Zeugma: word followed by two or more words that go with it but not together: the morning brought misty weather and the newspaper. Prolepsis: treating a possible event or a future event as if it were real and in the present: if you stop to think you’re dead. ![]() Litotes: positive statement by denying a negative: No Small Courage (book title). Hyperbaton: inversion of the usual word order or talking like Yoda: Fred his name is. Hypallage: adjective attached to the wrong noun: the prisoner is in the condemned cell. Hendiadys: equal words joined by and instead of made into a phrase: nice and warm instead of nicely warm gloom and doom instead of gloomy doom. – the police arrested him.Īntonomasia: replacing one name or designation with another: San Francisco is the Paris of the West.Īphaeresis: loss of the first part of a name: copter for helicopter, plane for airplane.Ĭacophemism: using a disparaging or cruel name: she called him a jerk.Ĭhiasmus: repeating a phrase in reverse word order to reverse its meaning: This man I thought had been a lord among wits but, I find, he is only a wit among lords (Johnson on Chesterfield). My father was worried that I would succumb to the “tricks of rhetoric, which are the opposite of poetry.” In the same letter, he went on to state that “Aristotle mentions them not in his Poetics but in his Rhetoric.” He included a quote from Kenneth Rexroth regarding Petronius: “he is a master of all the flowers of rhetoric, but he knows they are paper flowers and he delights in showing them up by setting fire to them.” Take that, New Critics.Īmphibole: meaning understood more than one way: the shooting of the hunters.Īnacoluthon: a sudden change of direction in speech, often signaled by a dash: I was listening to the news – this man, he was a C.E.O. At the time, I was beginning my MFA degree in Creative Writing at San Jose State University. ![]() I found this list in a 2003 letter from my father.
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