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

by Mark Forsyth

I wandered lonely as a cloud . . . Clouds are not lonely.

mind always skips to the second connection which is that clouds do wander aimlessly.

Metaphor is when two things are connected because they are similar, metonymy is when two things are connected because they are really physically connected.

The extreme form of metonymy is synecdoche, where you become one of your body parts. You are your feet, your lips or your liver.

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.”

We accept that miles can be weary, roads lonesome and highways lost, because we know that in each case the adjective describes the weary, lonesome, lost chap and not the thoroughfare.

Epithets are almost always transferred between humans and their surroundings, and it’s almost always a one-way street. The emotions leak out from us. The loneliness seeps through the soles of our shoes onto the road. Our clumsiness springs from our fingers onto the recalcitrant helmets. Wordsworth wrote of lonely rooms, but he never wrote about third-floor people containing en-suite bathrooms.

Dizzy heights and guilty secrets can stand on their own.

In Dickens’ strange mind, mists were lazy, houses crazy, and snowflakes went into mourning and wore black.

Do happy days and lonely nights count? What about a knowing smile or sarcastic laugh? When

Pleonasm is the use of unneeded words that are superfluous and unnecessary in a sentence that doesn’t require them.

Dearly beloved, we are gathered together in the sight of God, and in the face of this congregation, to join together this man and this woman in Holy Matrimony . . .

It’s the lazy adjective noun. This is a world of personal friends, added bonuses and free gifts.

if you wander into a shop or make the terrible mistake of turning on the television or radio, you will hear of havens that are safe, cooperation that is mutual, and prizes that are, it turns out, to be won.

Such phrases lumber about the language like zombies. They were created long ago by insanely evil marketing executives who were desperate to progress forward and sell their foreign imports to the general public.

Duty calls, money talks, sleep beckons,

Allegory is proper personification, in fact it’s personification that has moved in and taken over the whole story.

green-eyed jealousy,”

Hyperbole (pronounced hi-PER-boh-lee) is the technical term for exaggeration,

That may be because we exaggerate constantly. The human being is the great embroiderer. It’s not enough for us to say that we waited for ten minutes; we have to wait “for ages.” If I’ve told you twice, I’ve told you a thousand times. If you’re rich, you have a ton of money. It’s enough to make you break down in a flood of tears.

An adynaton (pronounced ad-in-ART-on) is impossible. Before an adynaton will work, pigs will fly, Hell will freeze over and the Devil will go skiing.

About pronouns they were sometimes wrong, the old masters; because you can use a pronoun before saying what it refers to. It’s an odd little technique, and it’s called prolepsis.

Prolepsis has two great advantages. First, it has mystery, but not too much. When a poem opens with a pronoun, a little bit of your mind thinks to itself: “What? What the hell’s going on? Who? Who are they?” For a moment it weeps and wonders, but only for a moment, because a few words later, before the full stop is even upon us, you find out that they are the old masters, or your mum and dad, or the days of wine and roses.

The technical name for a heap of insults is bdelygmia, and the best thing about a good bdelygmia (aside from the pronunciation: no letter is silent) is that you don’t even need to know what any of the words mean.

Who needs an “is” when you have all those nouns? Eternity. A sentence without a tense. “This is Space,” “this was Space,” or “this will be Space” would limit it in time.

Anaphora (an-AFF-or-a) is starting each sentence with the same words.