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

by Mark Forsyth

It is the wit of Churchill describing Field Marshal Montgomery as ‘In defeat, unbeatable; in victory, unbearable’. Or it’s the finality of ‘Ashes to ashes, dust to dust’. Or it’s the simplicity of ‘You pays your money and you takes your choice’. Which is also an example of enallage.

He knew that we means you and I and that us means you and me. But he still started ‘The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock’2 with the words: Let us go then, you and I,

‘I really want a lovely cup of tea’ goes te-TUM-te-TUM-te-TUM-te-TUM-te-TUM. And now you’ve got a rhythm going.

Choose anapaest and tetrameter and you’ve got: te-te-TUM te-te-TUM te-te-TUM te-te-TUM

like beating the retreat

Which Byron used for: The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold

awesome style. same as The General

But these strange ones have never really worked well in English apart from the amphibrach (te-TUM-te), which is the basis of the limerick: There was a young man from Calcutta

Anapaests and dactyls tend to sound a bit silly. Byron made the anapaest serious, but that’s because he was an absolutely bloody amazing poet. If you try it yourself you’ll probably end up with something that sounds like a nursery rhyme, because anapaests and dactyls are the nursery rhyme feet and they tend to sound rather higgledy piggledy wiggledy woo. ‘Little Miss Muffet, she sat on a tuffet …’

The soft and lovely iamb. The humble te-TUM. Because the TUM falls on the offbeat, as it were, the rhythm is gentler. It never has the primeval power of the trochee, but nor does it have any of its primeval coarseness. The iamb is just the gentle rhythm, the waves lapping in the background.

The only question that remains is how many? The simplest answer is the greedy one. Four and three alternating: the tetrameter and the trimeter. This is called the ballad meter and it sounds wonderfully traditional. There is a house in New Orleans They call The Rising Sun It’s been the ruin of many a poor boy In God, I know I’m one.

‘The time has come,’ the Walrus said, ‘To talk of many things: Of shoes—and ships—and sealing-wax— Of cabbages—and kings— And why the sea is boiling hot— And whether pigs have wings.’ It can always be sung to the tune of ‘The House of the Rising Sun’ or ‘O Little Town of Bethlehem’.

There’s an odd thing about English verse that when you have an even number of feet in a line, it doesn’t seem right to pause. When you have an odd number of feet, people just naturally take a breath at the end of the line. Why this should be is a complete mystery, but it’s almost always true.

The important thing here is that there are two ways of marking the end of a line. You can do it with a rhyme, or you can do it with a pause. And in the tetrameter that second option is out the window. So all tetrameters have to rhyme. I wandered lonely as a cloud That floats on high o’er vales and hills When all at once I saw a host Of many dancing buttercups. Is just nonsense.

Dark house, by which once more I stand Here in the long unlovely street, Doors, where my heart was used to beat So quickly, waiting for a hand, ‘And eet eet and.’ What’s so lovely about this is that it takes four lines for the whole thing to make structural sense. If you write in couplets, it’s all over in two lines.

If you write in alternating rhyme, you’re wrapping up after three. But with the In Memoriam stanza that first line doesn’t make poetic sense until you come to the last syllable of the fourth. It holds and holds, and then completes.

nice tension

let’s go back and rewrite that in anapaests. So I know it is true that whatever befall; And I feel it whenever I sorrow the most; That ’tis better to truly have loved and have lost Than never to truly have loved one at all. Quite aside from some little changes in meaning, you can hear how the anapaest changes the feel of the verse.

nice metre. use this

That’s why poets are so fond of words like ‘Oh’ or ‘and’. It’s not that they keep saying the word in real life, it’s just that you can throw it in anywhere. ‘And thou art dead, as young and fair’. It’s not that Byron usually started sentences with ‘and’, he just knew the quickest way to make an iambic tetrameter.

The Renaissance poet Ben Jonson said that when he wanted to write poetry, he just wrote prose and then mucked around with the word order and banged it with a verbal hammer until it fitted nicely into a verse form.

Because the pentameter has an odd number of feet, it doesn’t need to rhyme. So Shakespeare could write conversations in it that sounded natural and normal. Yet still it always had that subtle beat tapping away underneath. It had a rhythm.

In general, Shakespeare has his heroes and his aristocrats natter away in iambic pentameters, but whenever the working classes come on stage they are forced to love, laugh and die in prose, because they’re common.

nice, like an aria

Like all truly beautiful things, and people, the iambic pentameter gets boring after a while.

Just like the drum fill in the middle of a song, you can have a deliberate metrical break, just for the fun of it.

The other standard trick is to replace one of the iambs with a trochee, usually the first: Eyeless in Gaza at the mill with slaves.

TUM tee tee might be a nice rhythm. like a freight train

The iambic pentameter is the most natural form of English. It’s how the English language wants to be. And, in all seriousness, I didn’t even notice that that last sentence was one until I had typed

Zeugma

Sometimes you have a series of clauses that all have the same verb. Tom likes whisky, Dick likes vodka, Harry likes crack cocaine. That’s three likes, but you only need one. Tom likes whisky, Dick vodka, Harry crack cocaine. The sentence still makes sense, because we understand that that first likes is still kind of hanging around in the next few clauses.

Zeugma does have its moments. It makes things sound crisp and clear. You start with a full and florid sentence and then you’re down to a bunch of nouns. The first clause sounds normal, the second curt.

