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Kindle Notes & Highlights
by
Mark Forsyth
Read between
April 17 - May 9, 2021
single phrase striking and memorable just by altering the wording. Not by saying something different, but by saying something in a different way.
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.
Nicholas Nickleby, The Pickwick Papers (full title: The Posthumous Papers of the Pickwick Club) and, indeed, A Christmas Carol.
(Sense and Sensibility, Pride and Prejudice),
So popular is alliteration that in the 1960s it actually made a grab for political power. In the 1960s a vast radical youth movement began campaigning to do things for the sole reason that they began with the same letter. Ban the bomb. Burn your bra. Power to the people.
first you mention one thing: then you mention another.
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. The beauty of merism is that it’s absolutely unnecessary. It’s words for words’ sake: a gushing torrent of invention filled with noun and noun and signifying nothing.
“night and day” is a merism for always.
Hyperbaton
Hyperbaton is when you put words in an odd order, which is very, very difficult to do in English.
John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a “green great dragon.” He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely couldn’t have a green great dragon, and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years.
adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun.
every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out.
when you repeat a word with a different vowel, the order is always I A O.
ablaut reduplication, and if you do things any other way, they sound very, very odd indeed.
It is the anadiplosis, the repetition of the last word of one clause as the first word of the next, that gives both lines their power,
Anadiplosis gives the illusion of logic. Like a conquering general it arrives at a word, plants a flag there, and then moves on. 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, that goes something like this:
Using lots of conjunctions is called polysyndeton. No conjunctions is called asyndeton.
Angry letters of complaint, redundancy notices and ransom notes will, if written in careful hypotaxis, sound as reasonable, measured and genial as a good dose of rough Enlightenment pornography.
Diacope (pronounced die-ACK-oh-pee) is a verbal sandwich: a word or phrase is repeated after a brief interruption.
The simplest is the vocative diacope: Live, baby, live. Yeah, baby, yeah. I am dying, Egypt, dying. Game over, man, game over. Zed’s dead, baby, Zed’s dead.16
there’s also something immensely powerful, something satisfying in a megalomaniacal, egocentric way, about forcing somebody to answer a question when you both know the answer already.
“Does Marsellus Wallace look like a bitch?”
“Then why you trying to fuck him like a bitch?”
Asking a question when you really don’t know the answer is called aporia. It is the moment of doubt, when you’re really not sure whether to top yourself.
You take an adjective and a noun, and then you change the adjective into another noun.
When you end each sentence with the same word, that’s epistrophe.
A Divagation Concerning Versification
Every word in English has a particular stress, and when a foreigner gets it wrong we notice, and we snigger. There’s an old joke with many variations, all of which involve a Frenchman in pursuit of a penis, rather than happiness. That’s partially because the French don’t pronounce their Hs, but mainly because HAPpiness and a PEnis are stressed differently. Some words even get two stresses. Antidote goes TUM-te-TUM. UNDerSTANDing goes TUM-te-TUM-te. And sometimes the stress is optional. You usually say HAPPiness, but you can, if you like, say HAPpiNESS. Also, even when a sentence is made out of
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te-te-TUM te-te-TUM te-te-TUM te-te-TUM Which Byron used for: The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold
“One for all and all for one.”
“Eat to live, not live to eat.”
“Pleasure’s a sin, and sometimes sin’s a pleasure,”
“All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime,”
The story (unconfirmed) goes that her editor at The New Yorker sent a telegram to Parker while she was on her honeymoon. The editor wanted to remind her about the deadline for an article she was meant to be writing. Dorothy Parker sent one back saying: “I’ve been too fucking busy, and vice versa.”
Assonance is repeating a vowel sound: deep heat or blue moon.
There’s even a letter for this grunty, nothing sound: . If you start using this lett you get an ide of how ubiquts schwa is. It’s the most commn vowl in English—not A or E or any of the vowls you learnt at school, but schwa. Not lot of peopl know that.
The importance of all this for assonance is that English is missing a bunch of its vowels, or at least uses a vague, half-arsed compromise vowel that sounds like all and none. There is a second problem, though. Vowels change.
Folk songs and fairy tales are bursting with such strangely significant numbers. It has to be four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in the pie, and three blind mice, and fifteen men on a dead man’s chest because if you replace those numbers with “several” or “a lot of” the whole feeling is lost—the feeling of significance, of something ancient and mysterious.
A hundred and one other authors have used the trick: Tolkien’s Nine Ring Wraiths and Lawrence of Arabia’s Seven Pillars of Wisdom.
Catachresis is rather difficult to define, but it’s essentially when a sentence is so startlingly wrong that it’s right.
Litotes is affirming something by denying its opposite.
On August 15, 1945, Emperor Hirohito made a broadcast to the Japanese nation. It was the first time an Emperor had ever spoken on the radio, so the Japanese people knew that something was up. Moreover, two atomic bombs had just been dropped. Hirohito announced to his listening nation that “the war situation has developed not necessarily to Japan’s advantage,” which is perhaps the most extreme example of litotes in all humanity’s huge history. But it wasn’t quite clear enough. Many listeners didn’t realise what he was saying until the speech was over and the announcer cut in to say that Japan
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Litotes is a complicated beast. It’s closely related to the double-negative, but it’s not quite the same.
Irony is an untruth that both parties know is untrue, that both parties agree is untrue.
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.
In metaphor and simile you say that two things have a couple of qualities in common. It generally has to be at least two: one obvious one and one that is strongly implied. Suppose that a chap tells the girl he loves that her eyes are as green as emeralds: she’ll probably take that as a compliment, not because emeralds are green but because they’re valuable. If he tells the girl that her eyes are as green as mould, he’ll get a slap; not because he’s inaccurate but because it’s always the second, implied comparison that’s important. Green as beer-bottles suggests that she’s drunk, and green as
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