Adjectives and descriptions thicken up our stories. Most can be cut out without compromising key points, but their complete absence leaves our sentences empty and bareboned. Although English grammar and writing conventions have placed specific rules that dictate how adjectives and descriptions are to be used, what if we told you that it’s okay to break the rules in the name of eloquence? Join us once again as we venture into Mark Forsyth’s The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase to find out how to master writing!
Transferring attributes with epithets
Adjectives, or if you want to be very specific – epithets – are defined as a characterising words or phrases accompanying or occurring in place of a name of a person or thing. This means that we must choose from a certain bank of words when trying to describe a person or thing. Let’s say we’re talking about a man. We can say he’s tall, fat, lives in Florida, is non-religious, of low moral fibre, or even a fan of caffeine-free Coca-Cola. These are all acceptable because they are attributes of a person. Now let’s try with an inanimate object like a mug. A mug can be round, made of porcelain, plastered with pictures of cartoons, filled with lukewarm tea and shatter easily. What would happen if we swapped the adjectives for the man with the mug? Frankly, half of them wouldn’t make any sense – the lack of a nervous system means mugs can’t choose to like cola, and most people don’t crack and shatter when bumped off a table (well, literally speaking anyway).
With transferred epithets, adjectives and descriptors are no longer bound by standard rules of applicability – allowing you to intentionally apply adjectives to the “wrong” noun. “Instead of writing ‘the nervous man smoked a cigarette’, you write ‘the man smoked a nervous cigarette’,” describes Forsyth. “Cigarettes, of course, do not have feelings; yet we understand immediately what that second sentence means. A transferred epithet is a good thing, or, rather, a good epithet is a transferred thing.”
However, just because you can use transfer epithets, doesn’t mean that any adjective can be plopped down beside a noun. Let’s try an example where it works and doesn’t work:
· The antsy convenience store clerk twiddled his thumbs.
· The convenience store clerk twiddled his antsy thumbs.
· The thick necked convenience store clerk twiddled his thumbs.
· The convenience store clerk twiddled his thick necked thumbs.
Notice how the example with the transferred epithet doesn’t make much sense when dealing with anatomical descriptions, nor does it carry the same meaning as the original sentence. You could replace thick necked with a colour or shape and we’d also have the same problem. We find that transferred epithets work best when used with emotions, personality traits or behaviours. “Epithets are almost always transferred between humans and their surroundings, and it’s almost always a one-way street,” notes Forsyth. “The loneliness seeps through the soles of our shoes onto the road. Our clumsiness springs from our fingers onto the recalcitrant helmets. Wordsworth wrote of lonely rooms, but he never wrote about third-floor people containing en-suite bathrooms.”
Transferred epithets can also be thought of as a simple from of personification that “makes the world come alive.” One of Forsyth’s favourite examples can be found in Charles Dickens’ Great Expectations:
“Mr Jaggers never laughed; but he wore great bright creaking boots and, in poising himself on these boots, with his large head bent down and his eyebrows joined together, awaiting an answer he sometimes caused the boots to creak, as if they laughed in a dry and suspicious way.”
It’s easy to write about how a man like Mr Jaggers has no time for nonsense, but doing so wouldn’t be very creative. Instead, consider how Dickens describes and personifies the boots this man wears to contrast his character – it’d be too ordinary for him to wear polished and clean-cut shoes, so why not give him bright and creaking boots that laugh as he interrogates someone for answers? Describing the world around us is so much more exciting when you give it human features, wouldn’t you agree?
Pleonasms and redundantly redundant redundancies
With how much the world values conciseness (especially in marketing and daily life), lengthier sentences rarely get their chance to shine anymore. From that, we’ve also created the habit to permanently shun redundant words and phrases. However, there actually are legitimate tactics that involve the use of redundancies without being deemed insane – enter the pleonasm.
“Pleonasm is the use of unneeded words that are superfluous and unnecessary in a sentence that doesn’t require them,” explains Forsyth. “It’s repeating the same thing again twice, and it annoys and irritates people.” Why would anyone want to use a literary device intended to annoy? It certainly seems to do more harm than good, and given the importance of getting to the point, when would pleonasms ever be viable?
According to Forsyth, there are three forms of pleonasms – “the tiny, the lazy and the lovely”. Starting with the tiny, he suggests the following line from Psalm 121:
“I will lift up mine eyes unto the hill, from whence cometh my help.”
It sounds fine, right? “There are [even] some who would find the line inspiring,” he muses. However, if we scan through the line with the comb of conciseness, it is apparent that the line isn’t as pristine as it may seem. To lift is to raise something into the air, hence the following up is unnecessary. Whence means from where, so from from where would also be repulsive if we were to weed out the unconcise. Despite these faults, the line remains pleasant to read. That is the power of pleonasms – it has the ability to make redundancies eloquent.
Forsyth further points out that pleonasms are all around us. Even in marriage, the priest or officiator usually begins with a medley of pleonasms – usually along the lines of “dearly beloved, we are gathered together to join together xx and yy in matrimony”. If people were truly so disgusted by redundancies, every wedding would be a riot waiting to happen! No, people do not hate all redundancies. They just despise the second – the lazy that takes on the “adjective + noun” format.
“This is a world of personal friends, added bonuses and free gifts. They are annoying for two contradictory reasons: first of all, nobody talks like that, and secondly, everybody talks like that.” These are the examples that are needlessly redundant and should be axed. Redundant adjectives like free with gift, safe with haven or mutual with cooperation are worthless – not only do they fail to convey any additional detail, they do nothing for eloquence.
The final type of pleonasm is Forsyth’s favourite – the “lovely pleonasm of emphasis”. “A free gift may be put down to thoughtlessness, but ‘free, gratis and for nothing” is quite deliberate,” he writes. “It is the pneumatic drill of repetition that gives emphasis and insistence to the notion that you don’t have to pay a penny.” As we’ve discussed in past chapters, repetition is one of the most valuable and effective literary devices at our disposal. Is rhetoric not inherently redundant? So why not take rhetoric even further by exponentialising the repetition with pleonasms? Let’s try writing a short blurb for a brand of whitening beauty cream:
Bid adieu to dark tones with Walt’s Whitening Cream. No more will melanin cloud the lakes of purity with unsightly splotches and shades. Let only the light and bright remain.
We went a little overboard with the example, but look at the many ways we can express “whitening” without using the word more than once. For even greater emphasis on how repetition can work, Forsyth recommends watching Monty Python’s “Dead Parrot Sketch” – where John Cleese uses a total of 16 different ways to express how dead his recently purchased pet is. “This is pleonasm, but it’s pleonasm for an effect. The tragic truth of the parrot’s mortality can be communicated only through repetition.”
Adjectives and details don’t always have to be shoehorned into traditional English conventions. Try shaking things up and being intentionally heavy-handed with their usage – you might just discover the eloquent symphonies that transferred epithets and pleonasms are capable of! For more on Forsyth’s book, 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
Part 11 – Litotes, metonymies and synechdoches