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There’s even a letter for this grunty, nothing sound: . If you start using this lett you get an ide of how ubiquts schwa is. It’s the most commn vowl in English – not A or E or any of the vowls you learnt at school, but schwa. Not lot of peopl know that.
The only phrase where I’d say with some certainty that assonance made it famous is: I met a traveller from an antique land Three ans in a row, with the very odd word ‘antique’ evidence of how deliberate it is. But that, after much searching, is my best candidate. It’s not like alliteration.
The only reason that a stitch in time saves nine is the assonance. If it saved eight the phrase would be forgotten. English cats have nine lives, in Germany they have sechs Leben.
That the West thinks that seven is lucky and the Chinese think eight is shows both that numerology is wrong and that it’s popular across the world.
You would have to have a heart of stone and a soul of Formica to listen to ‘A Whiter Shade of Pale’ without wondering to yourself why there are sixteen vestal virgins. What? What does the number mean? Why sixteen? What’s the reason? There is, of course, no reason and the truth is plain to see: it feels so mysterious. If she had been one of several vestal virgins, the song would be Much Less Memorable.
Like Borges
It has to be four-and-twenty blackbirds baked in the pie, and three blind mice, and fifteen men on a dead man’s chest because if you replace those numbers with ‘several’ or ‘a lot of’ the whole feeling is lost – the feeling of significance, of something ancient and mysterious.
You can speak any adverb. You can speak loudly, softly, gradually, democratically and deliciously. You can speak a few nouns: English and the truth. Or you could speak words as sharp as daggers, or as cruel. But you can’t speak daggers any more than you can speak grenades or bullets or blunderbusses. And that’s why the phrase stuck. Speaking daggers is so unusual that it became part of the language. And then it became usual.
It’s the fate of everyone who sets out to shock: you shock, you are noticed, you are remembered, but what is remembered ceases to be noticed and shocks no more.
It is very hard to explain grammatically why it is that ‘Thunderbirds are go’. But if Thunderbirds were going it would never have caught on. It’s that single word that hits you like first love, and, like a first love, seems rather familiar 40 years later.
but the most beautiful catachresis is probably Roxette’s opening line, ‘Lay a whisper on my pillow’.
Litotes is affirming something by denying its opposite.
Litotes is a form of understatement-by-negative, and is not without its uses.
Irony is an odd fish because, contrary to popular belief, irony draws people together. Irony is an untruth that both parties know is untrue, that both parties agree is
Irony is always about what people have in common, and so is litotes. It’s a sociable figure. Though it can be used to end wars, bury generals and crush courtiers, litotes is most at home among friends. It is a gentlemanly figure, a civilised figure, an agreeable one. It is the sort of figure you should toss out with an amiable smile and a raised eyebrow.
Though he never said it, the litotes seemed to sum up all that the public found wrong in him. Where Thatcher would have said ‘big’ and Churchill ‘vast’, Major footled about with a double-negative. Where was the oratory? Where was the charisma? Why didn’t he just come out and say ‘considerable’? It was a slur, but it was a slur that stuck.
Litotes isn’t the best figure to use when you’re trying to be grand. Litotes does not stir the soul, it’s more suited to stirring tea.
So Orwell wasn’t wrong, but he wasn’t quite right either. Litotes has no place in politics or pastoral poetry. Litotes cannot stand on a podium or cry from a mountaintop, it is much more at home in the drawing room or the bathtub. It’s the sort of figure that should be used by Bertie Wooster.
Suppose that a chap tells the girl he loves that her eyes are as green as emeralds: she’ll probably take that as a compliment, not because emeralds are green but because they’re valuable. If he tells the girl that her eyes are as green as mould, he’ll get a slap; not because he’s inaccurate but because it’s always the second, implied comparison that’s important.
Metaphor is when two things are connected because they are similar, metonymy is when two things are connected because they are really physically connected. It’s the favourite rhetorical figure of Fleet Street.
Blake works in fragments; when you read his synecdoches you have to see the world in a grain of sand.
Ten years of elaborate Greek mythology in three clear images: a face, a flotilla, and turrets set ablaze.
The Boston Tea Party, the storming of the Bastille, and the fall of the Berlin Wall are all synecdoches. They are fragments that narrate a whole story.
A transferred epithet is when an adjective is applied to the wrong noun. So instead of writing ‘The nervous man smoked a cigarette’ you write ‘The man smoked a nervous cigarette’.
