Glossary by John Eppel

A Glossary of Literary and Linguistic Terms - By John Eppel

Ablaut  /ˈɑb laʊt / 

This is also known as apophony. Take a verb in the present tense like ‘sing’ and change the vowel, ‘i’ into the vowel, ‘o’. The verb becomes a noun, ‘song’. Now change the vowel, ‘o’ into the vowel ‘a’. The noun becomes a verb in the past tense, ‘sang’. Change the vowel, ‘a’ into the vowel, ‘u’ and the verb becomes the past participle, ‘sung’. This is ablaut. Incidentally, ‘sung’ is not a variation of ‘sang’. It has to be accompanied by an auxiliary verb e.g. ‘He had sung the song before’.

Ablaut Reduplication refers to the instinctive order of vowels in certain phrases. The pattern is ‘I’ followed by ‘A’ followed by ‘O’, as in ‘hic, haec, hoc’ (English speakers tend to pronounce ‘haec’ as ‘hac’). Two-word ablauts always begin with ‘I’ e.g. ‘ping pong’, ‘click clack’, ‘sing song’. This points to Noam Chomsky’s theory that language acquisition is innate (see Language Acquisition Device).

Acatalexis  /eɪˌkæt lˈɛk sis / 

This word, derived from Greek, means ‘not stopping short’. It is used in prosody, the theory and practice of making poems. It describes a line of poetry that has a complete foot at the end of it. A foot is one accented syllable with one or more unaccented syllables. The most common foot in English poetry is the iamb - an unaccented syllable followed by an accented syllable. Five of these in a line of verse make up a pentameter. Take, for example, the opening line of Shakespeare’s sonnet 18:

Shall I / compare / thee to / a sum / mer’s day?/

This is an example of iambic pentameter; and it is acatalectic because the last foot on the line - ‘mer’s day’ is complete.

A line that ends with an incomplete foot is called ‘catalectic’ (‘stopping short’). Many of the witches’ lines in Macbeth are catalectic, to make them more stressful, more like incantations:

When shall / we three / meet a / gain /

It’s not only catalexis that gives sinister force to the witches’ lines, but we will consider trochees, tetrameter and rhyme lower down the alphabet.

Acquisition of language by teenagers

Although children develop language fluency well before adolescence, their oral and written language use evolves over the teen years. This is when abstract thinking improves, and when there is a deeper understanding of figurative language and idioms. Furthermore, adolescents are capable of detecting, and responding to forms of irony like sarcasm.

Key Aspects

Influence of social media: according to Jean Gross, social media have led teenagers to pare down their daily vocabulary to 800 words from an average store of 40 000 words. This does not stop them from being fluent conversationalists.

Class pressure: in a Detroit high school study, Penelope Eckert distinguishes between ‘jocks’ and ‘burn-outs’ (and a few in-betweens outside the hegemony). ‘Jocks’ hold on to middle-class values, which benefit from the corporate organization of education. They will go on to white collar jobs. They speak standard American English. ‘Burn-outs’ hold on to a working class culture. They resist corporate norms and will go on to blue collar jobs. They speak non-standard American English.

Code-switching: moving backwards and forwards between different registers of formality depending on the audience, e.g. close friend or teacher (see Howard Giles and Communication Accommodation Theory).

Peer pressure: teenagers in English cities achieve group identity by speaking a patois, the dialect of a particular group, especially one with low status in relation to the standard language. Jamaican creole (patwah) is very influential, especially when it comes via reggae and rap.

Slang: teenagers are factories of slang generation. Here are some examples: awks –awkward; cheddar – money; dope - cool or awesome. GOAT - Greatest of all time; Gucci - good or cool; lit - amazing. Like patois, it acts as an identity marker for groups, and is used either for inclusion or exclusion. Slang comes and goes with every generation.

In teenagers there is less activity in the brain's temporal lobe, which is associated with language development, and more activity in the frontal lobe, which is associated with cognition.

Acronym  /ˈæk rə nɪm / 

The town in South Africa called Soweto is an acronym for South-western township. Gif is an acronym for Graphics interchange format, Scuba for Self-contained underwater breathing apparatus. A word formed from the initial letters of a group of words is an acronym. The media nowadays is more than cluttered with these lazy words.

Adjacency pair  /əˈdʒeɪ sən si  pɛər / 

When a tag is responded to you have an adjacency pair. It is the start of turn-taking in conversation. Greetings nearly always lead to an adjacency pair, for example:

‘Hullo, how are you?’

‘Fine, thank you.’

Transactions are full of adjacency pairs, for example:

‘I’d like a milkshake, please.’

‘Sure. Coming up.’

If a complaint is followed by a denial, you have an adjacency pair:

‘You broke my vase.’

‘No, I didn’t.’

These are a few examples of standard reactions in conversation, known, in linguistic terminology, as adjacency pairs.

Agenda setting  /əˈdʒɛn də  ˈsɛt ɪŋ / 

When one speaker decides what the main topic of a conversation will be.

Allegory  /ˈæl əˌgɔr i / 

One of the most self-conscious forms of creative writing is allegory. An allegory is an extended metaphor, which tells two stories at the same time. One of the stories is simple to understand, the other is more difficult – but also more important. The parables of Jesus are allegories; the fables of Aesop are allegories; the most famous allegory in English literature is Pilgrim’s Progress by John Bunyan, where the main character, Christian, encounters such obstacles as Vanity Fair and the Slough of Despond. You are probably more familiar with the Narnia series by C.S. Lewis, or 'Animal Farm' by George Orwell, which is also a satire. Another famous allegory, and another satire is 'Gulliver’s Travels', written by the Irish priest, Jonathan Swift.

In an allegory the second story, which carries the 'message', is partially hidden behind the first story, and the problem with this is that it can be interpreted in different ways. People sometimes find allegorical meanings in writing that was never intended to be allegorical. This is especially so with sacred texts like the Bible. The “Song of Solomon”, which is a celebration of sexual love, is allegorized by both Jews and Christians. Jews interpret it as God’s love for Israel while Christians interpret it as Christ’s love for the Church.

Allegories can be visual too. The statue at the entrance to New York harbour is an allegory of liberty. A pair of scales is an allegory (or symbol, or emblem) of justice. An old man with a long beard and a scythe in his hand, is an allegory of time. Can you think of any other examples?

In written allegories abstract concepts like good and evil are given human shape: they are personified, as in morality plays like 'Everyman', where characters have names like Good Deeds, Mercy, and Pity.

Ngugi wa Thi’ongo uses many literary devices in his novel, 'A Grain of Wheat', including allegory. Here, the character, Gatu is condemning imperialism in the form of allegory:-

'I was born in a valley. The grass in the valley – man, it was big And green-rich. The sun shone daily. And the rain also fell and Fruit trees sprung from the earth. I often lay in the sun on the Grass, a piece of fruit in my hand, and listened to the running stream and the wild animals. Nobody knew of this valley and I knew no fears. Then one day I was surprised to get an unexpected visitor. Can you guess who? Anyway, you can imagine my surprise when I saw the famous Queen – Queen of England. She said (mimics her voice): Why are you living in this dark place? It is like a cold dark cell in prison.” I lay there on the grass. I could see she was quite surprised, naturally, because I was not impressed with her blood-stained lips. “I like it where I am,” I told her and went on lying on the ground.'

Here is an allegorical poem called “Pain” by Mbella Sonne Dipoko. Allegories are particularly popular with African poets: they are one way of dealing with colonial conquest and its aftermath. It can also be a way of getting through subversive messages without being detected by authorities who haven’t been trained to read between the lines!

PAIN

All was quiet in this park

Until the wind, like a gasping messenger, announced

The tyrant’s coming.

Then did the branches talk in agony.

You remember that raging storm?

In their fear despairing flowers nevertheless held 

Bouquets to the grim king;

Meteors were the tassels of his crown

While the branches that only spoke when the storm menaced

We cried in agony as we fell

Slashed by the cold blade of an invisible sword.

Mutilated our limbs were swept away by the rain

But not our blood;

Indelible, it stuck on the walls

Like wild gum on tree trunks.

