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

So Shakespeare stole; but he did wonderful things with his plunder. He’s like somebody who nicks your old socks and then darns them. Shakespeare simply knew that people are suckers for alliteration and that it’s pretty damned easy to make something alliterate (or that it’s surprisingly simple to add alliteration).

You can spend all day trying to think of some universal truth to set down on paper, and some poets try that. Shakespeare knew that it’s much easier to string together some words beginning with the same letter. It doesn’t matter what it’s about. It can be the exact depth in the sea to which a chap’s corpse has sunk; hardly a matter of universal interest, but if you say, ‘Full fathom five thy father lies’, you will be considered the greatest poet who ever lived. Express precisely the same thought any other way – e.g. ‘your father’s corpse is 9.144 metres below sea level’ – and you’re just a coastguard with some bad news.

Any phrase, so long as it alliterates, is memorable and will be believed even if ...

Curiosity, for example, did not kill the cat. There are no widely reported cases of felines dying...

Nobody has ever thrown a baby out with the bathwater, nor is there anything particularly right about rain. Even when something does make a bit of sense, it’s usually obvious why the comparison was picked. It takes two to tango, but it takes two to waltz as well. There are whole hogs, but why not pigs? Bright as a button. Cool as a cucumber. Dead as a doornail.

get it into business language - F4F marketing

Dickens knew full well why it is doornails that are dead. Dickens was a writer, and as a writer, he knew that alliteration is the simplest way to turn a memorable phrase. This was, after all, the guy who had written Nicholas Nickleby, The Pickwick Papers

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.

John Keats once wrote fourteen lines of Fs and Ss, and it was beautiful: Deep in the shady sadness of a vale Far sunken from the healthy breath of morn, Far from the fiery noon, and eve’s one star, Sat gray-hair’d Saturn, quiet as a stone, Still as the silence round about his lair; Forest on forest hung about his head Like cloud on cloud. No stir of air was there, Not so much life as on a summer’s day Robs not one light seed from the feather’d grass, But where the dead leaf fell, there did it rest. A stream went voiceless by, still deadened more By reason of his fallen divinity Spreading a shade: the Naiad ’mid her reeds Press’d her cold finger closer to her lips.

But he probably had to do it as he couldn’t change ‘farewell farewells’. It’s much too clever to use a word as an adjective and then a noun. In fact, the trick has a name. It’s called polyptoton.

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.

When Lennon was a child, his mother used to sing him a Bing Crosby song called ‘Please’. The lyrics went like this: Please, Lend your little ear to my pleas Lend a ray of cheer to my pleas And Lennon’s explanation of his own lyrics3 was that in that song ‘I was always intrigued by the double use of the word “Please”’.

Moses’ wife saying ‘I have been a stranger in a strange land’,

‘That’s one small step for a man, one giant leap for mankind.’

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.’

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’.

nice - give them a surprise

But these are all just plays on the basic formula of antithesis: X is Y, and not X is not Y.

There is something final and certain about a good antithesis. If you said (as you have all right to do, dear reader) that those who can’t write themselves instead instruct other people on how to write, who would remember? But say ‘Those who can, do: those who can’t, teach’ and you sound as though you have sliced the world neatly into two and squeezed it out as an epigram.

‘Marriage has many pains, but celibacy has no pleasures’ (Samuel Johnson),

‘Kissing don’t last, cookery do’ (George Meredith),

There’s something basically and horribly wrong with cutting somebody up and replacing them with a bunch of inanimate objects; doing it symbolically in verse is also slightly disturbing.

Victory does not look like anything visible or sound like anything audible or taste like anything edible, but it has a smell, a smell memorably described in Apocalypse Now. I love the smell of napalm in the morning. You know, one time we had a hill bombed, for twelve hours. […] The smell, you know that gasoline smell, the whole hill. Smelled like … victory. Someday this war’s gonna end …

The reason for Tolkien’s mistake, since you ask, is that adjectives in English absolutely have to be in this order: opinion-size-age-shape-colour-origin-material-purpose Noun. So you can have a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife. But if you mess with that word order in the slightest you’ll sound like a maniac. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.

There are other rules that everybody obeys without noticing. Have you ever heard that patter-pitter of tiny feet? Or the dong-ding of a bell? Or hop-hip music? That’s because, 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.1 This is called ablaut reduplication, and if you do things any other way, they sound very, very odd indeed.

This is really good

The importance of English word order is also the reason that the idea that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition is utter hogwash. In fact, it would be utter hogwash anyway, and anyone who claims that you can’t end a sentence with up, should be told up to shut.

In fact, the most famous example of hyperbaton in English comes from a civil servant twisting a sentence round to get the preposition away from the end. Nobody actually knows what the sentence was. All that history records is that Winston Churchill underlined it and wrote in the margin: ‘This is the kind of English up with which I will not put.’

