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.

This was easy, as Elizabethan London was crazy for rhetorical figures. A chap called George Puttenham had a bestseller in 1589 with his book on them (that’s about the year of Shakespeare’s first play). And that was just following on from Henry Peacham’s The Garden of Eloquence, which had come out a decade earlier. Book after book was published, all about the figures of rhetoric. So I should probably explain what the figures of rhetoric are.

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.

So the classical works on rhetoric were dug out, translated and adapted for use in English. But it wasn’t the enthymemes or the topics or even the baculums that the English liked. We loved the figures. The “flowers of rhetoric” as they were called (hence The Garden of Eloquence), because, as a nation, we were at the time rather obsessed with poetry.

There are three answers to that. First, we need woodworkers.

They wanted to be natural, and the figures of rhetoric are not natural. They are formulas, formulas that you can learn from a book.

We just happen to say something beautiful, and don’t know how we did it. We are like blindfolded cooks throwing anything into the pot and occasionally, just occasionally, producing a delicious meal. Shakespeare had a big recipe book and his eyes wide open.

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.

Author As god?

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.

So an article on syllepsis will start by defining the term, attacking other scholars for defining it differently, appealing to the authority of Quintilian or Susenbrotus, and then conclude without actually having said anything about syllepsis or what it is.

It doesn’t insult the Wright Brothers to explain the principles of aerodynamics, nor Neil Armstrong the spacesuit. Shakespeare was a craftsman, and if you told him that now people studied his attitudes to feminism more than his rhetorical figures he would chuckle.

Despite years at Stratford Grammar School learning pretty much nothing but the classics, Shakespeare could never be bothered with foreign languages. He always used translations.

Know your audience.

howboys, cithernes, viols, and such other instruments as they played up in the barge.

Update kindle dictionary

The thing about this is that it’s definitely half stolen.

Curiosity, for example, did not kill the cat. There are no widely reported cases of felines dying from being too inquisitive. In fact, the original proverb was not “curiosity killed the cat” (which is recorded only from 1921), it was “care killed the cat.” And even that one was changed. When the proverb was first recorded (in Shakespeare, actually, although he seems to be just referring to a well known bit of folk wisdom), care meant sorrow or unhappiness. But by the twentieth century it was care in the sense of too much kindness—something along the lines of a pet that is overfed and pampered. In a hundred years’ time it may be something else that does the pussy-killing, although you can be certain that whatever it is—kindness, consternation or corruption—will begin with a C or K.

Changing definition of -care-

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,”

It’s enough to get your goat.1

Footnote

paroemion

Let me not to the marriage of true minds Admit impediments. Love is not love Which alters when it alteration finds, Or bends with the remover to remove.

Susanna Centlivre had a strange life. She ran away from home, may have cross-dressed, may thus have been the first woman educated at Cambridge University, and was certainly the most successful female writer of the eighteenth century.

William Blake’s “Piper, pipe that song again.” Polyptoton, even though nobody has ever heard of it, succeeds, and nothing succeeds like success.

Nothing succeeds like sucess