This is an allegory of colonial conquest, but it ends on a positive note, reminding the reader of that famous protest line: 'We shall overcome'.

'This park' is Africa. Notice, he doesn’t call it a jungle! A park has connotations of civilized order. The 'tyrant' and 'grim king' is colonialism. The branches and the flowers are the indigenous Africans. In the final stanza, the use of the word 'limbs' is interesting because it synthesises the two stories: a limb is the branch of a tree as well as a human arm or leg. The real story peeps through the surface story when the word 'blood' (not 'sap') is mentioned; then we make a partial return to the surface story with the final simile: 'Like wild gum on tree-trunks’.

Alliteration  /əˌlɪt əˈreɪ ʃən /

We sometimes forget that the sound of poetry is just as important as its sense. In the best poems they merge: ‘I am soft sift in an hour glass’ (Gerard Manley Hopkins). Alliteration, like rhyme, assonance, and onomatopoeia, is essentially a sound effect. Nursery rhymes and nonsense poems are full of alliteration, a form of repetition where clusters of words begin with the same letters or the same sounds. Both examples occur in the above quote: ‘soft sift’; ‘ am…an hour’.

Also known as head rhyme, alliteration was a required feature of Germanic poetry like Anglo Saxon and early Middle English. Here is a Modern English translation of an extract from a famous Anglo Saxon epic called ‘Beowulf’:

Then they bore him over to ocean’s billow, 

loving clansmen, as late he charged them, 

while wielded words the winsome Scyld, 

the leader beloved who long had ruled.... 

In the roadstead rocked a ring-dight vessel, 

ice-flecked, outbound, atheling’s barge: 

there laid they down their darling lord 

on the breast of the boat, the breaker-of-rings, 

by the mast the mighty one. Many a treasure 

fetched from far was freighted with him.

Notice the alliteration in every single line. It adds muscularity to the verse, which you don’t often find in softer languages like Italian and IsiNdebele.

One of my favourite examples of alliteration is from Coleridge’s ballad, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’:

The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

The furrow followed free;

We were the first that ever burst

Into that silent sea.

The use of alliteration seems natural in English; you see it in newspaper headlines; in collocations like ‘time and tide’, ‘hale and hearty’; in book titles like ‘The Pickwick Papers’ and ‘Sense and Sensibility; in similes like ‘fit as a fiddle’ and ‘flat as a flounder’. Its effect is mainly decorative but it can add emphasis to an image: ‘Good things of day begin to droop and drowse…’ (Macbeth).

Allusion  /əˈlu ʒən / 

A reference in a literary text to another text, like the Bible. A similar word is intertextuality. Most allusions are subconscious. Conscious allusions are not to be confused with plagiary. The writer expects their reader to recognize the other text, and appreciate its often ironic function.

Here is an example where T.S. Eliot alludes to Chaucer, and I allude to Eliot:

Whan that Aprill with shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote….

[from ‘The Canterbury Tales’]

April is the cruelest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land….

[from ‘The Waste Land’]

April is the coolest month, breeding tooth-

Picks out of the drying soil.

[from ‘April in Bulawayo’]

Ambiguity  /ˌæm bɪˈgju ɪ ti / 

Words, phrases, and entire statements that can have more than one meaning. Ambiguity outside literature has more negatives than positives (and most of the positives have to do with humour). It often leads to misunderstanding and even confusion. Consider homophones like ‘they’re’, ‘there’, ‘their’; ‘two’, ‘too’, ‘to’; ‘reign’, ‘rain’, ‘rein’. Or paradox words like ‘buckle’, ‘still’, and ‘draw’ (the curtain). And what about puns: ‘Our cemetery is located in the dead centre of town’.

If William Empson could locate seven types of ambiguity in a Shakespeare sonnet, postmodernism locates an infinite number. In literature, especially poetry, ambiguity enriches the text. When Keats advised Shelley to be ‘more of an artist, and load every rift of your subject with ore’, be assured, he included ambiguity in that ore.

Linguists identify five types of ambiguity:-

Lexical, for example, homonyms. Complete homonyms have the same spelling and the same pronunciation, e.g. the 'bank' where your salary is deposited and the 'bank' of a river. Partial homonyms include homophones where the pronunciation is the same but the spelling is different, e.g. 'male' and 'mail'; and homographs where the spelling is the same but the pronunciation is different, e.g. 'tear' (teardrop) and 'tear' (rip).

Structural, for example, 'The chickens are ready to eat'. Here, the entire sentence is ambiguous.

Referential, for example, 'Susan loves her pet'. Here the pronoun is ambiguous.

Scope, for example 'Two boys have two pets'. Here two quantifiers have scope over each other.

Pragmatic, for example, 'I've got news for you'. Is this a threat or a promise? This type of ambiguity is context dependent.

Ambivalent feelings /æmˈbɪv ə lənt ˈfi lɪŋz /

Mixed feelings (like and dislike) of a reader or an audience for a literary character, or of one literary character for another. Complex (or ‘round’) characters, like Hamlet tend to generate mixed feelings, while simple (or ‘flat’) characters don’t. For instance we tend to dislike a purely wicked character like Fagin in ‘Oliver Twist’; and we tend to like a purely good character like Joe in ‘Great Expectations’.

Hamlet has ambivalent feelings for his mother; Ophelia has ambivalent feelings for Hamlet. This happens in real life too, especially among family and friends. Ambivalence, like ambiguity, complicates and therefore enriches any text, any relationship.

Amphibrach  /ˈæm fəˌbræk /

A rare metrical foot consisting of two unstressed syllables on either side of a stressed syllable, for example, in the word, ‘determine’. In a world where there are many Englishes, these aspects of prosody become problematic because words are stressed in different ways. Most Zimbabweans stress the third syllable in ‘determine’, which would make it an anapaest.

For some reason, the amphibrach has found a home in rude songs and limericks. The most well known is ‘There once was’. Browning’s poem, ‘How they brought the Good News from Ghent to Aix’ is often scanned as anapaestic, but what makes these horses gallop is the amphibrach:

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he;

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three.

Amphimacer  /æmˈfɪm ə sər /

Even rarer than its opposite (see above), the amphimacer is a three-syllable foot with two stressed syllables on either side of an unstressed syllable, e.g. ‘hit the ball’, ‘best of luck’. ‘bugger off’. I’m sure there must be some examples from the poets - try Tennyson - but I can’t find any.

Anachronism  /əˈnæk rəˌnɪz əm /

Something in a text that is out of its time, for example the clock in 'Julius Caesar', or the fact that one of the disciples in Salvador Dali’s painting of the Last Supper, is wearing spectacles. The first example is probably carelessness on Shakespeare’s part; the second is deliberate. Dali is showing that his subject is for all time.

Anacoluthon  /ˌæn ə kəˈlu θɒn /

It is common in speech for people to break off what they are saying because another idea has struck them in mid utterance. Anacoluthon can be accidental as in non sequiturs or deliberate as in stream of consciousness writing, or advertising, for example: 'Camel - the taste.’

Anagnorisis  /ˌæn ægˈnɔr ə sɪs /

Recognition. According to Aristotle a tragic character must recognize his hamartia (his flaw) before he dies, in order to achieve catharsis (where pity and fear are reconciled in an epiphany experienced by the audience). Here is Othello’s anagnorisis:

…then you must speak

Of one that lov’d not wisely, but too well;

Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought,

Perplex’d in the extreme….

Analogy  /əˈnæl ə dʒi / 

An extended simile. For example, ‘The way ZANUPF governs is reminiscent of a gardener sweeping leaves on a windy day’. The two things being compared here are very different, but they have striking similarities. Here it is being compressed towards a simile in the form of a slightly rearranged haiku:

Governing in Africa

is like sweeping leaves

on a windy day

Is an analogy a figure of speech?

Although analogies operate like similes in that they find similarities in differences, they are not metaphorical; that is they don't require an imaginative leap to be understood. Consider, for example, the simile, 'He is as slippery as a fish' (the idiom is 'eel'). The meaning is not immediately apparent (especially without a context). Now consider the analogy in the following extract from an essay by George Orwell:

'They crowded very close about him, with their hands always on him in a careful, caressing grip, as though all the while feeling him to make sure he was there. It was like men handling a fish which is still alive and may jump back into the water.’

