Undressing Figures of Speech

The disorder of words.

There’s an order to adjectives in English that is so deeply entrenched in your thinking, the only reason to study it—is to shatter it.

Opinion. Size. Age. Shape. Color. Origin. Material. Purpose.

Even if you’ve never consciously considered the order of adjectives, if you’re a native speaker, you’ve learned to follow the rule. Try it out for yourself and see. Consider any noun with a string of adjectives before it:

BFG by Ronald Dahl. BFG stands for Big Friendly Giant!

Oh oh. We’ve got a problem. Opinion (friendly) comes before size (big). What we have here is a hyperbaton, the technique of putting words in an uncommon order. In this case, Dahl uses the technique to mimic the mind of a child, doubly so as “Big” hardly seems necessary when describing a giant.

Hyperbaton can be used for dramatic effect as well:

His hand He will uplift.

“Paradise Lost” by John Milton

Some rise by sin, and some by virtue fall.

“Julius Caesar” by William Shakespeare

Occasionally, it’s even used in sentences that have nothing to do with uplifting or falling:

"In vain have I struggled. It will not do. My feelings will not be repressed. You must allow me to tell you how ardently I admire and love you."

“Pride and Prejudice” by Jane Austen

Word order in English follows subject, verb, and then object, but someone forgot to tell Jane Austen. Now, write “I have struggled in vain” one hundred times, and in the future, remember to follow the rules.

Her mixed-up order works, and that’s the only rule that matters.

It’s easy to think of Dr. Seuss when considering hyperbaton, and a variety of hyperbaton can be seen in “I am Sam. Sam I am.” Because only one word is switched, it’s an anastrophe. This isn’t a test, though. You don’t need to learn the words for a technique, only that the technique is available to use.

If you employ the technique, and the technique you employ, now you’ve reached the heights of antimetabole, which sounds like middle-school girls with a secret language saying “timetable.” (Curse those girls, and those girls be cursed with their awesome secret languages I could never learn.) However, this word that you don’t need to know is anti-meta-bole. It repeats the same idea in a different order, increasing the reader’s memory for its meaning and the meaning for our memory.

Apparently, we love creating words for how we order words and then rarely using the word we created. You can call a hyperbaton an inversion. If you reverse the word order without necessarily keeping the words the same, you have a chiasmus. Repeat a grammatical structure and you have parallelism. Contrast ideas in close proximity and you have an antithesis. Repeat a word or phrase at the end of a series of clauses and you have an epistophe, and as you might recall, if you omit conjunctions from various parts of a sentence, you have an asyndeton.

What matters is what matters, and what matters most is the impact our word choices make.

I went to Thesaurus.com, and here are a few of their 13 famous quotes from modem Literature.

“It is better to be hated for what you are than to be loved for what you are not.”

Autumn Leaves by André Gide

Parallelism and antithesis

"Get busy living, or get busy dying."

Different Seasons by Stephen King

Parallelism and antithesis.

“In the depth of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer.”

Lyrical and Critical Essays by Albert Camus

Antithesis.

And so it continues… “To be or not to be.” “It was the best of times, it was the worst of times…” “Fair is foul, and foul is fair.”

Okay, yes, I used Shakespeare twice, and twice the bard has blessed us—thrice, if memory be not weak nor mercy withered.

Playing with word order, when it works, creates memorable lines, and this playfulness can be obvious or subtle, depending on whether we want to stand out and sound theatrical or blend in with a realistic story. Either way, possibilities await.

Let’s go to the movies:

“Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine.”

Casablanca

This one is an example of anaphora: repeating a word or phrase at the beginning of a clause or sentence. It heightens our sense of Rick’s frustration at running into Elsa again.

Many of my quotes, however, have been examples of antithesis.

“Leave the gun. Take the cannoli.”

The Godfather

Antithesis has the value of comparing ideas to create its effect. The Godfather quote happens to also be an example of parataxis. The Macbeth quote uses alliteration, and we’ve seen how several were both parallelism and antithesis—multiple stylistic devices used at once.

If we haven’t intentionally been using figures of speech like these, we can find ourselves reluctant to do so, but I’m reminded of a speech I once gave. One thing I loathed was when other speakers used alliteration in listing their points. (I love alliteration in fiction. This was different.) Mockingly, I made all my points begin with the letter “P” and was horrified when the audience responded, not by sharing my derision, but by taking notes.

The device worked, no matter how I felt.

Many figures of speech have entered our popular lexicon, but none of what I’ve said is a suggestion that you use existing turns of phrase. These techniques help us create our own.

Remember the Brandon Sanderson example I used previously?

Ash fell from the sky.

Lord Tresting frowned, glancing up at the ruddy, mid-day sky as his servants scuttled forward, opening a parasol over Tresting and his distinguished guest. Ashfalls weren’t that uncommon in the Final Empire, but Tresting had hoped to avoid getting soot stains on his fine new suit coat and red vest, which had just arrived via canal boat from Luthadel itself. Fortunately, there wasn’t much wind—the parasol would likely be effective.

Mistborn: The Final Empire by Brandon Sanderson

Could we jazz it up with a little anaphora?

Lord Tresting frowned, glancing up at the ruddy mid-day sky and up at the parasol his servants opened over him and his distinguished guest. The ash came down upon the pavers and down upon the common, ash-stained boots of his servants.

How about an antithesis?

Ashfalls were common, but Tresting’s new suit coat and red vest, exquisite,

And hyperbaton?

by canal boat from Luthadel, just that week delivered.

And personification?

The parasol would deliver him now. The wind had class enough to keep its own.

I rewrote the paragraph as an exercise. In our regular writing, not every sentence requires a stylistic device. Some, in their simplicity, will be a fancy sentence’s foil.

— Thaddeus Thomas