single speech, if you’re complaining about a dead parrot that is: Passed on No more Ceased to be Expired Gone to meet its maker Stiff Bereft of life Rests in peace And so on and so forth until we get to . . . 16. ExFeb 26 2024 11:19AM
  • This is pleonasm, but it’s pleonasm for an effect. The tragic truth of the parrot’s mortality can be communicated only through repetitionFeb 26 2024 11:19AM
  • The idea that a thing is itself dates back to the days of Socrates, Aristotle, togas and casual pederasty. It was formulated by Gottfried Leibniz as “A is A.” This truth of logic is unchanging, a point demonstrated by the twentieth-century thinker Herman Hupfeld who asserted that: A kiss is still a kiss, A sigh is just a sigh;Feb 26 2024 11:20AM

Chapter 39

  • John Lennon complained that the song “Yesterday” didn’t go anywhere. You find out that the guy’s unhappy, and that he longs for the past, but it never goes beyond that. There’s no resolution. Lennon was quite right. After all, the song begins with the word “yesterday” and ends 125 words later with the word “yesterday.” It’s a circular song, which ends where it began. And it even does it at a smaller level. The first verse begins and ends with the same word—“yesterday”—and so does the second—“suddenly”—and so does the third—“yesterday” again. But that’s probably the song’s strength. It’s about a man who can’t think of anything else but yesterday, and the words mirror that rather beautifully. It’s also a double case of epanalepsis: beginning and ending with the same word.Feb 26 2024 11:21AM
  • Ending where you began has two effects that are, at first sight, contradictory. It gives the impression of going nowhere, and it gives the impression of moving inevitably on. So each New Year’s Day you’re back where you started: January 1. And each New Year’s Day an old year is gone forever and a new one is upon you. Time moves ever onwards, and Time scampers around in circles. It’s the same thing with epanalepsis.Feb 26 2024 11:21AM
  • “The king is dead; long live the king” sums up both sides of epanalepsis. On the one hand it announces that the old monarch is dead and gone, and that there is a new king on the throne. On the other hand, it curtly tells republicans that there will always be a monarch. Everything has changed, and everything has remained the same.Feb 26 2024 11:21AM
  • Epanalepsis implies circularity and continuation. When Robert Burns wrote of “Man’s inhumanity to man” he didn’t say that inhumanity breeds inhumanity, but he implied it with the epanalepsis. It sounds so like “A lie begets a lie” or “Nothing will come of nothing” that we can’t help feeling that there’s an unending inhuman circle of dog eat dog eat dog eat dog. The phrase wouldn’t have been nearly as memorable if Burns had written “Man’s inhumanity to others.”Feb 26 2024 11:22AM

Chapter 40

  • Personification is a strange woman. She wanders about holding a mask and talking to herself. She’s never there when you think she is, and when she does turn up, she tries to take over your life. But most importantly, she’s very, very hard to define. Women, eh?Feb 26 2024 11:23AM

Chapter 46

  • Hendiadys has her eccentric charm, polyptoton slaves away in the background, catachresis wanders around smashing things up, but anaphora has all the power.Feb 27 2024 10:00PM
  • It’s pretty clear what he’s describing. He’s describing defeat, defeat with honour. But Churchill also knew exactly what he was doing with anaphora. People never hear the rest, they hear the words “We shall fight” and that’s good enough for them. They hear, and because they’ve heard it several times, they believe. Churchill needed to get across two messages: we shall fight, and we shall probably lose. The anaphora allowed him to push one, while slipping the other in unnoticed.Feb 27 2024 10:01PM
  • The effect is slightly less powerful, but beautifully hypnotic. There was an eighteenth-century poet called Christopher Smart. Smart did all of the things that you might expect of an eighteenth-century poet: getting into debt, writing scurrilous poems, writing religious poems, signing silly contracts with booksellers. In the end it all got too much for him and he was confined to a madhouse with nothing to keep him company except a cat called Jeoffrey.Feb 27 2024 10:02PM
  • Anaphora gets everywhere. It’s been running through this book. Every chapter, every figure, every writer. Do you remember Dickens’ fog? Fog everywhere. Fog up the river, where it flows among green aits and meadows; fog down the river [ . . . ] Fog on the Essex marshes, fog on the Kentish heights. Fog creeping into the cabooses of collier-brigs; fog lying out on the yards and hovering in the rigging of great ships; fog drooping on the gunwales of barges and small boats. Fog in the eyes and throats of ancient Greenwich pensioners, wheezing by the firesides of their wards; fog in the stem and bowl of the afternoon pipe of the wrathful skipper . . .Feb 27 2024 10:03PM

Chapter 48

  • However, it’s a truth of all the humanities that you have to learn the distinctions first, and only then can you learn why the distinctions don’t really exist.Feb 27 2024 10:06PM

Chapter 49

  • SELECTED FURTHER READING A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms—Richard A. Lanham (the standard reference work) Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language—Sister Miriam Joseph (not with a bang but a wimple) Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry—Professor Sir Brian Vickers (an excellent introduction) In Defence of Rhetoric—Professor Sir Brian Vickers (a comprehensive vindication) You Talkin’ To Me?—Sam Leith (an introduction to the more structural aspects of rhetoric and persuasion, as opposed to the verbal figures found here) And on the Internet Silva Rhetoricae (rhetoric.byu.edu), produced by Gideon O. Burton of Brigham Young University (a dictionary listing alternative names and definitions in which one can click happily between related terms)Feb 26 2024 11:25AM

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