Anapaest  /ˈæn əˌpɛst / 

A three syllable foot more common than the amphibrach and the amphimacer, of two unstressed syllables followed by one stressed syllable, e.g. ‘interrupt’, ‘Are you mad?’ The word ‘anapaest’ is an anapaest. Lord Byron’s poem, ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’, is largely anapaestic. Here is the opening stanza:

The Assyrian came down like the wolf on the fold,

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;

And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.

As you can hear, the anapaest speeds up the action, giving it, in this context, a galloping effect.

Anaphora  /əˈnæf ər ə / 

A form of repetition where succeeding sentences or clauses begin with the same word or phrase. Dickens uses it to open his novel, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’:

‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom, it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of incredulity, it was the season of light, it was the season of darkness, it was the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair….’

It evokes a horse-drawn carriage going at breakneck speed, which is its context. Notice how Dickens omits necessary semicolons so that the clauses kind of tumble into each other. The style here alludes to that great passage in the Bible:

‘To every thing there is a season, and a time to every purpose under the heaven: a time to be born, and a time to die; a time to plant, and a time to pluck up that which has been planted; a time to kill, and a time to heal; a time to break down, and a time to build up; a time to weep, and a time to laugh; a time to mourn and a time to dance….’

Notice how the semicolons slow the pace right down, so now we get a sense, not of horses galloping, but of mortality.

Anaphoric reference /ˌæn əˈfɔr ɪk ˈrɛf ər əns / 

Where the noun precedes the pronoun e.g. ‘Mpho (noun) took me to his (pronoun) house.

Angst  /æŋst /

A German word, which has come to mean something between anxiety and dread, and which you can sense in Hamlet’s words: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question’. According to European philosophers like Kierkegaard (Danish), Nietzsche (German), Heidegger (German), Sartre (French/German) it’s a mood that pervades the lives of people who experience, paradoxically, the bondage of being released into a godless world. It is often accompanied, somewhat redundantly, by the epithet, ‘existential’. Apparently it is quite common for those who have lost God to see life as pointless, even absurd.

Here is the Russian author, Dostoyevsky (a profound Christian), describing a mood of angst in his novel, ‘The Brothers Karamazov’:

‘If you were to destroy in mankind the belief in immortality not only love but every living force maintaining the life of the world would at once be dried up. Moreover, nothing then would be immoral, everything would be permissible, even cannibalism.’

Anthropomorphize: why toddlers do this  /ˌæn θrə pəˈmɔ faɪz /

To attribute human characteristics to animals or objects like toys.

According to Piaget, young children go through stages of cognitive development: they don't think like adults. During Piaget's pre-operational stage (ages 2 to 5), they attribute mental lives to their toys.

Our toddler granddaughter is at this stage, and it is my observation that she goes further than attributing 'mental lives' to her toys; she anthropomorphizes them, gives them human qualities.

Studies show that toys with human features are more likely to become the toddler's special toy, the attachment object. More rarely it could be a blanket or a dinky car. Toddlers spend a lot of time conversing with these special objects (conversing, not monologuing). They provide an emotional bond, a feeling of security, when the toddler feels lonely, bed time, for example.

This behaviour should not surprise us. After all, lonely adults anthropomorphize their pets. And who among us has not anthropomorphised abstractions like good and evil?

Antimeria (or verbing)  /æn tə ‘mɛə ri ə /

Using nouns as verbs is commonplace these days, and is often looked down upon by pedants, but Shakespeare did it a lot in his plays. Here are some striking examples:

‘sharked up a list of lawless resolutes’ [Hamlet]

‘Grace me no grace, nor uncle me no uncle’ [Richard 11]

‘I had rather have one scratch my head in the sun

When the alarum were struck, than idly sit

To hear my nothings monstered.’ [Coriolanus]

Antithesis (stress the second syllable)  / ænˈtɪθ ə sɪs /

A sentence or a clause that is balanced by contrasting ideas usually separated by a comma or a semicolon: ‘It was the best of times, it was the worst of times’. The adjective is ‘antithetical’. This rhetorical device was very popular with English writers of the 18th Century, like Alexander Pope (‘To err is human, to forgive, divine’) and Jane Austen (‘Your mother will never see you again if you do not marry Mr Collins, and I will never see you again if you do’).

In philosophy, especially after Hegel, it is part of a dialectic, where it opposes the thesis in a process of formal reasoning until a synthesis or agreement is reached.

If I call my thesis an eagle, and my antithesis a serpent, my synthesis might, by a dialectical process, become a dragon!

Antonym  /ˈæn tə nɪm /

Because English is a binary language, many words have opposites, for instance ‘good’ is the opposite of ‘evil’; ‘love’ is the opposite of ‘hate’. These are antonyms.

Aphorism  /ˈæf əˌrɪz əm /

A wise saying, like a proverb, for example: ‘Three people can keep a secret only if two of them are dead’. African oral tradition (before stories were written down) is rich in Aphorisms. Chinua Achebe peppers his writings with aphorisms and other features of orature like fables, songs, and declamations. He introduces these as a deliberately uneasy counterbalance to the written literary genres of Europe.

In a novel like ‘No Longer at Ease’, Achebe registers his personal unease by adopting, via his semi-autobiographical protagonist, Obi, a self-mocking tone. Here I am, he suggests, exposing the evils of the West by using that most European of genres, the novel. And if that’s not enough, I’m writing in the language of my colonizers. And if that’s still not enough, my epigraph is a quotation from a poem by an Anglo-American author, T.S. Eliot. Perhaps he had in mind Caliban’s words to his colonizer, Prospero, in Shakespeare’s play, ‘The Tempest’:

You taught me language; and my profit on’t

is I know how to curse; the red plague rid you

for learning me your language.

Here is an aphorism from ‘No longer at Ease’, which exemplifies the idea that if your are going to take a bribe, make sure it’s a worthwhile one: ‘But we have a saying that if you want to eat a toad you should look for a fat and juicy one’.

Apocalyptic /əˌpɒk əˈlɪp tɪk /

In literature, a style that resembles the hyperbolic language of the apocalypse in the Bible, especially the Book of Revelations, announcing that the sinful world is about to end. Curiously, the apocalyptic message is not always negative, since it can look forward to a new, better world, a world, say, without weapons of mass destruction, without climate-changing pollution, without big banks.

An apocalyptic poem that immediately comes to mind is ‘The Second Coming’ by W.B. Yeats, but here is an example from a lesser known poet, Gillian Clarke, who is lamenting the destruction of nature by oil spills:

For the burnt earth and the sun put out,

the scalded ocean and the blazing well.

For vengeance, and the ashes of language.

Apollonian and Dionysian  /ˌæp əˈloʊ ni ən /  &  /ˌdaɪ əˈnɪʃ ən /

A useful though simplistic way of understanding complex characters in literature. The idea is derived from Nietzsche. The Apollonian refers to rational behaviour, the Dionysian to instinctive behaviour. In Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’ the Apollonian nature is exemplified by the Roman, Octavius Caesar, while the Dionysian is exemplified by the Egyptian, Cleopatra. Mark Antony, the Roman lover of Cleopatra, is torn between the two. The Apollonian is frequently associated with masculinity and the celestial (golden), the Dionysian, antithetically, with femininity and the chthonic (red). If you mix red and gold you get orange or saffron, a colour which teeters on the threshold of hermaphroditism. When Cassio calls Desdemona ‘perfection’ he is alluding to the fact that she is both female and male: on Shakespeare’s stage, a boy disguised as a young woman. Robert Louis Stevenson’s psychological thriller, ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ clearly dramatises this duality. The dangers of it are that we tend to think, in a scientific age, of the Apollonian as angelic and the Dionysian as diabolical. Philosophers are troubled by it; poets relish it.

