English grammar.
A sprawling, unruly beast that is not unlike, in its whiles and wherefores, a Victorian dinner party where half the guests are fussy and overcomplicated whilst the other half are utterly unnecessary and either overlooked or overcooked.
We should all know the basics: nouns, verbs, adjectives-any writers staples.
Yet, lurking in the dusty corners of the language are grammatical oddities so obscure they make the semicolon look positively mainstream.
Ever heard of an paragoge? How about an tmesis?
No? Don’t worry. Neither do most people, and yet these peculiarities shape the way we speak and write every day. Today’s blog is all about them and some of their closely related cousins, sometimes delightfully unnecessary and occasionally baffling quirks of the English language.
And, I should add, tools for the everyday pedant that are beyond priceless.
Take the paragoge for example. It refers to the addition of an extra sound, syllable, or letter to the end of a word, often for poetic effect (eg) ‘whilst’, which is the archaic extension of ‘while’ and the much more obscure ‘withouten’, the Middle English version of ‘without’ which has seen the latter gain an extra syllable.
A tmesis is the insertion of one word or phrase inside another. So, for example, if you say ‘abso-bloody-lutely’ or ‘fan-bloody-tastic’ then you, dear reader, have employed a tmesis in your speech-and well done for that.
How about an anapodoton? That refers to a sentence fragment that implies a full expression but leaves it tantalisingly incomplete via the use of an ellipsis (three dots) at its termination. So, for example, ‘If looks could kill…’ or ‘Everyone knew what happened next…’
One of the most famous exponents of an epizeuxis is Sir Winston Churchill. Epizeuxis is the immediate repetition of a word in a sentence, for example, his oft-quote ‘Never never never give up’ or, to quote Samuel Taylor Coleridge in the Rime Of The Ancient Mariner, ‘Alone, alone, all all alone, alone on a wide, wide sea!’
Excess and epic epizeuxis you might say.
I find the use of crasis annoying. Maybe that’s my inner pedant? It’s the blending of two words into one, for example, ‘gonna’ instead of ‘going to’ or, the favourite of checkout staff around the country, ‘s’later’ instead of ‘see you later’.
How about a scesis onomaton?
This is a rhetorical device that I admit to being rather fond of myself, one that sees conjunctions and verbs deliberately omitted in order to create a sentence that has, particularly in isolation, a punchy effect.
Why, for example, write ‘It was very cold, dark and unerringly silent’ and hide it away in the middle of a paragraph when, it glorious isolation, you could simply use;
Cold. Dark. Silent.
Scesis onomaton, ladies and gentlemen… (he wrote, using a quick anapodoton in the process).
Hypotaxis is fun for the simple reason that the explanation behind it is complicated enough in itself.
It is the use of subordinate clauses in a sentence to create a layered, complex structure. A subordinate clause (also, to further complicate matters, called a dependent clause) is a group of words that contains a subject and a verb but does not express a complete thought, meaning it cannot stand alone as a sentence.
It depends on a main (independent) clause to make sense. So, for example, if someone says, ‘Because it was raining, we stayed indoors’, then the subordinate clause is ‘Because it was raining’ (it has a subject and verb but isn't a complete thought) and the main clause is ‘We stayed indoors" (a complete thought).
You may wish to have a quick lie down after that one.
I’ll bring things to an end with a touch of haplology-this is the omission of a repeated syllable in a word, something that is becoming more and more common in everyday speech as people economise on syllable use, presumably in fear of being charged for excess usage.
Thus ‘probably’ becomes ‘probly’ and ‘library’ becomes ‘libry’.
Which means the next time someone says to you ‘I can’t believe we’re in the middle of Febry’ already, you can astound and amaze them by complimenting them on their fine use of haplology.
Probly anyway…*
*Use of haplology and anapodoton in just two words.
