What do you know about alliteration, polyptoton, antithesis, merism, the Blazon, aposiopesis, hyperbaton, anadiplosis, hypotaxis and parataxis, polysyndeton, asyndeton, aiacope, hendiadys, epistrophe, amd the tricolon? Yep, me neither - and that's only on the first one hundred pages of the 230-page thick book "The Elements Of Eloquence".
As in his previous books, "The Etymologicon" (which dealt with the connections between words) and "The Horologicon" (which covered obsolete words), Mark Forsyth employs his ingenious trademark of ending one section with a word that starts the next, which I think is a form of anadiplosis - see chapter 9 on page 60. It means you are likely to start off reading a couple of chapters, and end up reading the whole book in one go.
Some of the rhetorical devices he discusses are well known, such as alliteration (Pride and Prejudice, Power to the People), but most will be unfamiliar terms. Forsyth's examples bring them immediately to life: for example polyptoton, where you repeat a word in a different sense (Please Please Me, "but me no buts").
It's packed with obscure but fascinating facts. On page 24 we learn that "to be bonny and buxom, in bed and at board, till death us do part" was part of the medieval marriage service; on page 25, that the first world war song "Bless 'em all, bless 'em all, the long and the short and the tall" originally went "Fuck 'em all".
Like Doug Piranha in the old Monty Python sketch – "he knew all the tricks: dramatic irony, metaphor, bathos, puns, parody, litotes and satire" (see 10:54 in the above video clip) – Mark Forsyth wears his considerable knowledge lightly. And writes it down so beautifully.
I read about this book while reading "For Who The Bell Tolls". That's the thing with books: you read a book and then, like one of those Russian matryoshka dolls, another book pops up inside it. Of course, I could've read the online copy - as you can by clicking here - but I'm a booklover and need to open its cover and turn its pages, and so I lashed out $33.33 on a beautiful hardcover copy. Hours of reading pleasure await me!
