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

by Mark Forsyth

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.