So it works very well occasionally, but only if you want to sound dismissive, as Oscar Wilde did when he said: ‘The good end happily and the bad unhappily. That is what fiction means.’ It’s also what Tennyson used when he had Ulysses dismiss his son’s entire life with the words ‘He works his work; I mine.’

There are two reasons that zeugma doesn’t really work in English. First, we’re not used to seeing verbs miles away from their nouns. The Romans were, and they loved it in a way that makes schoolchildren despair.

The second reason is that we would much rather balance clauses in an isocolon (q.v.). ‘My true love hath my heart and I have his’ wouldn’t be nearly as beautiful if it were ‘My true love hath my heart, I his’,

Zeugma is a weak figure: good for expressing contempt, and contemptible in other expressions.

All women become like their mothers. That is their tragedy. No man does, and that is his. This could have been phrased, ‘Why is it that your girlfriend’s mother is always annoying, but your male friends’ mothers are always lovely?’ But instead, it was phrased as a veridical paradox.

Politics is full of potential for such things, but for some reason nobody has used the slogan ‘The Left is Right’, or ‘The Right is Wrong’ (aside from the Johnny Cash song ‘The One on the Right Is on the Left’). The punning paradox is, perhaps, no paradox at all, but it is intriguing and it is memorable, and Back to the Future made a tidy profit.

It is easy, therefore, to see the true paradox as being false; as being an easy trick and therefore worthless. It is an easy trick, but it is in no way worthless. A well executed paradox stirs the soul and mixes language and philosophy in a way that no other figure does. Paul Simon was on to something when he titled his song ‘The Sound of Silence’, and his verse about people talking without speaking, and about people hearing without listening, was easy for him, but that makes it no less beautiful to us.

beautiful, maybe, but cheap. we must give the reader a clue as to how the paradox is possible. without that we expect the reader to do so, and if they can't then the paradox fails

the ideas that they stir are of thought outside mere reality, and by their very operation on the human mind, they show themselves to have value, because such operation is itself proof, to have such thoughts is to prove that such thoughts can exist. And though that may not matter, it does.

i disagree. mere opposites are not profound. it must be more than that

The palindrome is an old tradition: the first thing that man ever said was, probably, ‘Madam, I’m Adam’.

The only reason that T.S. Eliot insisted on the middle initial was that he was painfully aware of what his name would have been without it, backwards.

Mind you, just reversing words is almost as hard as a palindrome. It gets you stuck. Stuck. You get it?

The current President told his troops: ‘You stood up for America, now America must stand up for you.’

or hillary clinton - family values, value families

‘People the world over have always been more impressed by the power of our example than by the example of our power’,

Joseph Kennedy, quite aside from being a businessman, diplomat and politician, is the prime suspect for originating the phrase later immortalised by Billy Ocean: ‘When the going gets tough, the tough get going.’

Chiasmus really comes into its own when the inversion of the words gives you an inversion of thought as well. JFK’s great chiasmus works because you and your country are swapped around. The doer becomes the done for and the done for becomes the doer.

Oscar Wilde said that ‘All crime is vulgar, just as all vulgarity is crime’, and then got sent off to Reading Gaol to reconsider and write ballads. Both these lines use chiasmus to get around one of the problems of precise logic: if all tomatoes are red, does that mean that all red things are tomatoes? Chiasmus lets you explain, and sound rather elegant while you’re doing so.

Mae West said, ‘It’s not the men in my life, it’s the life in my men’, where life is being used in two different senses (CV vs. vigour).

Dorothy Parker allegedly went one further. The story (unconfirmed) goes that her editor at The New Yorker sent a telegram to Parker while she was on her honeymoon. The editor wanted to remind her about the deadline for an article she was meant to be writing. Dorothy Pa...

One of the things that makes Dorothy Parker’s chiasmus a trifle unlikely is that a good chiasmus needs to be thought out. Chiasmus is clever, but not natural. Kennedy’s inauguration speech could never have been improvised and Mae West, one suspects, took a while to work hers out.

so it's not fresh, because it's all pre-planned

There is, though, a more subtle form: the grammatical chiasmus. Adjective noun : noun adjective, or as Milton put it in the closing line of Lycidas: ‘Tomorrow to fresh woods and pastures new.’ It’s a bit of a wrench to move that ‘new’ to the end, but it completes a symmetry. More accomplished is the opening line ‘I see trees of green, red roses too’ from ‘What a Wonderful World’,1 where the sentence is plant colour : colour plant.

Johnson wrote in The Vanity of Human Wishes about the world of pleasure-seekers who indulged in ‘By day the frolic, and the dance by night’, which sounds rather agreeable, not just because a schedule of 24-hour dancing and frolicking is a good schedule, but because the sentence runs time activity : activity time.

it occurs in the great opening line: In Xanadu did Kubla Khan … Did you see it? Look again. Nothing? It’s not a symmetry of grammar, or words being mirrored; yet there is a reason why that line rolls off the tongue like the milk of paradise. Give up? An – Ah – Oo – i – Oo – Ah – An In Xanadu did Kubla Khan It’s a chiasmus of vowels. Tennyson wrote: Beneath the thunders of the upper deep Ee – e – u – e – o – e – u – e – ee A symmetry of assonance.

Assonance is repeating a vowel sound: deep heat or blue moon. It is, I’m afraid, the thin and flimsy cousin of alliteration.

Half the vowels in English aren’t what you thought they were. They’re schwas.

good point