The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase

by Mark Forsyth

Now some people will tell you that great writing cannot be learnt. Such people should be hit repeatedly on the nose until they promise not to talk nonsense any more.

if you say, “Full fathom five thy father lies,” you will be considered the greatest poet who ever lived. Express precisely the same thought any other way—e.g. “your father’s corpse is 9.144 metres below sea level”—and you’re just a coastguard with some bad news.

Polyptoton, even though nobody has ever heard of it, succeeds, and nothing succeeds like success.

God, whatever His other failings, is a great rhetorician.

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.

It’s rude to finish other people’s sentences, unless you killed them first.

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.

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.

They don’t have to be sentences, they could be divided by commas, they could be divided by semi-colons; there’s a class of people who get very worked up about such things—they’re lonely people—they tend to have stains down the fronts of their shirts—they’ll tell you that dashes should be used only to subordinate complete sentences. You must forgive them.

The alternative, should you, or any writer of English, choose to employ it (and who is to stop you?) is, by use of subordinate clause upon subordinate clause, which itself may be subordinated to those clauses that have gone before or after, to construct a sentence of such labyrinthine grammatical complexity that, like Theseus before you when he searched the dark Minoan mazes for that monstrous monster, half bull and half man, or rather half woman for it had been conceived from, or in, Pasiphae, herself within a Daedalian contraption of perverted intention, you must unravel a ball of grammatical yarn lest you wander forever, amazed in the maze, searching through dark eternity for a full stop. That’s hypotaxis, and it used to be everywhere.

You have to think calmly for a long time to come up with a good hypotactic sentence, and so a good hypotactic sentence tells the reader that you have been thinking calmly for long time.

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.

Alfred Tennyson’s best friend went on holiday and died. This was a bad thing for Tennyson, but a good thing for English poetry, because Tennyson settled down to write 133 short poems about his dead chum, or one long poem in 133 sections, if you want to look at it like that.

Poor zeugma! So elegant in the classical world! So silly in ours! Like a toga.

The palindrome is an old tradition: the first thing that man ever said was, probably, “Madam, I’m Adam.”

I wandered lonely as a cloud . . . Clouds are not lonely. Especially in the Lake District where Wordsworth wrote that line. In the Lake District clouds are remarkably sociable creatures that bring their friends and relatives and stay for weeks. But nobody even notices that the comparison is all wrong because the mind always skips to the second connection which is that clouds do wander aimlessly. It’s not that Wordsworth didn’t know about meteorology, it’s that he did know about metaphor.

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.

Lewis Carroll finished his poem “Jabberwocky” by repeating the whole of the first verse. It has the same effect, though. The Jabberwock may be slain, but it’s still brillig, the toves are still slithy, and the mome raths continue their outgrabing. Everything has changed, but everything is still the same.

Hyperbole (pronounced hi-PER-boh-lee) is the technical term for exaggeration, and even though we have literally thousands of English words that mean the same thing, hyperbole is one of the few technical Greek rhetorical terms that absolutely everybody knows.

All things are, of course, possible with Jesus, but having a large plank of wood in your eye and not noticing is an extreme example.

The best thing about congeries is that it’s a singular noun. Otherwise I’d use the word “list.” List means exactly the same thing, but it has none of the exoticism of congeries, no spice, no adventure, no derring-do, no whiff of the palm tree and the jungle, no pizzazz, no fairy-dust, no magic. Also everybody knows how to pronounce “list,” but no two dictionaries can agree on congeries, which makes it much more fun. The plural, incidentally, is congeries.

Space: the final frontier. It wouldn’t be nearly as good if it ran: This is Space, which is the final frontier.

But scesis onomaton works for even the pettiest rule. “Finders keepers” does not deign to tell us whether they were, are, will be or should be. It’s a rule, a verbless rule (and was actually an underlying principle of parts of the British Empire).

Above all, I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy and a falsehood.

The Greek term, since you ask, is prosopopoeia. But for once we have a nice, normal English word that does the trick without lining up innumerable vowels.

Burns had the same line: “Till a’ the seas gang dry, my dear, / And the rocks melt wi’ the sun.” But the adynaton is rather overdone—impossibility is one thing, but warm sunshine in Scotland is ridiculous.

A “peep-show box” in that more innocent age was a box with a magnifying glass in the side through which you could see little painted wonders. In the twentieth century some bright and drooling spark had the idea of putting dirty pictures inside, and eventually somebody decided to shove a whole girl in there. This is called Progress.