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
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