Aporia  /əˈpɔr i ə /

A hole in the text, either deliberate or accidental, or ambiguous. For example, when Lady Macbeth faints, we don’t know for certain whether she is faking it. When she and her husband are planning to murder King Duncan, Macbeth says, at one point, ‘What if we should fail?’ His wife’s reply, in some editions of the play, is ‘We fail.’ In other editions it is ‘We fail!’ In yet others it is ‘We fail?’ Which one did Shakespeare intend? The different punctuation marks alter the meaning considerably.

Arguably the most famous aporia in Shakespeare is Hamlet’s soliloquy, which begins: ‘To be or not to be, that is the question.’ If Hamlet was less of a philosopher and more of a poet (like his creator) he might have supplied a satisfactory answer to the question. The closest he gets is ‘The readiness is all’. Shakespeare’s implied answer to the question is to change the conjunction ‘or’ to the conjunction ‘and’. A paradox!

Aposiopesis  /ˌæp əˌsaɪ əˈpi sɪs /

A break in a sentence, which suggests that the speaker is overcome, with emotion or intellectual doubt. Here it it helps to dramatise King Lear’s uncontrollable anger with his daughters, Goneril and Regan:

I will have revenges on you both

That all the world shall - I will do such things -

What they are yet, I know not; but they shall be

The terrors of the earth!

Aposiopesis is usually indicated by a dash or three dots.

Appearance versus Reality

Probably the most common theme in the plays of Shakespeare, and treated far more subtly than you might think. Take, for example, the caskets in ‘The Merchant of Venice’. On the surface they suggest that we mustn’t judge by appearances: ‘All that glisters is not gold’. The gold and silver caskets are the wrong choice for suitors to win the hand of Portia; the lead casket is the right choice. But at another level, a more moral level, the shiny caskets are the right choice, the dull casket the wrong. In the gold casket the skull reminds us that we are not immortal; in the silver casket, the fool’s head warns us against folly. In the lead casket we find Portia, who demonstrates to the audience over and over again that, while she possesses many treasures upon earth, her character ‘glisters’. Yes, she is beautiful and witty and generous, but below the surface she is capricious, wanton, and merciless.

We have to bear this complexity in mind when we judge the character of Shylock.

A priori, a posteriori (from what comes before and from what comes after)  /ˌeɪ praɪˈɔr aɪ / &   /ˌeɪ pɒˌstɪər iˈɔr aɪ /

Useful latin terms to distinguish, somewhat simplistically for the benefit of a secondary school audience, religious from scientific reasoning. An a priori (or deductive) argument goes from the general, God made the world, to the particular; thus a bird in flight, like Gerard Manley Hopkin’s ‘Windhover’, is a manifestation of God in nature. It supports the assumption that God exists. An a posteriori (or inductive) argument goes from the particular to the general, and is known as the scientific method: that bird in flight is awesome:

‘Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!’

Thus, only God could have created it. Religious reasoning, as the above example shows, has the flexibility to use both methods; scientific reasoning only works backward from effect to cause, from a particular case to a general rule.

Archaism  /ˈɑr keɪˌɪz əm /

Old fashioned words like ‘eftsoons’. In this extract from ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge (written in 1798) it means ‘immediately’:

He holds him with his skinny hand,

‘There was a ship,’ quoth he.

‘Hold off! unhand me, grey-beard loon!’

Eftsoons his hand drops he.

The word ‘quoth’ (for ‘said’) is also an archaism.

Archetypes  /ˈɑr kɪˌtaɪps /

Symbols or themes that have a wide, even universal, recognition, like an eagle or the quest. They are powerful because they originate in the sub-conscious. Some of them are paradoxes, for example, fire symbolises both purity and lust (at least according to St Augustine). In literature there are also archetypal characters like the clown, and settings like a wilderness. They tend to recur in a given work of art, and are then called motifs. The blood archetype (a life/death paradox) occurs multiple times in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’: ‘It will have blood, they say; blood will have blood’.

Assonance  /ˈæs ə nəns /

Similarity of vowel sounds in close proximity, not to be confused with rhyme. For example, ‘snug as a gun’ (Seamus Heaney) is assonance, but ‘snug as a bug’ (anonymous) is rhyme. With rhyme, the end letters are the same.

Assonance is problematic because different Englishes pronounce vowels in different ways. The North American ‘a’ in ‘tomato’ is pronounced ‘ay’; the standard English ‘a’ is pronounced ‘ah’. The Zimbabwean ‘u’ in ‘urge’ is pronounced ‘eh’; the standard English ‘u’ is pronounced ‘er’.

Asynchronous communication  /eɪˈsɪŋ krə nəs/  /kəˌmyu nɪˈkeɪ ʃən /

When there is a delay in the communication between the text and the receiver of the text e.g. a letter, which has to be posted.

Atmosphere  /ˈæt məsˌfɪə /

The writer’s presentation of the outside world to complement (or contrast) a character’s inner feelings. Frequently paired with ‘mood’. T. S. Eliot called it the ‘objective correlative’. If personification is involved, it is sometimes called the ‘pathetic fallacy’, after John Ruskin.

Here is an example from the beginning of Charles Dickens’ novel, ‘Great Expectations’:

‘... and that the dark flat wilderness beyond the churchyard, intersected with dykes and mounds and gates, with scattered cattle feeding on it, was the marshes; and that the low leaden line beyond, was the river; and that the distant savage lair from which the wind was rushing, was the sea; and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.’

Audience  /ˈɔ di əns /

The listeners or readers of a text.

Babbling /ˈbæb lɪŋ /

This is the first stage of language acquisition. Babies from birth to about 11 months make sounds rather than words, which make primitive communications. 

Back-channel  / bæk ˈtʃæn əl /

This is common with phone conversations. They are sounds and words from the listener to indicate to the speaker that the former is paying attention in a cooperative manner, encouraging the speaker to go on. Some examples are ‘uhuh’, ‘mmm’, ‘really’, ‘right’, ‘ja’ ‘i know’. They tend to overlap (//) the speaker’s utterances:

so i says (.) i says

//

mmm

//

i says (.) erm (.) i will no longer tolerate this attitude (1) its too bad (.) too bad

//

ja

you have no respect for your elders (.) no respect whatsoever (.) i

//

really

Speech cannot be punctuated in the same way writing is punctuated. At the end of a transcript there will be a key, something like this:

(.) = micro-pause

(1)= longer pause

// = speech overlap

Backformation  / bæk fɔrˈmeɪ ʃən /

A word, usually shortened, from its origin e.g. ‘pram’ from perambulator; ‘bus’ from ‘omnibus’.

Ballads  /ˈbæl ədz /

Songs which tell a simple story usually of love or war or the supernatural. They often use dialogue, which gives them a dramatic quality, and they often have a refrain (or chorus). There are basically two types of ballads. A folk ballad is a communal creation passed down orally from one generation to another. It may, therefore, exist in more than one version. A literary ballad is an imitation of a folk ballad and is written by a single author. Here is an extract, in modern English, from a well known folk ballad, ‘Barbara Allen’:

Slowly slowly she got up

Slowly slowly she came nigh him

And the only words to him she said

Young man I think you're dying

...

As she was walking o’er the fields

She heard the death bell knelling

And every stroke it seemed to say

Hardhearted Barbara Allen

And here is an extract from a literary ballad (on a similar theme) called ‘La Belle Dame Sans Merci’ by John Keats:

I see a lily on thy brow,

With anguish moist and fever dew,

And in thy cheeks a fading rose

Fast withereth too.

...

I met a lady in the meads

Full beautiful - a fairy’s child;

Her hair was long, her foot was light,

And her eyes were wild.

Ballads come in many forms but the most usual is a four-line stanza (or quatrain) with the first and third lines slightly longer (eight syllables) than the second and fourth (seven syllables). The shorter lines usually rhyme.

Bard  /bɑrd /

When poets in Celtic cultures had status (a long long time ago), they were known as bards. Its most common meaning today is as a metonym for Shakespeare, the bard of Avon. Excessive worship of Shakespeare is known as bardolatry. Because the greatest poet in the English language was white and male, many contemporary literary theorists go to a lot of trouble to expunge him from his plays. This is known as Bardicide.

Here is William Blake, from his Introduction to ‘Songs of Experience’:

‘Hear the voice of the Bard!

