The Elements of Eloquence: Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase by Mark Forsyth

Description: The Elements of Eloquence by Mark Forsyth Originally published: London: Icon, 2013. FORMAT Paperback LANGUAGE English CONDITION Brand New Publisher Description From the #1 international bestselling author of The Etymologicon and The Horologicon comes an education in the art of articulation, from the King James Bible to Katy Perry…From classic poetry to pop lyrics, from Charles Dickens to Dolly Parton, even from Jesus to James Bond, Mark Forsyth explains the secrets that make a phrase—such as "O Captain! My Captain!" or "To be or not to be"—memorable. In his inimitably entertaining and wonderfully witty style, he takes apart famous phrases and shows how you too can write like Shakespeare or quip like Oscar Wilde. Whether youre aiming to achieve literary immortality or just hoping to deliver the perfect one-liner, The Elements of Eloquence proves that you dont need to have anything important to say—you simply need to say it well. In an age unhealthily obsessed with the power of substance, this is a book that highlights the importance of style. Author Biography Mark Forsyth, author of The Horologicon and The Etymologicon, was given a copy of The Oxford English Dictionary as a christening present and has never looked back. He is the creator of The Inky Fool, a blog about words, phrases, grammar, rhetoric, and prose. He has contributed to the New York Times, Wall Street Journal, and Huffington Post. He lives in the UK. Review Praise for The Elements of Eloquence"Besides reinvigorating our sense of the ingredients and recipes that make our utterances flavorsome, Mr. Forsyth has a flair for finding zesty examples. As he moves in 39 succinct chapters through techniques such as hyperbaton (deliberate disruption of a sentences logical word order) and enallage (calculated disregard for conventional syntax), his frame of reference proves admirably wide. One moment we are in the company of the Athenian orator Demosthenes, the next were rubbing shoulders (or shoulder pads) with Dolly Parton. Mr. Forsyth wants to drive home the point that potent rhetorical devices are all around us—whether in political speeches, advertisements or Katy Perry lyrics—and he does that handsomely."—The Wall Street JournalPraise for The Horologicon"This is not a book to be gulped down at a sitting, but gently masticated to be savored in small bites…[Forsyths] irreverent commentary on the history of the terms and when to use them is worth reading…Every page contains a new jewel for logophiles and verbivores everywhere."—Publishers Weekly"Forsyths fascinating entries employ erudite humor and playful historical anecdotes to make these dusty old words sound fresh again. In doing so, he succeeds in creating a book to be not just browsed but absorbed. Get ready to be impressed and entertained."—Library JournalPraise for The Etymologicon"The Facebook of books…Before you know it, youve been reading for an hour."—The Chicago Tribune"A breezy, amusing stroll through the uncommon histories of some common English words…Snack-food style blends with health-food substance for a most satisfying meal."—Kirkus Reviews"The stocking filler of the season...How else to describe a book that explains the connection between Dom Perignon and Mein Kampf."—Robert McCrum, The Observer Review Quote Praise for The Horologicon "This is not a book to be gulped down at a sitting, but gently masticated to be savored in small bites…[Forsyths] irreverent commentary on the history of the terms and when to use them is worth reading…Every page contains a new jewel for logophiles and verbivores everywhere."- Publishers Weekly "Forsyths fascinating entries employ erudite humor and playful historical anecdotes to make these dusty old words sound fresh again. In doing so, he succeeds in creating a book to be not just browsed but absorbed. Get ready to be impressed and entertained."- Library Journal Praise for The Etymologicon "The Facebook of books…Before you know it, youve been reading for an hour."- The Chicago Tribune "A breezy, amusing stroll through the uncommon histories of some common English words…Snack-food style blends with health-food substance for a most satisfying meal."- Kirkus Reviews "The stocking filler of the season...How else to describe a book that explains the connection between Dom Perignon and Mein Kampf ."