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

by Mark Forsyth

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.

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.

Accuracy is much less important than alliteration.

Any phrase, so long as it alliterates, is memorable and will be believed even if it’s a bunch of nonsense. Curiosity, for example, did not kill the cat. There are no widely reported cases of felines dying from being too inquisitive.

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.

paroemion (that’s the technical name for excessive alliteration).

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.

So just as a little recap, polyptoton is a favourite of Jesus, Shakespeare and John Lennon.

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

It is hard, polyptonically, to talk the talk when you’re also trying to moon-walk the moon-walk.

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.

“The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.”

So you start with a simple statement—Some men invent epigrams—and then you add unexpected inversion—others are invented by them.

Why just say that life is sweet, when you can add that death is sour? Why point out that the sun rises in the morning without mentioning that it sets in the evening? Of course, anyone could have worked the second halves out for themselves, but what does that matter? United we stand, divided we fall, even though both statements imply the other.

For though one antithesis is grand, a long list of antitheses is divine, and is technically known as a progressio.

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.

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.

Synaesthesia She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight. THE LITTLE SISTER BY RAYMOND CHANDLER

Synaesthesia is either a mental condition whereby colours are perceived as smells, smells as sounds, sounds as tastes, etc., or it is a rhetorical device whereby one sense is described in terms of another. If colours are harmonious or a voice is silky, that is synaesthesia (or some other spelling).

Hyperbaton is when you put words in an odd order, which is very, very difficult to do in English.

adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun.

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.

Yoda11 is known for wrong his word order getting, but his most quoted line, from Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, uses a different figure entirely. Yoda announces that fear leads to anger. He then takes the last word of that sentence and repeats it as the first word of the next: anger leads to hatred. He then takes the last word of that sentence and repeats it as the first word of the next: hatred leads to suffering. This is a case of anadiplosis.

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.

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.

in English we tend to take a much more limited view and the periodic sentence is simply a very big sentence that is not complete until the end.

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.

Using lots of conjunctions is called polysyndeton. No conjunctions is called asyndeton.

There’s nothing wrong with parataxis. It’s good, simple, clean, plain-living, hard-working, up-bright-and-early English. Wham. Bam. Thank you, ma’am. Orwell liked it. Hemingway liked it. Almost no English writer between about 1650 and 1850 liked it.

But facts obscure the truth, which is that writing prose doesn’t make you a prose writer any more than philosophising makes you a philosopher or fooling around makes you a fool.

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.

Absolutely anything sounds civilised and well-thought-out, provided that it’s expressed in the most syntactically complicated, hyper-hypotactic manner.

Angry letters of complaint, redundancy notices and ransom notes will, if written in careful hypotaxis, sound as reasonable, measured and genial as a good dose of rough Enlightenment pornography.

So just to recap, one of the greatest lines in the history of cinema is a man saying a name deliberately designed to be dull. The only possible explanation for the line’s popularity is the way it is phrased. Would the line have been remembered if he had said “My name is Mr. James Bond,” or “Bond, first name James,” or “Bond, but you can call me James,” or “James Bond”?

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.

(foreseeing and answering a possible objection is a rhetorical device called procatalepsis).

The same sorts of doubt assailed poor Mr. Presley when he sang “Are You Lonesome Tonight?” a song whose melodic section consists only of rhetorical aporias.22 Here, we must suppose that he really wants an answer. If she is lonesome tonight and her memory does stray to bright and osculatory summer days, then he’s a happy man. If on the other hand she’s got plenty of company tonight thank you very much, he’s in trouble. Here, there is an answer, we just don’t know what it is. How do you do what you do to me? Will you still love me tomorrow? Who’s that girl running around with you?

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.”

There’s also a variant form of hendiadys where adverb-adjective becomes adjective-adjective. If your tea is nice and hot and my champagne is nice and chilled, those would both appear to be hendiadyses for nicely hot and nicely chilled.

There’s also (some would say) the double verb form where you try and do something rather than trying to do something or go and see somebody rather than going to see them.

When you end each sentence with the same word, that’s epistrophe. When each clause has the same words at the end, that’s epistrophe. When you finish each paragraph with the same word, that’s epistrophe. Even when it’s a whole phrase or a whole sentence that you repeat, it’s still, providing the repetition comes at the end, epistrophe.

Epistrophe is the trope of obsession. It’s the trope of emphasising one point again and again. And it’s the trope of not being able to escape that one conclusion, which is one of the reasons that songs are so suited to the idea of obsessive love, political certainty and other such unhealthy ideas.

But add another word and they’re tricolons. Eat, drink and be merry. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Truth, justice and the American way. With a tricolon you can set up a pattern and then break it. “Lies, damned lies, and statistics” is a simple example.

Tricolons sound great if the third thing is longer. The American way is (as outlined in their mutinous Declaration of Independence) made up of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.

when it comes to tricolons, Shakespeare had been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt.

Tricolons sound statesmanlike. It’s government of the people, by the people, for the people. Even though I can’t for the life of me see what the difference is between “of the people” and “by the people,” it doesn’t matter. It’s three and three sounds good.

Epizeuxis (pronounced ep-ee-ZOOX-is) is repeating a word immediately in exactly the same sense. Simple. Simple. Simple.

“Howl! Howl! Howl! Howl!” King Lear is here breaking the golden rule of three, which is a sign, I suppose, of his madness.

There’s a song called “Have Some Madeira M’Dear,” which contains long lines of syllepsis like “she made no reply, up her mind, and a dash for the door.”

Syllepsis was also a favourite of Charles Dickens, who wrote lines like: “Mr. Pickwick took his hat and his leave,”