Who Present, Past & Future sees,

Whose ears have heard

The Holy Word

That walked among the ancient trees,

Calling the lapsed Soul,

And weeping in the evening dew,

That might control

The starry pole

And fallen fallen light renew.’

Bathos /ˈbeɪ θɒs/

Going from the sublime to the ridiculous - accidentally or deliberately. The word was coined by the satirical poet, Alexander Pope, to describe these lapses amongst contemporary poets:

‘Where’er you find “the cooling western breeze”,

In the next line, it “whispers through the trees”:

If crystal streams “with pleasing murmurs creep”,

The reader’s threatened, not in vain, with “sleep”.’

Pope uses bathos deliberately as a tool of satire, for example here, in ‘The Rape of the Lock’ (the title itself is bathetic):

‘Whether the nymph shall break Diana’s law,

Or some frail china jar receive a flaw;

Or stain her honour, or her new brocade;

Forget her prayers, or miss a masquerade;

Or lose her heart, or necklace, at a ball.’

Here is a prose example of bathos (also sometimes called ‘anticlimax’): ‘In the disaster, he lost his family, his fortune, and his toothpick’.

Beast fable /‘bist ˈfeɪ bəl /

Allegories from an oral tradition that use personified animal characters in entertaining stories which teach a community how to behave. In the European tradition, Aesop comes to mind. The story of the hare and the tortoise teaches us the moral: ‘slow and steady wins the race’, or, more succinctly: ‘look before you leap’. Different fables can teach completely opposite morals. If you dig around you’re likely to find one that warns: ‘he who hesitates is lost’.

Originally from the Asante people of Ghana, Anansi trickster tales were brought to the Caribbean and beyond by African slaves. In the United States they became the Brer Rabbit stories told by Uncle Remus. Ezra Pound’s pet name for T.S. Eliot, ‘Old Possum’, comes from these stories.

One advantage, these days, of using animal instead of human characters (see, especially, little children’s books) is that it helps avoid political incorrectness.

Behaviourism  /bɪˈheɪvjəˌrɪzəm /

See Reinforcement theory.

Bildungsroman  /ˈbɪl dʊŋz roʊˌmɑn /

Novels like ‘David Copperfield’, ‘Jane Eyre’, and ‘Nervous Conditions’, which develop a character’s search for identity from childhood through adolescence to adulthood. The German word means something like ‘formation novel’. Here is the opening sentence of ‘David Copperfield’:

‘Whether I shall turn out to be the hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else, these pages [about 800] will show.’

Black comedy  /blæk ˈkɒm ɪ di /

Treating morbid subjects like death and disease in an amusing way, usually to point a moral, but sometimes to deliberately offend. It was coined by the French academic, Andre Breton, who applied it to the writings of the Irish satirist, Jonathan Swift. Swift’s infamous essay, ‘A Modest Proposal’, in which he advocates the eating of unwanted babies to solve the hunger crisis in Ireland, is a potent example of black comedy. Here is a sample:

‘...always advising the mother to let them suck plentifully in the last month, so as to render them plump and fat for a good table. A child will make two dishes at an entertainment for friends; and when the family dines alone, the fore or hind quarter will make a reasonable dish, and seasoned with a little pepper or salt will be very good boiled on the fourth day, especially in winter.’

The term, for an obvious reason, has become politically incorrect, and the synonymous ‘gallows humour’ is now preferred.

Blank verse  /blæŋk vɜrs /

Unrhymed lines of five beats with a dominant pattern of unstressed/stressed syllables (iambic pentameter). Some of the greatest poetry in English has been written in blank verse, which was first used by a minor English poet called Henry Howard. It has the threshold strength of not quite spilling over into prose and not quite slipping back into lyric.

Here is Wordsworth at his very best:

‘And I have felt

A presence that disturbs me with the joy

Of elevated thoughts; a sense sublime

Of something far more deeply interfused,

Whose dwelling is the light of setting suns,

And the round ocean and the living air,

And the blue sky, and in the mind of man:

A motion and a spirit, that impels

All thinking things, all objects of all thought,

and rolls through all things.’

Blending /’blɛn dɪŋ /

When the beginning of one word is joined to the end of another to form a new word. So ‘smog’ is a combination of ‘smoke’ and ‘fog’; ‘brunch’ is a combination of ‘breakfast’ and ‘lunch’.

Bombast  /ˈbɒm bæst /

Empty rhetoric. Listen to almost any politician and you will hear bombast. Here is Slackbridge, a hypocritical trade-unionist in Dickens’ novel ‘Hard Times’, in the process of fleecing impoverished factory workers:

‘“Oh my friends, the down-trodden operatives of Coketown! Oh my friends and fellow countrymen, the slaves of an iron-handed and a grinding despotism! Oh my friends and fellow-sufferers, and fellow work-men, and fellow-men. I tell you that the hour is come, when we must rally round one another as One united power, and crumble into dust the oppressors that too long have battened upon the plunder of our families, upon the sweat of our brows, upon the labour of our hands, upon the strength of our sinews, upon the God-created glorious rights of Humanity, and upon the holy and eternal privileges of brotherhood!”’

Bombast is an example of a dead metaphor. In Elizabethan times it was cloth, usually cotton, used as padding for the doublet and hose of fashionable men; so it is an appropriate word for shallow ideas dressed in impressive-sounding language.

Borrowing  /ˈbɒr oʊ ɪŋ /

One of the reasons that the English language is alive and well is that it borrows (some would say ‘steals’) words from other languages. ‘Safari’, for example, is borrowed from Swahili; ‘donga’ is borrowed from Zulu; ‘veld’ is borrowed from Afrikaans.

Broadening / ˈbrɔd n ɪŋ /

See ‘Semantic widening’.

Bowdleriize  / ˈboʊd ləˌraɪz /

To remove parts of a text that are considered to be offensive to the upright, and damaging to children. It is named after Thomas Bowdler who, in 1818, published an expurgated version of Shakespeare’s plays called ‘The Family Shakespeare’.

There wouldn’t have been much text left if he had removed all the obscenities, most of them puns, like ‘nothing’: knotting (copulation); no thing (without a penis).

In ‘The Merchant of Venice’, When Antonio boasts, ‘My ventures are not in one bottom trusted’, apart from the obvious pun, Shakespeare expects us to know the Latin word for ship, which is ‘navis’ - knave - jack - arse. My bowdlerized text paraphrases ‘in one bottom’ as ‘in only one ship’, so my students are safe.

Burlesque / bərˈlɛsk /

A contested term, often used interchangeably with ‘parody’ and ‘travesty’, which begs to be simplified. Burlesque treats a trivial subject seriously, as in Pope’s mock-epic poem, ‘The Rape of the Lock’, while travesty treats a serious subject trivially, as in Monty Python’s ‘Life of Brian’. Both are forms of parody, incongruous imitations intended to cause laughter.

Canon (The Western)  /ˈkæn ən /

A body of writings (especially literature), music and art that, according to traditional scholars, represents high Western culture. Progressive scholars dismiss it because, being made up almost entirely of white men, the canon is unrepresentative.

Not to be confused with the Biblical canon, those books like Genesis and Exodus, which the Church accepts as being genuine, not apocryphal.

Caricature  /ˈkær ɪ kə tʃər /

A verbal cartoon. A portrait of a character that exaggerates details like noses and ears, usually for the purposes of humour or ridicule. The novels of Charles Dickens are peppered with caricatures, also known as grotesques. Here is that monster of false humility, Mr Bounderby (from ‘Hard Times’):

‘A man made out of coarse material, which seemed to have been stretched to make so much of him. A man with a great puffed head and forehead, swelled veins in his temples, and such a strained skin to his face that it seemed to hold his eyes open, and lift his eyebrows up. A man with a pervading appearance on him of being inflated like a balloon, and ready to start. A man who could never sufficiently vaunt himself a self-made man.’ [note the anaphora]

Carnivalesque /,kɑr nə vəl ‘esk /

Describes literature that seeks to undermine authority, often through eccentric characters, like the fools in Shakespeare’s plays. It comes from ‘carnival’, when the Catholic church allowed its followers just one day in the year to misbehave, usually behind masks. The Russian linguist, Mikhail Bakhtin, was the first to apply it to literature. It is related to burlesque and other forms of satire.