-Robert McCrum, The Observer Excerpt from Book ACKNOWLEDGEMENTS PREFACE Shakespeare was not a genius. He was, without the distant shadow of a doubt, the most wonderful writer who ever breathed. But not a genius. No angels handed him his lines, no fairies proofread for him. Instead, he learnt techniques, he learnt tricks, and he learnt them well. Genius, as we tend to talk about it today, is some sort of mysterious and combustible substance that burns brightly and burns out. Its the strange gift of poets and pop stars that allows them to produce one wonderful work in their early twenties and then nothing. It is mysterious. It is there. It is gone. This is, if you think about it, a rather odd idea. Nobody would talk about a doctor or an accountant or a taxi driver who burnt out too fast. Too brilliant to live long. Pretty much everyone in every profession outside of professional athletics gets better as they go along, for the rather obvious reason that they learn and they practise. Why should writers be different? Shakespeare wasnt different. Shakespeare got better and better and better, which was easy because he started badly, like most people starting a new job. Nobody is quite sure which is Shakespeares first play, but the contenders are Loves Labours Lost, Titus Andronicus , and Henry VI Part 1 . Do not, dear reader, worry if you have not read those plays. Almost nobody has, because, to be utterly frank, theyre not very good. To be precise about it, there isnt a single memorable line in any of them. Now, for Shakespeare, that may seem rather astonishing. He was, after all, the master of the memorable line. But the first line of Shakespeare that almost anybody knows is in Henry VI Part 2 , when one revolting peasant says to another: "The first thing we do, lets kill all the lawyers." In Part 3 theres a couple more--"I can smile, and murder while I smile." And each successive play has more and more and more great lines until you work up through Much Ado and Julius Caesar (1590s) to Hamlet and King Lear (1600s). Shakespeare got better because he learnt. Now some people will tell you that great writing cannot be learnt. Such people should be hit repeatedly on the nose until they promise not to talk nonsense any more. Shakespeare was taught how to write. He was taught it at school. Composition (in Latin) was the main part of an Elizabethan education. And, importantly, you had to learn the figures of rhetoric. Professionally, Shakespeare wrote in English. And for that he learnt and used the figures of rhetoric in English. This was easy, as Elizabethan London was crazy for rhetorical figures. A chap called George Puttenham had a bestseller in 1589 with his book on them (thats about the year of Shakespeares first play). And that was just following on from Henry Peachams The Garden of Eloquence , which had come out a decade earlier. Book after book was published, all about the figures of rhetoric. So I should probably explain what the figures of rhetoric are. Rhetoric is a big subject. It consists of the whole art of persuasion. The lot. It includes logic (or the kind of sloppy logic most people understand, called enthymemes), it includes speaking loudly and clearly, and it includes working out what topics to talk about. Anything to do with persuasion is rhetoric, right down to the argumentum ad baculum , which means threatening somebody with a stick until they agree with you . One minuscule part of this massive subject is the figures of rhetoric, which are the techniques for making a single phrase striking and memorable just by altering the wording. Not by saying something different, but by saying something in a different way. They are the formulas for producing great lines. These formulas were thought up by the Ancient Greeks and then added to by the Romans. As Shakespeare set to work England was busy having the Renaissance (everybody else had had the Renaissance a century or so before, and we were running late). So the classical works on rhetoric were dug out, translated and adapted for use in English. But it wasnt the enthymemes or the topics or even the baculums that the English liked. We loved the figures. The "flowers of rhetoric" as they were called (hence The Garden of Eloquence ), because, as a nation, we were at the time rather obsessed with poetry. So Shakespeare learnt and learnt and got better and better, and his lines became more and more striking and more and more memorable. But most of his great and famous lines are simply examples of the ancient formulas. "I can smile, and murder while I smile" was not handed to Shakespeare by God. Its just an example of diacope. So why, you may be asking, were you not taught the figures of rhetoric at school? If they make a chap write as well as Shakespeare, shouldnt we be learning them instead of home economics and woodwork? There are three answers to that. First, we need woodworkers. Second, people have always been suspicious of rhetoric in general and the figures in particular. If somebody learns how to phrase things beautifully, they might be able to persuade you of something that isnt true. Stern people dislike rhetoric, and unfortunately its usually stern people who are in charge: solemn fools who believe that truth is more important than beauty. Third, the Romantic Movement came along at the end of the eighteenth century. The Romantics liked to believe that you could learn everything worth learning by gazing at a babbling mountain brook, or running barefoot through the fields, or contemplating a