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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Forsyth
Read between
July 31 - August 15, 2020
Accuracy is much less important than alliteration.
“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.
the repeated use of one word as different parts of speech or in different grammatical forms,
“Please Please Me”2 is a classic case of polyptoton.
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.”
basic formula of antithesis: X is Y, and not X is not Y.
“Fashion is what one wears oneself. What is unfashionable is what other people wear.”
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,
“night and day” is a merism for always. “Night and day you are the one.”
Cannon to right of them, Cannon to left of them, Cannon in front of them . . .
Full fathom five thy father lies;
rhetorical device whereby one sense is described in terms of another. If colours are harmonious or a voice is silky, that is synaesthesia
“music that stinks to the ear.”
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.
ablaut reduplication,
Stone walls do not a prison make,
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.
Anadiplosis gives the illusion of logic.
By doubling down it makes everything seem strong, structured and certain.
There’s a logical fallacy called the quaternio terminorum, or fallacy of the four terms,
So long as you remember not to blurt out your main verb too early, so long as you begin clause after clause with when or if or though or while or so long, so long as you have very large lungs that can keep you going through fourteen apposite clauses for England (despite the fact that you’re on your death bed), so long as you don’t mind being a tad artificial, periodic sentences are a doddle.
The last sentence of James Joyce’s Ulysses is 4,391 words long and has no punctuation at all, not a dash or a semicolon from its opening to its last words: “yes I said yes I will Yes.”
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.
“I wish I’d said that.” Whistler, who liked to imply that all Wilde’s best lines were stolen from him, replied, “You will, Oscar. You will.”
“A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!”
To be or not to be.
erotesis? That’s the sort of question that really isn’t a question at all. “Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?”
Antipodes, “How bright is the sun?” “How cute is that koala?”
it’s not a real question. It’s epiplexis.
Anacoenosis, as we saw above, is the sort of question where a particular audience will answer in a particular way.
Hypophora is a rhetorical question that is immediately answered aloud, usually by the person who asked.
Asking a question when you really don’t know the answer is called aporia.
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.”
When you end each sentence with the same word, that’s epistrophe.
Don McLean following each verse with a whole chorus of Bye, bye, Miss American Pie,
Epistrophe is the trope of obsession.
It’s also the sort of useful reminder when a witness promises to tell the truth, the whole truth and nothing but the truth.
Tricolons sound great if the third thing is longer.
when she called Byron “Mad, bad and dangerous to know.”
when it comes to tricolons, Shakespeare had been there, done that, and bought the T-shirt.
Two’s company, three’s a list, and a list has to be complete.
he had “nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat.” But four doesn’t work and everybody remembers the line as “blood, sweat and tears.”
Epizeuxis (pronounced ep-ee-ZOOX-is) is repeating a word immediately in exactly the same sense. Simple. Simple. Simple.
At the beginning of a sentence epizeuxis has rather more power. “Tiger, tiger, burning bright,”
“Mr. Pickwick took his hat and his leave,”
“Make love not war”
Enallage (e-NALL-aj-ee) is a deliberate grammatical mistake.
