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

by Mark Forsyth

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.