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But there’s also something immensely powerful, something satisfying in a megalomaniacal, egocentric way, about forcing somebody to answer a question when you both know the answer already. Teachers do it. Policemen do it. Traffic policemen always bloody do it. ‘Is there any particular reason that you were doing 123mph … sir?’ And then they wait for an answer. ‘Did you think that the speed limit didn’t apply to you?’ And so on and so forth. The point of all this is not so that the copper in question can learn more about your motivations and beliefs. They lack such psychoanalytic curiosity.
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The principle of hendiadys is easy. You take an adjective and a noun, and then you change the adjective into another noun. So instead of saying ‘I’m going to the noisy city’ you say ‘I’m going to the noise and the city’.
Is law and order a hendiadys? It looks damned like it, but I would hate to say for certain. What about rough and tumble? House and home? To say for certain that something is hendiadys you have to be certain about what the writer thought in the first place.
If your tea is nice and hot and my champagne is nice and chilled, those would both appear to be hendiadyses for nicely hot and nicely chilled. But there is the possibility that my champagne is both nice – of good quality – and has been properly chilled.
Lots of everyday forgettable phrases use it (be a good fellow and close the door is not two commands).
An English teacher will tell you that The Purpose Of The Adjective Is To Describe The Noun. One does a job for the other. Not in hendiadys and not in Shakespeare. Here you just get the nouns lined up, one beside the other, and though they’re holding hands, you can’t tell which is in charge.
most famously, in Macbeth, where life is a tale ‘Told by an idiot, full of sound and fury’. Whether Shakespeare was thinking of furious sound or sounding fury hardly signifies. The point and beauty of hendiadys is that it sets the words next to each other, that it removes the grammar and relation, that it doubles the words out to give breadth and beauty.
You saw her bathing on the roof. Her beauty and the moonlight overthrew you. The ‘and’ where we might expect ‘in’ makes the hendiadys.
half the songs ever written are just extended examples of epistrophe. Whether it’s Leonard Cohen ending every verse with hallelujah, Gershwin ending every clause with the man I love or Don McLean following each verse with a whole chorus of Bye, bye, Miss American Pie etc., that’s epistrophe. When the moon hits your eye like a big pizza pie, that’s also epistrophe because it always ends with amore.
Epistrophe is the trope of obsession. It’s the trope of emphasising one point again and again. And it’s the trope of not being able to escape that one conclusion, which is one of the reasons that songs are so suited to the idea of obsessive love, political certainty and other such unhealthy ideas.
You can’t reason in an epistrophic pop song. You can’t seriously consider the alternatives, because the structure dictates that you’ll always end up at the same point, thinking about the same girl and giving peace a chance.
When the music stops, epistrophe can get a little more subtle. It can be merely emphatic, a kind of banging on the table, jabbing at the air for emphasis. That’s the sort that Abraham Lincoln used when he said ‘government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth’. I’m pretty sure that there would have been a hand gesture repeated for each people.
Epistrophe gets bigger and stronger the longer you delay it. Probably the most famous example of this in modern rhetoric is Barack Obama’s various epistrophic speeches, in which he always ended up with Yes we can. He leaves whole paragraphs of American history between them, but he always ends up with the same answer. Whatever the obstacle, whatever the objection, the answer is always the same. Yes we can.
epistrophe, usually, by its very form, has an underlying sense of No you can’t. Whatever you try to do, however you start out, you’ll always end up at the same place, back where you started, as with the songs above. It just so happens that Mr Obama’s starting point was Yes we can. But epistrophe is much more natural when you’re in trouble.
epistrophe is particularly suited for death; I suppose because death is the huge human epistrophe, and all biographies end the same way.
Epistrophe works wonderfully with a good but. You demonstrate that all the doors are closed. This door is closed. That door is closed. The other door is closed. And then you point out the fire exit.
nice, surprise at the end
Saint Paul who finds himself in an epistrophe and then, inevitably, finds his way out: When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child: but when I became a man, I put away childish things.
Cabbages and kings? One is familiar and domestic and the other grand and distant? That’s just how the human brain is built, and it’s all the fault of God and Darwin. We see a pair and we see a pattern. You can always, always connect two dots with a straight line.
good point
But add another word and they’re tricolons. Eat, drink and be merry. Father, Son and Holy Spirit. The Good, the Bad and the Ugly. Truth, justice and the American way.
With a tricolon you can set up a pattern and then break it. ‘Lies, damned lies, and statistics’ is a simple example. The first two words establish the direction we’re going. The third twists things for humorous purposes.
very nice
The surprise can be based purely on sound. Alliteration provides the twist of ‘Wine, women and song’ and rhyme gives it to ‘Ready, steady, go’.
RSG is very nice
Tricolons sound great if the third thing is longer. The American way is (as outlined in their mutinous Declaration of Independence) made up of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness.
nice point - flowout ending
The pursuit of happiness is, if you think about it, the least of the promises here. You can pursue happiness as much as you like, and most of us do anyway. It rarely ends in capture. Life and liberty were the more important guarantees. But it sounds so good when you go on a bit at the end.
‘Friends, Romans, countrymen’ works the same way. In terms of content Antony would have been much better off starting with the fact that they’re all of the same nationality, then pointing out that they are Romans, and finally, in a gushy sort of way, pointing out that they are really friends too. But the lon...
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Lady Caroline Lamb knew this when she called Byron ‘Mad, bad and dangerous to know’. And Shakespeare knew it when he wrote: ‘We few...
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there’s something nasty, brutish and short3 about some tricolons, which just punch you with three words.