Here is an exchange between Viola (disguised as a man) and Feste in ‘Twelfth Night’ that may be regarded as carnivalesque:

‘VIOLA: I warrant thou art a merry fellow, and car’st for nothing.

FESTE: Not so, sir, I do care for something; but in my conscience, sir, I do not care for you: if that be to care for nothing, sir, I would it would make you invisible.

VIOLA: Art thou not the Lady Olivia’s fool?

FESTE: No indeed sir, the Lady Olivia has no folly. She will keep no fool, sir, till she be married, and fools are as like husbands as pilchards are to herrings, the husband’s the bigger. I am indeed not her fool, but her corrupter of words.’

Carpe diem  /ˈkɑr peɪ ˈdi əm /

Make hay while the sun shines. From the Roman poet, Horace, it literally means ‘seize the day’. Often trivialised as a method of seduction, for example in Robert Herrick’s poem, ‘To Virgins, to Make Much of Time’, it is a serious theme in sacred as well as secular literature. Here is Ecclesiastes: ‘A man hath no better thing under the sun than to eat, and to drink, and to be merry’ [8:15]; and here, the Persian poet, Omar Khayyam (Fitzgerald’s translation):

‘Come, fill the cup, and in the fire of spring

The winter garment of repentance fling:

The bird of time has but a little way

To fly - and lo! the bird is on the wing.’

The theme suggests that life is precious because it doesn’t last.

Caretaker Language / ˈkɛərˌteɪ kər ˈlæŋ gwɪdʒ /

Also known as child-directed speech and including ‘motherese’, this is the way we talk to infants. It is very simple and spoken in a higher pitch than usual: ‘Isn’t daddy’s girl a clever little girl’.

Catastrophe / kəˈtæs trə fi /

In literature, especially tragedy, the moment when the principal character dies, which results in a deeper understanding of the plot. Closely linked to ‘denouement’. Here is the catastrophe in Shakespeare’s ‘Coriolanus’:

CORIOLANUS: Cut me to pieces, Volsces; men and lads,

Stain all your edges on me. “Boy!” False hound!

If you have writ your annals true, ’tis there,

That, like an eagle in a dove-cote, I

Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioli:

Alone I did it. “Boy!”

AUFIDIUS: Why, noble lords,

Will you be put in mind of his blind fortune,

Which was your shame, by this unholy braggart,

’Fore your own eyes and ears?

CONSPIRATORS: Let him die for’t.

PEOPLE: Tear him to pieces. - Do it presently.- He killed my son.- My daughter.- He killed my cousin Marcus.- He killed my father.

SECOND LORD: Peace, ho! no outrage: peace!

The man is noble and his fame folds in

This orb o’ the earth. His last offences to us

Shall have judicious hearing. Stand, Aufidius,

And trouble not the peace.

CORIOLANUS: O! that I had him,

With six Aufidiuses, or more, his tribe,

To use my lawful sword!

AUFIDIUS: Insolent villain!

CONSPIRATORS: Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him!

[They draw and kill Coriolanus. Aufidius stands on his body]

LORDS: Hold, hold, hold, hold!

AUFIDIUS: My noble masters, hear me speak.

FIRST LORD: Oh Tullus!

CAT

Communication Accommodation Theory was developed by Howard Giles. His theory argues that ‘When people interact they adjust their speech, their vocal patterns and their gestures, to accommodate others’. He calls this ‘convergence’. The opposite, when speakers want to exclude either themselves or someone in the group, is called ‘divergence’.

Cataphoric reference  / kəˈtæf ər ək ˈrɛf ər əns /

Opposite of anaphoric reference. It’s where the pronoun comes before the noun it is referring to: ‘He sat up in his coffin and glared balefully about the crypt. Dracula had returned’. Cataphoric reference is effective in creating suspense.

Catharsis (Purgation) /kəˈθɑr sɪs /

Aristotle’s word for the feeling of transcendence engaged audiences have at the end of a tragic drama. A combination of ‘pity’ for, say, Othello’s jealous suffering, and ‘fear’ for his violent behaviour, simultaneously pull us towards (sympathy) and away from (antipathy) the protagonist. This merging of opposites results in a momentary feeling of reconciliation in the audienced. In Shakespeare’s tragedies It is achieved more by the poetry than the action:

Soft you; a word or two before you go.

I have done the state some service and they know’t:

No more of that. I pray you, in your letters

When you shall these unlucky deeds relate,

Speak of me as I am; nothing extenuate,

Nor set down aught in malice. Then must you speak

Of one that loved not wisely, but too well;

Of one not easily jealous, but being wrought,

Perplexed in the extreme….

Members of the audience who fail to achieve catharsis, leave the auditorium with ambivalent (mixed) feelings for the tragic hero.

Circumlocution  /ˌsɜr kəm loʊˈkyu ʃən /

Also known as periphrasis, a long-winded way of saying something, usually to sound impressive. Dickens affectionately mocks the style in his character, Mr Micawber, from ‘David Copperfield’. Here David meets Mr Micawber for the first time:

‘“Under the impression,” said Mr Micawber, “that your peregrinations in this metropolis have not as yet been extensive, and that you might have some difficulty in penetrating the arcana of the Modern Babylon in the direction of the City Road - in short,” said Mr Micawber, in another burst of confidence, “that you might lose yourself - I shall be happy to call this evening, and install you in the knowledge of the nearest way.”’

Apparently Dickens’ real father was a model for Mr Micawber. If you want to experience dizzying amounts of circumlocution, serious and playful, read literary theory.

Climax  /ˈklaɪ mæks /

A form of repetition where the last word in an expression is repeated at the beginning of the next expression, and so on, with growing intensity. Here is St Paul: ‘Suffering produces endurance, endurance produces character, character produces hope, and hope does not disappoint us.’ Here is one I made up: ‘For some people, borrowing leads to debt, debt leads to theft, theft leads to prison, and prison leads to disgrace.’

In literature, ‘climax’ is synonymous with ‘catastrophe’, ‘anagnorisis’, and ‘denouement’, but It is a crisis that can occur anywhere in a text, not just at the end. For example, Pip’s confrontation with the runaway convict, Magwitch, occurs on the second page of Dickens’ long novel, ‘Great Expectations’:

‘... and that the small bundle of shivers growing afraid of it all and beginning to cry, was Pip.

“Hold your noise!” cried a terrible voice, as a man started up from among the graves at the side of the church porch. “Keep still, you little devil, or I’ll cut your throat!”’

Catalectic  /ˌkæt lˈɛk tɪk /

See ‘Acatalectic’.

Clipping

Similar to backformation. When you shorten a word like ‘television’ to ‘telly’.

Closed couplet

A rhyming couplet that conveys a complete thought, which gives it the quality of an epigram (a witty saying). The lines are written in iambic pentameter and are popular with satirical poets like Dryden, Pope, and Chaucer, Pope being the absolute master:

‘A little learning is a dang’rous thing;

Drink deep, or taste not the Pierian spring.’

In Greek mythology the Pierian spring was sacred to the muses, and therefore a source of inspiration.

Closure

The end of a literary work that satisfies reader expectation, that is not unresolved or ambiguous. Take, for example, the beautiful ending of Emily Bronte’s ‘Wuthering Heights’:

‘I lingered around them, under the benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’

James Joyce’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake’ has a very different kind of of closure: it completes the incomplete opening sentence of the novel. Thus:

‘riverrun past Eve and Adam’s, from swerve of shore to bend of bay, brings us by a commodius vicus of recirculation back to Howth Castle and Environs.’ [opening sentence of the novel]

‘A way a lone a last a loved a long the’ [closing sentence of the novel]

So the last ‘sentence’ begins the first ‘sentence’!

Coalescence

When two separate sounds merge to form a third sound, e.g. the ‘t’ and the ‘une’ in ‘tune’ become ‘choon’.

Code-switching

Changing your register during conversation to accommodate the person you are talking to, for instance an informal register with your school friends and a formal register with your teacher. Teenagers are particularly good at doing this.

