Calling a person or thing by name is easy and straightforward. “Hey John, pass me that knife over there,” you say to your friend – letting him know you want his help and exactly what he needs to do. Doing so is great when you can’t afford to muck around, but in writing where you have a chance to be more creative, the direct approach can be too bland. With the help of Mark Forsyth and his book The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase, find out how we can use more customised descriptions and labels to give a person or object more unique!
To deny ironically is to confirm the opposite with litotes
During the 70’s and 80’s, America’s kitchens underwent a revolution – saturated fats were “scientifically proven” to cause heart disease (even though it turns out the research was funded by the sugar industry to shift blame away from their own coronary-clogging products). Since butter and other whole milk products suddenly became kitchen taboo, people wanted an alternative spread for their toast and pancakes. Margarine was around already, but its poor prior branding and odd colouring left a poor taste in people’s mouths. Enter the brand I Can’t Believe It’s Not Butter – margarine instantly became rebranded, and it’s all thanks to a bit of clever naming through litotes.
“Litotes is affirming something by denying its opposite,” explains Forsyth. “It’s a form of understatement-by-negative.” However, he points out that understatements only works when you know the opposite of it to be true. “If Franz Liszt told you that he played the piano a little, it would be an understatement. If I said the same it would just be true. So, in a sense, understaters need you to know what they’re saying before they say it… or at the very least, the need you to get it instantly.”
The lyrics in Tom Jones’ song “It’s not unusual” is a great example of using litotes. The song would make just as much sense if the lyricist started off the song with “It’s usual” or “It’s normal”, but because there’s litotes (and a clever use of a double negative), the song becomes that much catchier without altering the meaning. “When Tom Jones sees you hanging around with anyone, we know that he cries and cries constantly,” writes Forsyth.
Although litotes often features double negatives, it’s important to know that they aren’t the same. “Litotes is a special kind of understatement that happens to use negatives, and understatement is a kind of irony.” Ironies work best when there’s a mutual understanding between you and your conversation partner. For example, if you queue up at Subway for a sandwich and the customer in front repeatedly berates the employee for not adding enough pickles, you and the employee can roll your eyes at each other. “What a great day to be in the service industry,” you tell the employee sarcastically as he nods. “Contrary to popular belief, irony draws people together. It’s an untruth that both parties know is untrue, that both parties agree is untrue,” describes Forsyth. “Irony is about what people have in common, and so is litotes. It’s a sociable figure.”
For this reason, litotes work best as a casual conversation piece and not so well for grandstanding. Want to make a cheeky quip about getting a raise? “It’s not uncommon for employees to have their wages adjusted annually for inflation,” you say to your fellow employees over lunch. “It’s also not uncommon to be let go when the economy is doing so poorly,” answers the boss nonchalantly as he walks past your table – prompting everyone to return to munching on their sandwiches.
Litotes can work as a product tagline as well, but you’ll need to be prudent about when to use one. For example, a casual tagline like “Your cough won’t go nowhere? Try OxyCough!” may work for an off-the-shelf cough medicine, it probably won’t work for a coronavirus vaccine – “Can’t go nowhere with COVID-19? Try OxyCOVID!” Considering how highly contested the topic of the vaccine is and how deadly the virus is, adopting such a light-hearted tone can come off as unprofessional and dissuade governments and doctors from considering your product.
Being literally literal with metonymies and synechdoches
Where litotes is to be descriptive by denying its opposite, a metonymy is far less complicated. Forsyth believes them to be the counterpart of similes and metaphors – if you recall how similes and metaphors work, you compare a subject’s qualities to something that is similar by using the specific prepositions “as and like” or “is”, respectively. For example:
Simile: “John’s hands were cold as ice.”
Metaphor: “John’s hands were ice.”
On the other hand, a metonymy is when a subject and object are “connected because they are really physically connected.” We don’t mean a physical connection like a bond between a child and parent, but a literal physical connection like the clothes on your back. For example, if John was a UPS delivery guy, his uniform would be a brown button-up shirt with matching coloured shorts. Instead of referring to John by his name, we call him by what he’s wearing or what he’s physically touching, like so:
Normal: “John rushed over to the door with package in tow.”
Metonymy: “The UPS brown shirt rushed over to the door with package in tow.”
“You are no longer you,” expresses Forsyth. “You are your clothes, you are the building you’re standing in, the medals pinned to your chest or hat on your head. You are a suit, a blue-stocking, a bit of skirt.” This style of literary device is used to dehumanise a subject – most commonly found in politics, the news and social media as a quick way to refer to a particular group of people (e.g. the government as suits, the police as blue shirts or bobbies, or an ethnicity of people by their signature religious garb etc). As a result, there’s always the chance of offending someone, so be careful with how you use metonymies!
If you thought referring to a person by their clothing was extreme, then you haven’t met the synecdoche. No longer just clothing, “you become one of your body parts – you are your feet, your lips or your liver”. A favourite of poet William Blake, Forsyth lists several of Blake’s most prominent lines from “The Tyger”:
“What immortal hand or eye
Could frame thy fearful symmetry?”“And what shoulder and what art
Could twist the sinews of thy heart?”
“What makes Blake’s synecdoches so powerful is that we get glimpses. It’s like the opening of a film where we see just a close-up of feet walking on green grass, a hand or an eye in the night-time forests,” explains Forsyth. “But whereas in a film the camera would pull out to show the whole scene, Blake never reveals… Blake works in fragments; when you read his synecdoches you have to see the world in a grain of sand.”
Synecdoches aren’t just for referring to people either, you can also use them to reference something much more large scale, like in Christopher Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus:
“Was this the face that launched a thousand ships
and burnt the topless towers of Ilium?”
In two short lines, we have three synecdoches – the “face” being Helen of Troy, “a thousand ships” being the Greek armada sent against the city of Troy, and “topless towers” being Troy’s destruction. “Ten years of elaborate Greek mythology in three clear images: a face, a flotilla, and turrets set ablaze,” muses Forsyth.
If you were to try and use a synecdoche for a tagline (say a trailer for a Batman movie), it might look a little something like this:
“When wicked hands pry at the fearful heart of Gotham, the fists of justice and cowl of vengeance descend upon the night.”
It’s definitely more exciting to refer to villains as “wicked hands”, the innocents as “the fearful heart” and Batman as a pair of angry fists!
There are many ways to refer to something in English, but few are as unique as the methods we covered today. Trying to stylise a statement? Affirm it by denying the opposite using a litotes. Need a new way to refer to a person or group? Try a metonymy or synecdoche. Want to find out more ways to write eloquently? Well, then you’ll have to wait until the next chapter… but until then, check out some of our previous articles on Forsyth’s book linked below. Stay tuned!
Part 1 – Alliterations and assonance
Part 2 – Polyptotons, antitheses, merisms and blazons
Part 3 – Hyperbatons, anadiplosis and periodic sentences
Part 4 – Parataxis and hypotaxis
Part 5 – Diacopes and rhetorical questions
Part 6 – Hendiadyses, epistrophes and tricolons
Part 7 – Syllepses and iscolons
Part 8 – Enallages, versification and epizeuxes
Part 9 – Zeugmas and paradoxes
Part 10 – Chiasmus and catachresis