A fun dictionary of expressions and their applications. This book will help you gain a better understanding of the various applications of the English language while also being entertaining. ( )

This delightful and fun book is one of my top reads (thus far) of 2022. Mark Forsyth's quirky British humor spills off every page of the book as he introduces (or reintroduces) us to the tools of ancient rhetoric and how past masters have employed them.

A reader should NOT be daunted by skimming the chapter titles in the table of contents. (Some examples: "Polyptoton", "Synesthesia", "Aposiopesis", "Hyperbaton", "Anadiplosis"--and those are all from the first ten chapters). Each is a tool of rhetoric the author defines, then illustrates in a whimsical and fun essay of only a few pages. Forsyth creatively builds from tool to tool by making the last sentence of a chapter the introduction to the next tool in the toolbox.

Here are a couple of examples to entice you to dive in:

"Songwriters love their antitheses and there are a million examples I could have used. Unfortunately, I noticed that the lyrics 'You say potato and I say potato. You say tomato and I say tomato' don't work that well when they're written down."

"What, O what is a rhetorical question?...Most of us, to be frank, don't know. Including me. The Greeks and Romans had a jolly good shot at it, but they certainly didn't use a term as vague and nebulous as 'rhetorical question.' They distinguished between every different sort of rhetorical question. And then they gave them names...And each term had a slightly different and very specific meaning. Unfortunately they could never agree what those meanings were, and how one differed from the others, and just when they were getting close they declined, fell, and were overrun by barbarians."

"Tricolons sound great if the third thing is longer. The American way is (as outlined in their mutinous Declaration of Independence) made up of life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness. The pursuit of happiness is, if you think about it, the least of the promises here. You can pursue happiness as much as you like, and most of us do anyway. It rarely ends in capture."

"Poor zeugma! So elegant in the classical world! So silly in ours! Like a toga."

"'The Burial of Sir John Moore at Corunna' begins: 'Not a drum was heard, not a funeral note / As his corpse to the rampart we hurried' And the reader has to pick up on the fact that there was silence. A logician might say that it was still possible that there was cheering and heavy traffic and sirens going off, but logicians have no place near poetry."

"Adynaton--'And again I say unto you, It is easier for a camel to go through the eye of a needle, than for a rich man to enter into the kingdom of God.' (Matthew 19, Verse 14). This verse has always rather worried rich men, who tend to ask themselves how much a really damned big needle would cost."

“‘I wandered lonely as a cloud…’ Clouds are not lonely. Especially in the Lake District where Wordsworth wrote that line. In the Lake District clouds are remarkably social creatures that bring their friends and relatives and stay for weeks. But nobody notices that the comparison is all wrong because the mind always skips to the second connection which is that clouds do wander aimlessly. It’s not that Wordsworth didn’t know about meteorology. It’s that he did know about metaphor.”

Go ahead. Buy it, read it, mark it up and use it. You'll have a delightful time and it will improve your writing and speaking. Highly recommended. ( )

A bit too technical for me, but very enjoyable. ( )

What a charming, clever, erudite, exposition. I loved it. Don't ask me to recite the extensive list of greek names for forms of written English: Polyptoton, Merism, Synaesthesia, Hypotaxis and Parataxis, Hendiadys along with slightly more familiar....Rhetorical questions, and Alliteration...and on and on. Forsyth does make the point in the Eilogue that rhetorical terminology is a catastrophe and a mess. (I guess it's possible to have a catastrophe without it being a mess but it's probably unlikely. so this would be an example of a "pleonasm"). I bought the book because at a quick glance it seemed like it might actually teach one to "turn the perfect English Phrase". But I don't think I've achieved that. In fact, I'm sure that I haven't. But I've certainly learned a lot. Forsyth liberally quotes Shakespeare but is totally unafraid to critique him. And it was illuminating to me to realise that Shakespeare himself, learned on the job. His early plays are hardly ever read or performed because they are just not that good. Poor "King John" is singled out for particular criticism. (Apart from the one good speech). But Forsyth draws his example from right across genres, from the poetry of Wordsworth and Coleridge, to the writings of Dickens and G.K. Chesterton, to the movies and to the words of the Beatles songs. He is just so clever and amusing. Take this quote for an example of Hyperbole: Dashiell Hammett describing a private detective. "He was a swarthy little Canadian who stood nearly five foot five in his high heeled shoes, weighed a hundred pounds minus, talked like a Scotchman's telegram, and could have shadowed a drop of salt water from Golden Gate to Hong Kong without ever losing sight of it." And Forsyth's take on that is "That next to their [Americans] mountainous over-statements, an Englishman's languid and effete attempts are subatomically small.
"And people will tell you that Shakespeare was inspired. He practised. Each one [personification] has a person, a visible person, leap into existence, to be glimpsed, and vanish." And the examples: "Close-tongued treason", "Pale-faced fear", "The silver-hand of peace", "The iron tongue of midnight".
As one of the reviewers on the back cover comments" "He [Forsyth] also writes beautifully. Here for example...a trifle: " Chiasmus is clever but not natural. Kennedy's inauguration speech could never have been improvised and Mae West, one suspects, took a while to work hers out'....."It's not the men in my life, it's the life in my men".
Along with this beautiful writing style, Forsyth is quick to break nearly all the old grammatical rules that we were taught at school. And uses quotes from various literary masters to illustrate his point. I was also amused by his ability to point out that many of the memorable and much quoted phrases that we all know have been remembered or recited inaccurately; He says that there is absolutely no record of John Major (British PM) ever saying "not inconsiderable" which became his catchphrase nevertheless. And in the Wizard of Oz movie, every child remembers how the Wicked Witch of the West, cries "fly my pretties, fly" ...except that she doesn't. In the film the flying monkeys are instructed to "Fly! Fly! Fly! Fly!...and no vocative "my pretties".
Bottom line, I really loved the book and, in fact, I've just bought another book of his; "The Etymologicon". Happy to give the current book five stars. ( )

http://pro-libertate.net/20131220/222-read-elements-eloquence ( )