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.

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.

But the true and natural home of merism is in legal documents. Lawyers are like Cole Porter and Alfred Lord Tennyson with a blender. A lawyer, for a reason or reasons known only to him or herself, cannot see a whole without dividing it into its parts and enumerating them in immense detail. This may be something to do with the billing system.

When healthy people fall in love, they buy a bunch of flowers or an engagement ring and go and Do Something About It. When poets fall in love, they make a list of their loved one’s body parts and attach similes to them.

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.

Synaesthesias of smell are jarring and effective, and are probably an easy shortcut to a memorable line.

All of the above is technically true, as aposiopesis is signalled in English punctuation by three dots. Like . . . like this . . . Aposiopesis is Greek for becoming silent and it’s the reason that we do not live in Paradise.

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. Bish bash bosh. So politicians may flip-flop, but they can never flop-flip. It’s tit-for-tat, never tat-for-tit.9 This is called ablaut reduplication, and if you do things any other way, they sound very, very odd indeed.

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.

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