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

by Mark Forsyth

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.

The son of God tended to use subtler polyptotons. “Give us this day our daily bread and forgive us our trespasses as we forgive them that trespass against us” is a pretty neat double.

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.

But the true and natural home of merism is in legal documents.

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.

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.

tik tok, tit for tat

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.

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

Diacope (pronounced die-ACK-oh-pee) is a verbal sandwich: a word or phrase is repeated after a brief interruption.

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.

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

Enallage (e-NALL-aj-ee) is a deliberate grammatical mistake.

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.”

A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms—Richard A. Lanham (the standard reference work) Shakespeare’s Use of the Arts of Language—Sister Miriam Joseph (not with a bang but a wimple) Classical Rhetoric in English Poetry—Professor Sir Brian Vickers (an excellent introduction) In Defence of Rhetoric—Professor Sir Brian Vickers (a comprehensive vindication) You Talkin’ To Me?—Sam Leith (an introduction to the more structural aspects of rhetoric and persuasion, as opposed to the verbal figures found here)

references

And on the Internet Silva Rhetoricae (rhetoric.byu.edu), produced by Gideon O. Burton of Brigham Young University (a dictionary listing alternative names and definitions in which one can click happily between related terms)

more references