Amazing book that I could easily quote word by word here if I go for good bits. Should be read and read again.
Hyperbaton is when you put words in an odd order, which is very, very difficult to do in English. [...] John Ronald Reuel Tolkien wrote his first story aged seven. It was about a "green great dragon". He showed it to his mother who told him that you absolutely couldn't have a green great dragon, and that it had to be a great green one instead. Tolkien was so disheartened that he never wrote another story for years.
The reason for Tolkien's mistake, since you ask, is that 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.
[...] When you repeat a word with a different vowel, the order is always I A O. Politicians may flip-flop, but they can not flop-flip.
Hypotaxis [long winding never-ending sentences] was what made English prose so terribly, terribly civilised. It still works. 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.
T.S. Eltio was a compulsive transferrer of epithets. In a mere three lines of 'Prufrock' retreats mutter, nights are restless, hotels are one-night, and restaurants are made of, or possibly serve saw-dist, it isn't clear which. Presumably the saw-dust is on the floor, but one of the odd things about the transferred epithet is that you don't need to even mention the noun that should be taking the adjective. You can leave it to be guessed. You need only mention the dizzy heights and imgination will supply the human.
Epithets are almost always transferred between humans and their surroundings, and it's almost always a one-way street. The emotions leak out from us. The loneliness seeps through the soles of our shoes onto the road.
[...] the lovely pleonasm of emphasis. A free gift may be put down to thoughtlessness, but 'free, gratis, and for nothing' is quite deliberate. It is certainly pleonasm, but it is also effective. [...] We are all casual creatures and we say things that we don't really mean; so, when we really mean a thing, we say it twice.
Othello
O, beware, my lord, of jealousy;
It is the green-eyed monster which doth mock
The meat it feeds on;
Iago could just have called jealousy a monster. It would have done the job. There's no particular reason to mention the eye colour, but it's just enough to bring the monster to life. It's only a glimpse, a moment's revelation; but there it is, the real monster, suddenly glaring out at you.
[...] The important thing is that you only get this complete picture of hungry, randy, ragged death if you read the whole of Shakespeare's works and put it together. Because Shakespeare does it all in glimpses. One detail and then Death is hidden away again. It's beautiful and it's remarkably effective. This isn't the half-personification of 'duty calls', but it's not the full-blown allegory either. It's one detail and no more.
The technical nae for a heap of insults is bdelygmia, and the best thing about a good bdelygmia (aside from the pronounciation: no letter is silent) is that you don't even need to know what any of the words mean.
(part of a speech Churchill delivered to Parliament on 4 June 1940)
We shall not flag or fail.
We shall go on to the end.
We shall fight in France.
We shall fight on the seas and oceans,
We shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air,
We shall defend our island, whatever the cost may be,
We shall fight on the beaches,
We shall fight on the landing grounds,
We shall fight in the fields and in the streets,
We shall fight in the hills,
We shall never surrender.
It's pretty clear what he's describing. He's describing defeat, defeat with honour.
But Churchill also knew exactly what he was doing with anaphora. People never hear the rest, they hear the words 'We shall fight' and that's good enough for them. They hear, and because they've heard it several times, they believe. Churchill needed to get across two messages: we shall fight, and we shall probably lose. The anaphora allowed him to push one, while slipping the other in unnoticed.
