WORDS are all I have...

A couple of words, new to me: antonomasia and hendiadys. They're both figure-of-speech types. There are many such obscure words, little known by any but high fallutin' grammarians and professional wordsmiths.

Wikipedia
In rhetoric, antonomasia is a kind of metonymy in which an epithet or phrase takes the place of a proper name, such as "the little corporal" for Napoleon I. Conversely, antonomasia can also be using a proper name as an archetypal name, to express a generic idea.



From Wiki's list of examples:

"Old Blue Eyes" or "The Chairman of the Board" for Frank Sinatra

"The Bard" for William Shakespeare

"The Gipper" or "The Great Communicator" for Ronald Reagan

"The Iron Lady" or the "The Leaderene" for Margaret Thatcher.

In 2016 we could add "The Donald" or "Agent Orange" or "Hair Hitler" - but one for the ages is yet to be discovered for "You Know Who"

Hendiadys
Wikipedia

A figure of speech used for emphasis. The basic idea is to use two words linked by the conjunction "and" instead of the one modifying the other.

The typical result of a hendiadys is to transform a noun-plus-adjective into two nouns joined by a conjunction. For example, sound and fury (from act V, scene 5 of Macbeth) seems to offer a more striking image than furious sound........hendiadys is most effective in English when the adjectival and nominal forms of the word are identical. Thus "the cold wind went down the hall" becomes the cold and the wind went down the hall. He came despite the rain and weather instead of "He came despite the rainy weather".

Two verbs (as in the case of a catenative verb) can be so joined: come and get it (also come get it) and Fowler says that try and... for "try to..." is a "true example" of hendiadys.

The conjunction may be elided, i.e. omitted (a sound or syllable) when speaking (parataxis): This coffee is nice and hot can become This is nice hot coffee; in both cases one is saying that the coffee is hot to a nice degree, not that the coffee itself is nice.

Whoa! Two more unknown (to me) words there: catenative and parataxis. A catenative verb is one where it can be followed directly by another verb, as in "he deserves to win the cup" or "you are forbidden to smoke in here". Parataxis = The placing of clauses or phrases one after another, without words to indicate coordination or subordination, as in "Tell me, how are you?"

A nice hot coffee, paratactical or not, is just what I fancy after that little lot!

Saturday & Sundry $10 Stuff

zeugma
a figure of speech in which a word applies to two others in different senses (e.g., John and his license expired last week) or to two others of which it semantically suits only one (e.g. with weeping eyes and hearts ).

syllepsis
a figure of speech in which a word is applied to two others in different senses (e.g. caught the train and a bad cold ) or to two others of which it grammatically suits only one (e.g. neither they nor it is working ).

Those two words do appear to have overlap. We are advised that zeugma is more about semantics and syllepsis about grammar. (More on this HERE).


isocolon
a rhetorical device that involves a succession of sentences, phrases and clauses of grammatically equal length. In this figure of speech, a sentence has a parallel structure that is made up of words, clauses or phrases of equal length, sound, meter and rhythm. Isocolon is the repetition of similar grammatical forms.

What the hammer? what the chain?
In what furnace was thy brain?
What the anvil? what dread grasp
Dare its deadly terrors clasp?

- From The Tyger by William Blake.

(See HERE)


schesis onomaton
Wikipedia: Originally a rhetorical technique consisting of a sentence constructed only of nouns and adjectives. It later came to mean such a series of nouns and adjectives or any series of words that were synonymous expressions. In the second sense it is a rhetorical technique used to emphasize an idea by repeating it rapidly using slightly different words that have the same or a very similar meaning.
Example of first meaning:

A man faithful in friendship, prudent in counsels, virtuous in conversation, gentle in communication, learned in all liberal sciences, eloquent in utterance, comely in gesture, an enemy to naughtiness, and a lover of all virtue and godliness.
— Peacham.

Example of second meaning:

Wendy lay there, motionless in a peaceful slumber, very still in the arms of sleep.
— Robert A. Harris, VirtualSalt

Alternatively...think about the dead parrot speech from Monty Python!


There's a good $10-type piece on such things by Christopher Howse at: UK's Spectator, he is reviewing a book The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth.

Also from the above: should one ever be tempted to over-adjectivise the pudding - some advice:

Designated order of adjectives, in English:
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.

This knowledge is implicitly mastered by all native speakers; to see it made explicit is an enjoyable revelation, like learning to carry a tray on the flat of your hand.

Metaphoric Power

There's an interesting brief article by Tori Rodriguez at Scientific American: "Figurative Speech Sways Decisions - choose the right phrasing to convince people to take action". Metaphor is the figure of speech being considered.
Snip:

A study published in January in PLOS ONE examined how reading different metaphors—“crime is a virus” and “crime is a beast”—affected participants' reasoning when choosing solutions to a city's crime problem. Those who read the beast metaphor were more likely to opt for a direct approach emphasizing enforcement, whereas the virus metaphor elicited a preference for a systemic, reform-focused solution.

This is new information? Surely not.

“What a different result one gets by changing the metaphor!”
― George Eliot, The Mill on the Floss (1860)

“The metaphor is probably the most fertile power possessed by man”
― José Ortega y Gasset (1883-1955)

A comment from "sunnystrobe" beneath the linked article offers a chilling example of influence of a metaphor in action:

....Fifty years ago, at Munich University, we studied Prof. Wolfgang Clemen's (then) ground-breaking book : 'Shakespeare's Imagery', which was an eye opener as to HOW the power of configurative visualization works, creating in our brains something which could be aptly named our own in-brain 'home art / movie', good or bad...
(for evil abuse of this fanciful human trait, think how the Nazi propaganda machine of fear & terror was able to turn a nation into tolerating 'Kristallnacht' - and worse to come- just by using visual metaphors of vermin- that would hAVE to be exterminated for the greater benefit & survival of the German race.).....

The article goes on to say that scientists aren't clear exactly how the brain processes metaphor, but suspect that it triggers related concepts when processing a metaphor's meaning. That's not such a world shattering conclusion though, is it? Wouldn't we lay-persons, if we had stopped to think about it, have concluded the same? That's the purpose of a metaphor, surely, to encourage readers or listeners, or viewers to understand a difficult concept by relating it to something already understood.

The main point of the article is good though: choice of metaphor, especially when explaining issues of great importance, can be crucial. Ordinary mortals like us tend to use metaphor to make our conversations or scribbles more colourful or more relatable; there's little danger we'd cause any kind of havoc to break out. What we should train ourselves to recognise is how, and when politicians, salesmen, corporate-beholden journalists, and the "Powers That Be" employ metaphor, and note carefully which metaphor they choose to use.

False Equivalency Poser

 Mathematical symbol for in-equation

A term I notice more and more as I scan through online articles and comment threads: "false equivalency". I understand the literal meaning of those words well enough, but at times am at a loss to relate them to what I'm reading. Having dipped into a variety of explanations of the term I see that it's one of, or maybe a generic term for (?) a family of figures of speech known as logical fallacies. See Skeptical Detective for a list of these.

As a Sun Aquarian logic ought to be stock-in-trade for me, but when logic is muffled in devious political argument it's sometimes hard to extract.

A definition of false equivalence in one sentence I quite liked is:

We may define false equivalence as when when someone falsely equates an act or idea of one as being equally egregious to that of another without also considering the underlying differences which may make the comparison invalid or unfair.

False equivalences often take the form of analogies that we are expected to take a little too seriously............... See the rest HERE

.
Some examples given in attempted explanations around the net leave me still confused; one of the clearest, used in several different places, is this comparison:

The burka is worn by women and covers the hair.
The nun's habit is worn by women and covers the hair.
Thus the burka and nun's habit are equal.

That's patently untrue, and quite easy to dismantle. The problem for me comes when the false equivalency is wrapped up in a thick layer of party politics.

Anyone have any clear - or unclear - thoughts on this tangled topic?

There's quite likely to be a bit of false equivalency going on in astrology, come to think of it. Far be it from me to unscrew the lid on that wee can o' beans!