Those of you who appreciate the beauty of the English language (and secretly wish to be Oscar Wilde) may enjoy the book The Elements of Eloquence, by Mark Forsyth. True to the title, the author lays out 39 rhetorical devices that have been in use since antiquity that can spice up your speech no matter what you have to say.
They may sound like viruses – litotes, synecdoches, zeugmas, isocolons, syllepsis, diacope, epizeuxis – and they act like them too: they’ve already infected your everyday speech even though you don’t know it; they are the rules we never knew we knew.
To demonstrate the difference a switch in style makes, consider James Bond’s famous phrase: “Bond. James Bond.” Would anyone remember the equivalent line “I am James Bond”? Or would Shakespeare’s Hamlet have been as dramatic if he opined, “To be, or not”? You’ve just learned the power of the diacope, or the A/B/A sandwich method that makes phrases memorable (now try it on the names in your address book).
While the book won’t make you an instant poet, it does provide this and other basic tools to expand your rhetorical flourish, laid out with the aid of witty prose.
For instance you might read this out of a grammar textbook:
But it’s so much better when the author adds some verbal “oomph”:
“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. It’s an odd thing that every English speaker uses that list, but almost none of us could write it out. And as size comes before colour, green great dragons can’t exist.”
Style matters.
Given his clear respect for stylistic flourishes, you might be surprised by his views of the Bard, spelled out at the very beginning of the book:
“ Shakespeare was not a genius.”
His point is that Shakespeare picked up and gradually mastered the same kinds of literary techniques, tricks that anyone can also learn. Basically no matter what you have to say, you can say it beautifully. Or as he puts it:
“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.”
Sometimes he’ll even playfully weave an example right into the explanation:
“The importance of English word order is also the reason that the idea that you can’t end a sentence with a preposition is utter hogwash. In fact, it would be utter hogwash anyway, and anyone who claims that you can’t end a sentence with up, should be told to shut. It is, as Shakespeare put it, such stuff as dreams are made on, but it’s one of those silly English beliefs that flesh is heir to.”
You can also learn a thing or two that you never knew. For instance, did you know:
“A ham sandwich is better than nothing. Nothing is better than eternal happiness. So eternal happiness is beaten by a ham sandwich.”
QED, folks.
To get an X-ray glimpse of the word patterns hiding in plain sight inside some of our culture’s most iconic phrases, you can check out the book (literally borrow it), or tune into Mark Forsyth’s TED talk (where he also predicts the next US President based solely on Clinton and Trump’s choices of rhetoric.)
Truly, the pen is mightier than the sword.
By Vincent Tan