Cognitive development

Cognition is the mental process involved in gaining knowledge and abilities through thought, experience, and the senses. This prompts the question, does cognition (thinking) come before the production of language, or can we think only if we have words to do so?

Cognitive theories link the child’s language with their cognitive development. The most important theorist in this field is Jean Piaget. He asserted that children don’t think like adults and that they go through stages of increasingly complex mental development.

Coinage

Similar to neologism. When new words or phrases are created, like ‘Google’ and ‘meme’. Sometimes they are deliberate, sometimes accidental. They don’t use the usual word formation processes like inflexion.

Collage

In literature, a work that is made up of fragments of other texts, held together by a central theme. Similar to pastiche but not to be confused with plagiarism. It is most common in poetry and is curiously termed ‘modernist’. A celebrated example is T.S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’. Here is a sample:

‘“On Margate sands

I can connect

Nothing with nothing.

The broken fingernails of dirty hands.

My people humble people who expect

Nothing.”

La la

To Carthage then I came

Burning burning burning burning

O Lord thou pluckest me out

O Lord thou pluckest

burning'

In this extract you will find a collocation of words by St Augustine and the Buddha.

Collective unconscious

C. G. Jung’s term for a pre-conscious memory shared by humankind, which gives rise to archetypes (universal symbols) found in dreams and myths. This became an important aspect of literature for academics like Northrop Frye, and so-called ‘myth criticism’ flourished in the 1950s and 60s. Frye focussed on the seasonal cycle of death and rebirth, and applied it to the literary canon. It has been largely debunked by contemporary critics for being too generalised, ignoring cultural and textual differences. Here are some of Jung’s sayings:

‘Knowing your own darkness is the best method for dealing with the darknesses of other people.’

‘Where love rules, there is no will to power, and where power predominates, love is lacking. The one is the shadow of the other.’

‘Through pride we are ever deceiving ourselves. But deep down below the surface of the average conscience a still, small voice says to us, something is out of tune.’

‘There are as many nights as days, and the one is just as long as the other in the year's course. Even a happy life cannot be without a measure of darkness, and the word 'happy' would lose its meaning if it were not balanced by sadness.’

Collocation

Idioms of paired words that are so familiar, the first word immediately recalls the second, e.g. ‘hot and bothered’; ‘black and white’; ‘now or never’.

Colloquialism

An expression apparently more appropriate to speech than writing, which tends towards the idiomatic. Some examples are ‘at a loose end’, ‘fighting fit’, ‘breaking bad’, ‘kick the bucket’, and ‘Can you put me up for the night?’ Here is T. S. Eliot making use of colloquial language in ‘The Waste Land’:

‘If you don’t like it you can get on with it, I said.

Others can pick and choose if you can’t.

But if Albert makes off, it won’t be for lack of telling.

You ought to be ashamed, I said, to look so antique.

(And her only thirty-one.)

I can’t help it, she said, pulling a long face,

It’s them pills I took, to bring it off, she said.’

Comedy

Usually associated with plays but also in other genres, like Dante’s great poem, ‘The Divine Comedy’. Broadly speaking, comedy ends happily (frequently in marriage), as opposed to tragedy, which ends sadly (frequently in death). Structurally, comedy starts off badly for the protagonists, then there is a reversal of fortune (a peripeteia), and ends happily. Tragedy works the other way round. Shakespeare, who understood the necessity of opposites, merges the genres in his plays so that the most appropriate label for ‘King Lear’, ‘Hamlet’, ‘The Merchant of Venice’, and ‘Twelfth Night’ is tragicomedy. Shakespeare sensed something absurd as well as admirable in the heroic act. In the last named play, overtly comical, there is a dark undercurrent, controlled by Feste the clown. The curtain falls on his closing words, a bleak song with the refrain: ‘For the rain it raineth every day’.

Comedy of manners

A kind of satire that rewards rather than condemns pomposity and other nasty characteristics of privileged societies. The text is dominated by witty repartee, and Oscar Wilde is a master of this genre. Here are some extracts from his play, ‘The Importance of Being Earnest’:

‘Really, if the lower orders don’t set us a good example, what on earth is the use of them?’

‘CECILY: When i see a spade I call it a spade.

GWENDOLEN: I am glad to say I have never seen a spade. It is obvious that our social spheres have been widely different.’

‘In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing.’

‘It is a terrible thing for a man to find out suddenly that all his life he has been speaking nothing but the truth.’

Compounding

Forming a word from two or more other words, e.g. ‘hogwash’. They often begin as hyphenated words, before compounding, e.g. ‘lock-down’ eases into ‘lockdown’.

Conceit

A metaphor which, some might argue, goes too far in the experience of finding similarities in dissimilarities. If you call the woman you love ‘a red red rose’ [Robert Burns], you have a metaphor ; if you call her ‘chocolate sprinkles’ [me], you have a conceit.

Dr Johnson described a conceit thus: ‘...the most heterogeneous ideas are yoked by violence together’. The wittiest conceits may be found among the so-called metaphysical poets (another Dr Johnson coinage), John Donne in Particular. In his poem, ‘The Flea’, Donne insists that this little jumping bloodsucker represents a marriage temple, and he chides his lady for squashing it! Here is an extract from the poem:

‘Oh stay, three lives in one flea spare,

Where we almost, nay more than married are.

This flea is you and I, and this

Our marriage bed, and marriage temple is.’

The blood of both lovers is mingled in ‘these living walls of jet’, so to kill the flea would be tantamount to murder, suicide, and sacrilege.

Confessional Poetry

What most teenagers write. A deeply personal mode dealing with sensitive issues like suicide, drug addiction, insanity, and failed relationships. Three of the most accomplished confessional poets from the US, Anne Sexton, Sylvia Plath, and John Berryman, killed themselves. The North Americans seem to have a propensity for embarrassing audiences (witness the Oprah Winfrey show) with deeply personal issues, and it’s to the North Americans we must go for the greatest confessional poets, who flourished in the decades of the 50s and the 60s. Here is Robert Lowell, from his poem, ‘Man and Wife’:

‘Now twelve years later, you turn your back.

Sleepless you hold

your pillow to your hollows like a child,

your old-fashioned tirade -

loving, rapid, merciless -

breaks like the Atlantic Ocean on my head.’

Connotations

Ideas and feelings associated with certain words, for example, a snake may have connotations of fear, or evil, or health, or sexuality, or wisdom; an eagle may have connotations of bravery, or cruelty, or nobility, or power. All these are archetypal connotations; there are also likely to be multiple private connotations. For some poets, a snake has connotations of the letter ‘S’! The literal, dictionary meaning of words then become denotations.

Consonance

The repetition of same or similar sounding consonants, e.g. ‘The moan of doves in immemorial elms’ [Tennyson]. Here the nasal ‘m’ sound evokes the call of doves. Consonance is enriched when it appears twice in paired words e.g. ‘grape’/’grope’; ‘rock’/’wreck’. Now it approaches rhyme; indeed enriched consonance is also called ‘half-rhyme’ or ‘slant rhyme’. Wilfred Owen mastered this form in his anti-war poems. Here are the opening lines of ‘Strange Meeting’:

‘It seemed that out of the battle I escaped

Down some profound dull tunnel, long since scooped

Through granites which Titanic wars had groined.

Yet also there encumbered sleepers groaned,

Too fast in thought or death to be bestirred.

Then, as I probed them, one sprang up, and stared

With piteous recognition in fixed eyes,

Long distressful hands as if to bless.

And by his smile, I knew that sullen hall;

By his dead smile I knew we stood in hell.’

This pleasing effect of similar sounding words in close proximity is evident in much lyrical poetry, much copy-writing, and much speechifying. In this category you get onomatopoeia, rhyme, assonance, and alliteration (a form of consonance).

Listen to the repetition of the fricative 'th' in a line from Tennyson's poem 'Godiva':

'Then she rode forth, clothed on with chastity'

Now listen to the repetition of the dental 'd' from D. H. Lawrence's poem, 'Snake':

'For he seemed to me again like a king,

Like a king in exile, uncrowned in the underworld,

Now due to be crowned again.'

