The Elements of Eloquence Quotes

“So Shakespeare stole; but he did wonderful things with his plunder. He's like somebody who nicks your old socks and then darns them.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“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.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How To Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility. Mountaineers do it, and climb Everest in clothes that would have you laughed out of the gutter. I suspect they also communicate quickly and efficiently, poor things. But for the rest of us, not threatened by death and yetis, clothes and language can be things of beauty. I would no more write without art because I didn’t need to, than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase

“That A Lot More became a mile, and then the inch was dropped because it doesn’t begin with an M, and we were left with ‘A miss is as good as a mile’, which, if you think about it, doesn’t really make sense any more. But who needs sense when you have alliteration?”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How To Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“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.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase

“That's how Dickens wanted to get his image across, the reader is simply bludgeoned into submission.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“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. That's why they're traffic policemen. By making you answer a question to which they already know the answer, they are asserting their authority, and belittling yours. That's also why they're traffic policemen.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“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 been sunk; hardly a matter of universal interest, but if you say, ‘Full fathom five your father lies’, you will be considered the greatest poet that ever lived. Express precisely the same thought in 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.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“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. Numbers feel mysterious and significant. So all you need to do to sound mysterious and significant is to pick a number, any number.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“But the true and natural home of merism is in legal documents. Lawyers are like Cole Porter and Alfred Lord Tennyson with a blender. A lawyer, for a reason or reasons known only to him or herself, cannot see a whole without dividing it into its parts and enumerating them in immense detail. This may be something to do with the billing system.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“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.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How To Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“English teaching at school is, unfortunately, obsessed with what a poet thought, as though that were of any interest to anyone. Rather than being taught about how a poem is phrased, schoolchildren are asked to write essays on what William Blake thought about the Tiger; despite the fact that William Blake was a nutjob whose opinions, in a civilised society, would be of no interest to anybody apart from his parole officer. 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”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How To Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“ad baculum, which means threatening somebody with a stick until they agree with you.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“A dutiful son has to remember not to slouch or swear or, in Hamlet's case, murder the old bat.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“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.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“The palindromeis anold tradition: the first thing that man ever said was, probably, “Madam, I'm Adam.” And it has caused terrible distress to even the greatest literary minds”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“They don’t have to be sentences, they could be divided by commas, they could be divided by semi-colons; there’s a class of people who get very worked up about such things - they’re lonely people - they tend to have stains down the front of their shirts - they’ll tell you that dashes should be used only to subordinate complete sentences. You must forgive them.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“When healthy people fall in love, they buy a bunch of flowers or an engagement ring and go and Do Something About It. When poets fall in love, they make a list of their loved one’s body parts and attach similes to them.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“So just to recap, polyptoton is a favorite of Jesus, Shakespeare, and John Lennon.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Nothing is better than eternal happiness. So eternal happiness is beaten by a ham sandwich.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“The Three Musketeers had a cry of 'All for one and one for all'. The symmetry makes it memorable but also reflects the reciprocity. It is that great human symmetry: the deal.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“The true paradox is arresting because it breaks all laws, but calming because it breaks all laws, but calming because that is so easy in language. it is easy to write that black is white, that up is down and that good is evil. It's as easy as typing, and as difficult. I can't do it, and I just did. But by breaking the laws of the universe, the true paradox lifts us out of it. The true paradox is, necessarily, a mystical moment, despite the fact that from a writer's point of view it's immensely easy.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“Yet hypotaxis (along with reason) has been declining for a century or more. Gone are those heady and incomprehensible sentences of Johnson, Dickens, and Austen, replaced with the cruel, brutalist parataxes of writers whose aim is to agitate and distress. The long sentence is now a ridiculed rarity, usually hidden away in the Terms and Conditions, its commas and colons, clauses and caveats languishing unread and unloved.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“But facts obscure the truth, which is that writing prose doesn't make you a prose writer any more than philosophizing makes you a philosopher or fooling around makes you a fool.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“There are two important trees in the Garden of Eden: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. We chose the wrong one. The fruit of the Tree of Life would have given us immortality. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge informed us that we were nude, which, as knowledge goes, is pretty low down the list of amazing facts.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“You're either better or you're worse, you're either richer or you're poorer, you're either sick or you're healthy. There are no other options. If you need some words there you could say 'in any circumstances'. But really, you don't need to say anything at all. 'Till death us do part' kind of has it sewn up.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“The beauty of merism is that it's absolutely unnecessary. It's words for words' sake: a gushing torrent of invention filled with noun and noun and signifying nothing. Why a rhetorical figure that gabs on and on for no good reason should be central to the rite of marriage is beyond me.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“Genius, as we tend to talk about it today, is some sort of mysterious and combustible substance that burns brightly and burns out. It's the strange gift of poets and pop stars that allows them to produce one wonderful work in their early twenties and then nothing. It is mysterious. It is there. It is gone.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase

“aposiopesis”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase

“Above all, I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility.

Mountaineers do it, and climb Everest in clothes that would have you laughed out of the gutter. I suspect they also communicate quickly and efficiently, poor things. But for the rest of us, not threatened by death and yetis, clothes and language can be things of beauty. I would no more write without art because I didn't need to, than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough. Again.

These figures grow like wildflowers, but they can be cultivated too. I do not believe that The Beatles had any idea what anadiplosis was, any more than I believe that the Rolling Stones knew about syllepsis. They knew what worked, and it did.

The figures of rhetoric are the beauties of all the poems we have ever read. Without them we would merely be us: eating, sleeping, manufacturing and dying. With them everything can be glorious. For though we have nothing to say, we can at least say it well.”
― Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase