I just read a book about the English language, and I loved it so much I’m going to tell you about it.
It’s called “The Elements of Eloquence – Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase” by Mark Forsyth. I actually mentioned it some posts ago, when I came across his chapter on adjectives. I enjoyed that so much I bought the book.
It’s been a revelation. This is from the introductory chapter.
The figures of rhetoric come to us from the ancient Greeks via the Romans and then the Renaissance, although they then fell out of fashion somewhat. I remember learning some of them at school – alliteration, hyperbole, personification, rhetorical questions – but most of them are brand new concepts for me, complete with impenetrable names that exemplify their exotic origins – aposiopesis, diacope, zeugma, scesis onomaton.
It took an embarrassing number of pages to figure out that he was secretly demonstrating each trick in the opening paragraph of each chapter. The author is a seriously clever and witty guy.
This is from his summary chapter:
What a joy! Recommended.
The figures of rhetoric I did learn at school came from Mr K, my English teacher in Form 5 ( Year 11 in before-times ). His daughter, the beautiful Jane, was in our same year. He was great, a real inspiration. He had twinkly eyes in a laughing face with a big bushy beard. I remember him telling us once that he went to the medical school every year, to demonstrate that he shouldn’t be alive after a brain bleed he’d had many years before. They would put his brain scan up on a screen behind him and all the trainee doctors would gasp in amazement. I often wonder if there was an understanding from anyone involved that there was an ongoing risk there, which medical science wasn’t advanced enough then to be able to treat? “You were lucky once, but there will be a next time…” Would you rather know, if there was nothing anyone could do to help? Would the doctors have told him? Paternalistic not to, but then medical ethics were a bit below the radar back then. He died a couple of years later, in our final year at school. I loathed school in general, but Mr K was a highlight.