Grecian urn. They wanted to be natural, and the figures of rhetoric are not natural. They are formulas, formulas that you can learn from a book. So what with the dislike of beauty and books, the figures of rhetoric were largely forgotten. But that doesnt mean that they ceased to be used. You see, when the Ancient Greeks were going around collecting their formulas, they werent plucking them out of thin air or growing them in a test tube. All that the Greeks were doing was noting down the best and most memorable phrases they heard, and working out what the structures were, in much the same way that when you or I eat a particularly delicious meal, we might ask for the recipe. The figures are, to some extent, alive and well. We still use them. Its just that we use them haphazardly. What Shakespeare had beaten into him at school, we might, occasionally, use by accident and without realising it. We just happen to say something beautiful, and dont know how we did it. We are like blindfolded cooks throwing anything into the pot and occasionally, just occasionally, producing a delicious meal. Shakespeare had a big recipe book and his eyes wide open. The figures are alive and thriving. The one line from that song or film that you remember and dont know why you remember is almost certainly down to one of the figures, one of the flowers of rhetoric growing wild. They account for the songs you sing and the poems you love, although that is hidden from you at school. English teaching at school is, unfortunately, obsessed with what a poet thought, as though that were of any interest to anyone. Rather than being taught about how a poem is phrased, schoolchildren are asked to write essays on what William Blake thought about the Tiger; despite the fact that William Blake was a nutjob whose opinions, in a civilised society, would be of no interest to anybody apart from his parole officer. A poet is not somebody who has great thoughts. That is the menial duty of the philosopher. A poet is somebody who expresses his thoughts, however commonplace they may be, exquisitely. That is the one and only difference between the poet and everybody else. So my aim in this book is to explain the figures of rhetoric, devoting one chapter to each. There are a couple of caveats that I should make clear before we begin. First of all, the study of rhetoric did not entirely disappear with the Romantics. There are still scholarly articles written. Unfortunately, almost all of these get tied in knots trying to define their terms. Rhetorical terminology, like anything kicked around for a couple of millennia, is a mess. So an article on syllepsis will start by defining the term, attacking other scholars for defining it differently, appealing to the authority of Quintilian or Susenbrotus, and then conclude without actually having said anything about syllepsis or what it is. Ive written more on this subject in the Epilogue, but as I have no particular interest in such lexical squabbles I have simply adopted the rule of Humpty-Dumpty: When I use a rhetorical term, it means just what I choose it to mean--neither more nor less. Second, some of you may think that I am trying to attack Shakespeare or whichever poet Im quoting. You may consider this a cruel work of debunking, like the spoilsports who uncurtained the Wizard of Oz. Shakespeare is a god and it is sacrilege to unseal his star-y pointing pyramid. Little could be further from the truth. It doesnt insult the Wright Brothers to explain the principles of aerodynamics, nor Neil Armstrong the spacesuit. Shakespeare was a craftsman, and if you told him that now people studied his attitudes to feminism more than his rhetorical figures he would chuckle. Shakespeare did not consider himself sacred. He would often just steal content from other people. However, whatever he stole he improved, and he improved it using the formulas, flowers and figures of rhetoric. CHAPTER ONE Let us begin with something we know Shakespeare stole, simply so that we can see what a wonderful thief he was. When Shakespeare decided to write The Tragedie of Anthonie, and Cleopatra he of course needed a history book from which Details ISBN042527618X Author Mark Forsyth Short Title ELEMENTS OF ELOQUENCE Language English ISBN-10 042527618X ISBN-13 9780425276181 Media Book Format Paperback DEWEY 808.042 Year 2014 Publication Date 2014-10-07 Subtitle Secrets of the Perfect Turn of Phrase Place of Publication New York Country of Publication United States AU Release Date 2014-10-07 NZ Release Date 2014-10-07 US Release Date 2014-10-07 UK Release Date 2014-10-07 Pages 256 Publisher Penguin Putnam Inc Imprint Berkley Publishing Corporation,U.S. Audience General We've got this At The Nile, if you're looking for it, we've got it. With fast shipping, low prices, friendly service and well over a million items - you're bound to find what you want, at a price you'll love! TheNile_Item_ID:92661560;

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