The Elements of Eloquence: How To Turn the Perfect English Phrase

by Mark Forsyth

argumentum ad baculum,

English teaching at school is, unfortunately, obsessed with what a poet thought, as though that were of any interest to anyone. Rather than being taught about how a poem is phrased, schoolchildren are asked to write essays on what William Blake thought about the Tiger; despite the fact that William Blake was a nutjob whose opinions, in a civilised society, would be of no interest to anybody apart from his parole officer. 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,

but as I have no particular interest in such lexical squabbles I have simply adopted the rule of Humpty-Dumpty: When I use a rhetorical term, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.

as I have no particular interest in such lexical squabbles I have simply adopted the rule of Humpty-Dumpty: When I use a rhetorical term, it means just what I choose it to mean – neither more nor less.

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. For a moment there it seemed as though alliteration would change the world. But then the spirit of idealism faded and those who had manned the barricades went off and got jobs in marketing. They stopped telling people to ban the bomb and started telling them to put a tiger in your tank, chuck out the chintz and use Access – Your Flexible Friend, or perhaps PayPal. And all because the lady loves Milk Tray.

Poor polyptoton is one of the lesser-known rhetorical tricks. It has no glamour. It isn’t taught to schoolchildren. It has a silly name which sounds a bit like polyp, a word for a nasal growth. In fact, it comes from the Greek for ‘many cases’, but that hardly makes up for it. Even once you’ve explained that that’s because it involves the repeated use of one word as different parts of speech or in different grammatical forms, polyptoton remains incorrigibly unsexy. This is a trifle unfair, especially as one of the best known examples of polyptoton is a song that is sometimes said to be about oral sex. ‘Please Please Me’1 is a classic case of polyptoton. The first please is please the interjection, as in ‘Please mind the gap’. The second please is a verb meaning to give pleasure, as in ‘This pleases me’. Same word: two different parts of speech. It’s easy, once you ponder it, to see how people could feel that the polyptoton was a little perverse.2

Of course there are, occasionally, clever antitheses, antitheses that draw fine distinctions or tell you something that you did not know already. Oscar Wilde was the master of these, with lines like, ‘The well-bred contradict other people. The wise contradict themselves.’ But we can’t all be Oscar Wilde, and it would be interminably dull if we were. The world would degenerate into one permanent epigram. Wildean antitheses are not too hard. You make a first statement that is relatively obvious, for example, ‘If a man is a gentleman he knows quite enough.’ The second half begins in an obvious way: ‘If he is not a gentleman’ … and then takes an odd turn: ‘whatever he knows is bad for him.’ So ‘Wicked women bother one’ looks as though it will be followed by ‘Good women console one’, but instead it is followed by ‘Good women bore one.’ Or you have ‘Women represent the triumph of matter over mind; men represent the triumph of’ … and again the reader expects mind over matter, but instead gets ‘mind over morals’. Or ‘Journalism is unreadable, and literature is not read’, or ‘If one plays good music, people don’t listen, and if one plays bad music people don’t talk.’ And so on and so forth. So you start with a simple statement – Some men invent epigrams – and then you add unexpected inversion – others are invented by them.

For though one antithesis is grand, a long list of antitheses is divine, and is technically known as a progressio. It was a favourite of God and Dickens: It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us, we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all going direct the other way …

The song ‘Hot N Cold’ is credited to Katy Perry, Lukasz Gottwald, Max Martin. I have been unable to establish for certain which latter-day Dickens wrote the progressio.

Merism, ladies and gentlemen, often looks like antithesis, but it’s different. 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.

As we’ve dealt with marriage and divorce, the merism of modern love can be completed with a restraining order. These mirror marriage’s merisms with lines like: ‘The defendant is prohibited from communicating with the plaintiff, either personally or through other persons, by telephone, writing or any other means.’ The second half of that sentence is either utterly redundant, or a challenge.

Your lips are like cherries, your hair is like gold, and your eyes are like traffic lights that make my heart stop and go.

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. If colours are harmonious or a voice is silky, that is synaesthesia (or some other spelling).

Yoda1 is known for wrong his word order getting, but his most quoted line, from Star Wars, Episode 1: The Phantom Menace, uses a different figure entirely. 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. It links him directly to a previous spiritual teacher: St Paul. We glory in tribulations also, knowing that tribulation worketh patience, and patience, experience, and experience, hope, and hope maketh man not ashamed. 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, whether they’re written by a saint or uttered by a small green alien. The content doesn’t matter much. In fact, anadiplosis doesn’t care what you say and will give its gravitas to a diametrically opposed opinion. Yoda seems to think suffering a bad thing, but there’s another semi-fictional American character called Jesse Jackson who observed that: Suffering breeds character; character breeds faith; in the end faith will not disappoint.

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.

As the Emperor Commodus (didn’t actually) put it when chatting to the (utterly fictional) Maximus Decimus Meridius Russellus Crowus in the film Gladiator: The general who became a slave. The slave who became a gladiator. The gladiator who defied an emperor. Striking story. And it is, but only when anadiplosis is on hand. The general who became a slave who became a gladiator who defied an emperor would sound like a rather incoherent nursery rhyme. But perhaps the greatest anadiplosis is not biblical or Shakespearian, it’s simply a description of a dismal dinner, and nobody knows who wrote it: If the soup had been as warm as the wine, and the wine as old as the fish, and the fish as young as the maid, and the maid as willing as the hostess, it would have been a very good meal.