Uneasy lies the head that wears the crown is one hell of a lot more memorable than The head that wears the crown lies uneasily.

9

We glory in tribulations also, knowing that tribulation worketh patience, and patience, experience, and experience, hope, and hope maketh man not ashamed.

Once you change your philosophy, you change your thought pattern. Once you change your thought pattern, you change your attitude. Once you change your attitude, it changes your behavior pattern and then you go on into some action.

it can be used to imply progress. We have taken a step on a journey thst eill get us to where we want

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.

A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Nothing is better than eternal happiness. So eternal happiness is beaten by a ham sandwich.

If the line had simply been ‘Fear leads to anger, which leads to hate, which leads to suffering’ it wouldn’t have sounded half as good, or half as convincing. But with the doubling of anadiplosis, it feels like an inevitable progress.

Progression is a story. A story leads to a climax, just as here leads there and there leads everywhere. 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.

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.

‘If’ is one long, 294-word sentence, 273 of which are conditional clauses. If you can keep your head, trust yourself, dream, think etc., then you can finally get to the main verb on the 31st line, and then ‘Yours is the Earth and everything that’s in it / And – which is more – you’ll be a Man, my son!’

The trick of the periodic sentence is that, until you’ve got to the end, until you’ve found that clause or verb that completes the syntax, until you’ve finally got to the period of the period, you can’t stop. Kipling forces you along to the climax.

relentless, emotional. good for a garden path sentence. throw a surprise in at the end which reframes all the rest

He knew the reader can’t stop until they get to that main verb.

There’s nothing wrong with parataxis. It’s good, simple, clean, plain-living, hard-working, up-bright-and-early English. Wham. Bam. Thank you, ma’am. Orwell liked it. Hemingway liked it. Almost no English writer between about 1650 and 1850 liked it.

Hypotaxis is unnatural in English; nobody would ever say a sentence like the one above. You have to think calmly for a long time to come up with a good hypotactic sentence, and so a good hypotactic sentence tells the reader that you have been thinking calmly for long time.

really? it's just shit English

hypotaxis doesn’t just stop you being rude, it stops you being too enthusiastic as well. You can’t gush with hypotaxis.

Emma Woodhouse, handsome, clever, and rich, with a comfortable home and happy disposition, seemed to unite some of the best blessings of existence; and had lived nearly twenty-one years in the world with very little to distress or vex her. You can almost see Miss Austen winking at you over a cup of tea. Absolutely anything sounds civilised and well-thought-out, provided that it’s expressed in the most syntactically complicated, hyper-hypotactic manner.

Hypotaxis was what made English prose so terribly, terribly civilised. It still works. Angry letters of complaint, redundancy notices and ransom notes will, if written in careful hypotaxis, sound as reasonable, measured and genial as a good dose of rough Enlightenment pornography.

The long sentence did have one last hurrah, though, one farewell bash before it was retired to exhausted obscurity. The last sentence of James Joyce’s Ulysses is 4,391 words long and has no punctuation at all, not a dash or a semi-colon from its opening to its last words: ‘yes I said yes I will Yes.’

(how they can be so precise, I don’t precisely know).

nice

Diacope (pronounced die-ACK-oh-pee) is a verbal sandwich: a word or phrase is repeated after a brief interruption. You take two Bonds and stuff James in the middle. Bingo. You have a great line. Or if you like you can take two burns and stuff a baby in the middle, and you’ve got a political slogan and disco hit: burn, baby, burn (‘Disco Inferno’).

nice. try this shit

The other main form of diacope is the elaboration, where you chuck in an adjective. From sea to shining sea. Sunday bloody Sunday. O Captain! My Captain! Human, all too human. From harmony, from heavenly harmony … or Beauty, real beauty, ends where intellectual expression begins. This form gives you a feeling both of precision (we’re not talking about fake beauty) and crescendo (it’s not merely a sea, it’s a shining sea).

lovely. very like natural speech. realiing part way through the sentence that it hasn't conveyed enough passion

Finally there’s extended diacope. All the previous examples have had the structure ABA. But you can extend that to AABA. When Richard III is dying he shouts, ‘A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!’ Shakespeare knew a show-stopping line when he wrote one, which is probably why he stole his own formula for Juliet on her balcony asking, ‘Romeo, Romeo, wherefore art thou Romeo?’

‘Love me. Love me. Say that you love me.’ – Cardigans, ‘Lovefool’

Doth he hear it? no. ’Tis insensible, then. Yea, to the dead. But will it not live with the living? no. Why? detraction will not suffer it. Therefore I’ll none of it. Honour is a mere scutcheon: and so ends my catechism. A catechism is a series of questions and answers about religion that you have to memorise. Once you’ve got the whole thing by rote, a stern and solemn priest will test you on your catechism.

re thereany other examples of catechism?