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

by Mark Forsyth

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

The same cannot be said of Rudyard Kipling’s poem “If.” “If” is one long, 294-word sentence, 273 of which are conditional clauses. If you can keep your head, trust yourself, dream, think, etc., then you can finally get to the main verb on the 31st line, and then “Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it / And—which is more—you’ll be a Man, my son!”

Hypotaxis is unnatural in English; nobody would ever say a sentence like the one above. 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. An angry drunk might shout paratactically; only a just and gentle mind can be hypotactic.

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