Eat and drink are two methods of ingestion. Eat, drink and be merry is a list of all the things you need to do this evening. Father and son is a generational pair: Father, Son and Holy Ghost is a list of all the aspects of God. When you finish a tricolon, you finish because there is nothing more to say. You’ve said it all. The list is complete. These are the final words.
This sense of completeness makes the tricolon perfectly suited to grand rhetoric. That’s why Barack Obama packed 21 tricolons into his short victory speech. Tricolons sound statesmanlike.
Two is only a pair, and four is all wrong. Churchill tried a four (it’s called a tetracolon). In his first speech to Parliament as Prime Minister he told them that he had ‘nothing to offer but blood, toil, tears and sweat’. But four doesn’t work and everybody remembers the line as ‘blood, sweat and
remember that. my thankyou note was a four.
Epizeuxis (pronounced ep-ee-ZOOX-is) is repeating a word immediately in exactly the same sense. Simple. Simple. Simple. However, epizeuxis is not the easiest way to get into the dictionary of quotations. It’s like a nuclear bomb: immensely effective, but a bit weird if you use it every five minutes.
Other forms of epizeuxis are less powerful. Without the rule of three, epizeuxis loses its punch. The only really great double is ‘The horror! The horror!’ in Conrad’s Heart of Darkness.
At the beginning of a sentence epizeuxis has rather more power. ‘Tiger, tiger, burning bright’, ‘Rage, rage against the dying of the light’, ‘Gone, gone again’.
Syllepsis Syllepsis is when one word is used in two incongruous ways. In fact, it can be more than two.
A shocking affair occurred last night. Sir Edward Hopeless, as guest at Lady Panmore’s ball, complained of feeling ill, took a highball, his hat, his coat, his departure, no notice of his friends, a taxi, a pistol from his pocket, and finally his life. Nice chap. Regrets and all that. The verb took is applied to nine different nouns in a way that seems rather absurd.
It also sounds rather funny when a noun as commonplace as hat is, by grammar, made equal with a noun like life.
In its simplest form syllepsis is just a pun. There’s a story that Dorothy Parker once commented on her small apartment, saying: ‘I’ve barely room enough to lay my hat and a few friends.’
It’s on this principle that Rosamond Lehmann complained of her fellow novelist Ian Fleming: ‘The trouble with Ian is that he gets off with women because he can’t get on with them.’
nice form of wit
But the commonest form is the simple contrast of the concrete and the abstract.
Mick Jagger1 employed when he talked in one song about a lady who was able to blow not only his nose, but his mind, although for rather different purposes.
Syllepsis was a favourite of the poet Alexander Pope. He loved combining the abstract with the concrete to make others look silly. A girl might ‘Lose her heart or honour at a ball’ or ‘Stain her honour or her new brocade’.
He even used it to make fun of Queen Anne: Here Thou, great Anna! whom three Realms obey, Dost sometimes Counsel take – and sometimes Tea.
Syllepsis was also a favourite of Charles Dickens, who wrote lines like: ‘Mr Pickwick took his hat and his leave’, or ‘He fell into a barrow, and fast asleep’.
good cor compression
It’s terribly witty, but it’s terribly witty in a look-at-me-aren’t-I-witty sort of way. There’s a sense in which it’s a cheap thrill. When Alanis Morissette sings ‘You held your breath and the door for me’2 you can either marvel at her rhetorical deftness or turn up your nose and off the radio. Syllepsis can get out of hand, up your nose, on your nerves and used too much.
There are, though, subtle syllepses. ‘Make love not war’ is a syllepsis, just one that’s barely noticeable. It gives the phrase its spice, but you wouldn’t be able to pick out the flavour without a good long chew. The same goes in a sense for ‘Tea and Sympathy’ or the two boys in Tom Sawyer who ‘covered themselves in dust and glory’. These tiny syllepses hide all over the place. The reader likes the line, remembers the line, but doesn’t know why.
Isocolon Roses are red. Violets are blue.
Woe to the modern mess! Because though isocolon can still be used in the calm Greek manner, it usually isn’t. When Cassius Clay said ‘Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee’, he had no calm and peaceful thoughts in his mind. And when Rick tells Ilsa, ‘Where I’m going, you can’t follow. What I’ve got to do, you can’t be any part of’, he doesn’t sound like Socrates contemplating virtue, he sounds like a man in a crisis with a gun and a girl at an airport.
Similarity and difference, comparison and contrast, are the stock in trade of isocolon, and that’s how Shakespeare liked to use it. When Brutus is explaining why he killed Julius Caesar, he gives this reply: As Caesar loved me, I weep for him; as he was fortunate, I rejoice at it; as he was valiant, I honour him: but, as he was ambitious, I slew him. There is tears for his love; joy for his fortune; honour for his valour; and death for his ambition.
This also shows up isocolon’s weakness: people can hear it happening and it can all start to sound rather forced and artificial. Silly even. It’s very hard to work an extended isocolon in subtly. It’s strictly for the moment when you’re addressing the crowds in Rome or Washington, or trying to win the Second World War over the radio.
Much better to keep isocolons short and snappy. Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee, chat like a human being. Thus you can keep to the twin powers of isocolon: antitheses like ‘Marry in haste, repent at leisure’; and restatements like ‘Thy kingdom come, thy will be done’.
The isocolon is particularly useful to advertisers. The parallelism can imply that two statements are the same thing even if they aren’t. ‘Have a break. Have a Kit-Kat’ is a clever little line because it uses isocolon to try to make two rather different things synonymous. The same goes for ‘The future’s bright. The future’s Orange’.
excellent point
