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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Forsyth
Read between
September 7 - September 10, 2016
Syllepsis can get out of hand, up your nose, on your nerves and used too much.
Roses are red. Violets are blue. That, at its simplest, is isocolon. Two clauses that are grammatically parallel, two sentences that are structurally the same.
With isocolon one seems reasonable; without isocolon one seems hasty. With isocolon language acquired a calm rhythm, without isocolon prose became a formless heap.
Modern isocolons tend to work as a kind of spot-the-difference game. We use the similarities to point up the differences, and use the differences to point up the similarities.
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.
Enallage (e-NALL-aj-ee) is a deliberate grammatical mistake. That definition raises all sorts of philosophical questions about whether a mistake can be deliberate, and all sorts of linguistic questions about what correct English grammar is and whether one chap ever really has the right to tell another chap he’s wrong.
Paradoxes are remarkably hard to define, but you know one when you see 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.
He would do anything for a good paradox, but he wouldn’t do that.
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.
The palindrome is an old tradition: the first thing that man ever said was, probably, “Madam, I’m Adam.”
Americans seem particularly fond of such verbal symmetries, and tend to elect anybody who can come up with a symmetrical sentence. The current President told his troops: “You stood up for America, now America must stand up for you.” The one before didn’t care “whether we bring our enemies to justice, or bring justice to our enemies.” Before that it was: “People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power,” and so on and so forth.
All of this goes back to JFK’s inauguration speech, which was chiasmus-crazy. With the Cold War at its coldest, Kennedy told America that “Mankind must put an end to war, or war will put an end to mankind.” His method was peaceful: “Let us never negotiate out of fear, but let us never fear to negotiate.” And most famously of all he told Americans: “Ask not what your country can do for you, but what you can do for your country.”
There is, though, a more subtle form: the grammatical chiasmus. Adjective noun: noun adjective, or as Milton put it in the closing line of Lycidas: “Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.”
Assonance is repeating a vowel sound: deep heat or blue moon. It is, I’m afraid, the thin and flimsy cousin of alliteration.
Catachresis is rather difficult to define, but it’s essentially when a sentence is so startlingly wrong that it’s right.
Songwriters love to use love as a catachresis. For example, there’s Leonard Cohen’s “Dance Me to the End of Love.” That’s a perfect catachresis.
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.
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.
A logician might say that it was still possible that there was cheering and heavy traffic and sirens going off, but logicians have no place near poetry.
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.45 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.
Litotes isn’t the best figure to use when you’re trying to be grand. Litotes does not stir the soul, it’s more suited to stirring tea.
“Your heart is as cold as ice” is completely different from “Your heart is as cold as ice cream,” even though the temperatures are the same.
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 10 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
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The extreme form of metonymy is synecdoche, where you become one of your body parts. You are your feet, your lips or your liver. All eyes were on the government as they tried to alleviate the famine with a charity theatre matinée. A spokesman said if they got enough bums on seats they could feed all the hungry mouths, but it would have to be all hands on deck as this was about getting feet on the ground. The government said they had their top brains working on it and that the gate from a full house could buy a hundred head of cattle.
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.”
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.
if you wander into a shop or make the terrible mistake of turning on the television or radio, you will hear of havens that are safe, cooperation that is mutual, and prizes that are, it turns out, to be won. Such phrases lumber about the language like zombies. They were created long ago by insanely evil marketing executives who were desperate to progress forward and sell their foreign imports to the general public.
It’s also a double case of epanalepsis: beginning and ending with the same word.
“The king is dead; long live the king” sums up both sides of epanalepsis.
Allegory is proper personification, in fact it’s personification that has moved in and taken over the whole story. In allegory the person isn’t just suggested by a human verb, it’s fleshed out and dressed up and given a house to live in.
However, we do not use hyperbole enough. We lack ambition. The state of Kansas is actually flatter than a pancake.51 It’s quite possible to have a ton of money. All you need is £2,853.93 in coppers. If you really want to make a hyperbole work, you must make sure that it is beyond anything that is even vaguely possible.
Long, long ago, at a time when the Big Bang was still a recent and painful memory, lived a man called Sydney Smith
An adynaton (pronounced ad-in-ART-on) is impossible. Before an adynaton will work, pigs will fly, Hell will freeze over and the Devil will go skiing.
About pronouns they were sometimes wrong, the old masters; because you can use a pronoun before saying what it refers to. It’s an odd little technique, and it’s called prolepsis.
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.
Congeries work precisely because readers and listeners aren’t used to them. We can deal with gold-tongued flattery and snarled threats, but a list? It hits below the belt.
The technical name for a heap of insults is bdelygmia, and the best thing about a good bdelygmia (aside from the pronunciation: no letter is silent) is that you don’t even need to know what any of the words mean.
Anaphora (an-AFF-or-a) is starting each sentence with the same words. It’s the king of rhetorical figures.
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.