This is consonance.

Consonant clusters

When consonants are bunched together in a word like ‘through’. ‘thr’ is an example. There are many consonant clusters in English, and they contribute to a hardness of sound. Romance languages like Italian are softer.

Conversational floor

Whoever is speaking during a conversation, holds the ‘floor’. Sometimes the speaker needs to be interrupted in order to give somebody else a chance.

Conversion

Creating a new word by changing the part of speech, e.g. in Shakespeare’s play, ‘Hamlet’, Horatio says, ‘...he sharked up a list of lawless resolutes’. Here the noun ‘shark’ has been converted to the verb ‘sharked’. 

Context

Meaning is skewed if a sentence or a word - or even a letter - is taken out of context. Take the letter S, for example, the nineteenth letter of the alphabet. On its own it’s pretty meaningless (although it does bear a pictorial resemblance to a biltong hook), but in a certain context it could suggest something serpentine; in another context it could suggest something watery; in yet another it could suggest something soporific. Consider these lines from one of D. H. Lawrence’s poems:

‘He sipped with his straight mouth,

Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,

Silently.’

If you are given a passage from a set work, a contextual, to analyse, the first thing you do is put it in its context; in other words relate it to what has come just before and just after the given passage. Then relate it, briefly, to the text as a whole. Bear in mind that the complete text, say Achebe’s novel, ‘No Longer at Ease’, also has a context: autobiographical, historical, geographical etc..

Propaganda thrives on taking matters out of context: it gives rise to the oxymoron, ‘true lies’.

Cooperative principle

According to linguist, Paul Grice, conversation requires four factors to make it cooperative. He called them maxims (not rules). His intention was to be descriptive, not prescriptive: maxims of quality (tell the truth), quantity (keep to the point), relation (be relevant), and manner (don’t waffle).

Grice was interested in the connection between what is said and what is meant in any given conversation. He called this ‘implicature’. In reality, these maxims are often violated, flouted, or simply ignored. Let’s look at an example:

Son: wheres dad

Mother: thursday nights are poker nights

This exchange seems to be violating the maxim of relation. The mother’s reply seems irrelevant. However, we can infer from her reply that dad is out gambling with his pals. So the maxim is flouted, not violated.

To violate a maxim is to be intentionally or unintentionally misleading; to flout a maxim is to be ironically misleading (not misleading, but requiring inference).

Courtly Love

The great North American mythologist, Joseph Campbell, claimed that romantic love (amor), of which courtly love is a branch, was created by the troubadours and minnesingers of medieval europe. He distinguishes it from eros (sexual desire) and agape (spiritual love); or rather, he sees it as a merging of those two extremes. It originated at a time when marriage had nothing to do with love and everything to do with politics and business. This gave rise to an important ingredient of courtly love: adultery. The beautiful aristocratic lady in a loveless marriage captures the heart of a handsome young man, usually her social inferior. The lady controls this game because, as Joseph Campbell points out: ‘if you want to make love to a woman, she’s already got the drop on you’. With a mixture of cruelty and tenderness, the lady puts the the love-struck swain through his paces. She gives him almost impossible tasks to perform and rewards him, if he succeeds, with a peck on the cheek or a pat on the shoulder. He starts dying of unrequited love, until something supernatural intervenes, and gives him hope. Apart from adultery (seldom consummated), courtly love required humility and courtesy. It began with a meeting of the eyes and grew into a pounding of the heart. Two famous courtly love stories are ‘Tristan and Isolde’ and ‘Lancelot and Guinevere’.

So it’s possible that the romantic love we take for granted today as natural to the human condition, is an artistic construct!

Covert prestige

Gaining status among your peers by using non-standard utterances like slang and swearing.

Creole

A language that grows from a mixture of different languages like Jamaican patois. It is a more complex and more enduring form of pidgin.

Curtal sonnet

Invented by the Jesuit poet, Gerard Manley Hopkins, a curtal sonnet, as the name suggests, is a shortened form, usually ten and a bit instead of fourteen lines. Here is Hopkins in full curtal cry:

‘Pied Beauty

Glory be to God for dappled things -

For skies of couple-colour as a brinded cow;

For rose-moles all in stipple upon trout that swim;

Fresh-firecoal chestnut-falls; finches’ wings;

Landscape plotted and pieced - fold, fallow, and plough;

And all trades, their gear and tackle and trim.

All things counter, original, spare, strange;

Whatever is fickle, freckled (who knows how?)

With swift, slow; sweet, sour; adazzle, dim;

He fathers-forth whose beauty is past change;

Praise him.’

Dactyl

When you scan a line of poetry you break it into feet of two or three syllables, which form a combination of stressed and unstressed sounds. It is the repetition of these sounds that give a poem its dominant rhythm. A dactyl is a three-syllable foot made up of one stressed and two unstressed syllables, as in the word ‘mournfully’. It is sometimes called a falling or descending rhythm. Thomas Hardy uses it at the beginning of his poem, ‘The Voice’, to evoke a lover’s waltz:

‘Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me,

Saying that now you are not as you were

When you had changed from the one who was all to me.

But as at first, when our day was fair.’

Notice how the waltz rhythm slowly collapses, as cherished memories return to the reality of an old man ‘faltering forward’ in the direction of his grave.

Here Tennyson uses the same dactylic metre to evoke a doomed cavalry charge:

‘Half a league, half a league,

Half a league onward,

All in the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.

“Forward, the Light Brigade!

Charge for the guns!” he said:

Into the valley of Death

Rode the six hundred.’

Deixis

Pronounced ‘dikesis’, this word features in the A Level language syllabus, which includes quite a lot of linguistics. It refers to utterances that can be understood only by those who are engaged in the conversation, where they can point, with a gesture of the head, say, to ‘this’(proximal) or ‘that’ (distal); ‘here’ (proxima) or ‘there’ (distal); ‘me’ (proximal) or ‘her’ (distal). If I am talking to you in a given context, like my back yard, and  I say ‘over there’, you will know, by my gestures, exactly where ‘there’ is. But someone who reads a transcription of my utterance, can’t know this. So the word ‘there’ is deictic, pronounced ‘diketik’.

So, at the risk of being pedantic, let me repeat: words, especially pronouns and adverbs of time and place, which participants in a conversation can make sense of, but which non-participants can’t, are deictic (pronounced diketic). For example, a pronoun like ‘her’, or an adverb of place like ‘here’. In the utterance, ‘here is her comb’, non-participants would need more context to know who ‘her’ is and to know where ‘here’ is. Those participating in the conversation would have eyes to see who ‘her’ is and where ‘here’ is. In the utterance, ‘you must go now’, ‘you’ and ‘now’ are examples of deixis.

To avoid gender discrimination and clumsy phrasing, the third person singular (‘his’, ‘her’) is rapidly being replaced by the third person plural (their). So ‘to each his own’ is becoming ‘to each their own’ [I took this example from Wikipedia]. Both, however, remain deictic to a non-participant i. e. you, the student, reading a transcript.

Denouement, see Catastrophe

Denotation, see Connotation

Descriptivism

The politically correct approach to language use. There is no such thing as incorrect or substandard usage. It challenges prescriptivism which makes a fuss of issues like split infinitives.

Deus ex Machina

When a novelist or playwright force their plot in an unconvincing manner, like suddenly discovering that the protagonist has an identical twin, or that Estella is Magwitch’s daughter, in ‘Great Expectations’. William Golding called his implausible rescue of the children from the island a ‘gimmick’, his word for a deus ex machina.

It means ‘god from a machine’. In some ancient Greek plays, a god like Apollo would be lowered onto the stage by a mechanical contraption, whereupon he would iron out any glitches in the plot.

Determiners

In speech acts, determiners are those words that need a context to be fully understood. They are deictic. They occur before a noun or a noun phrase. I can think of four categories:

Articles, e.g. ‘the’, ‘a’, ‘an’

Quantifiers, (also pronouns) e.g. ‘many’, ‘all’, ‘some’

Possessive pronouns, e.g. ‘its’, ‘our’, ‘their’

Demonstrative pronouns, e. g. ‘this’, ‘that’, ‘these’

Note: numbers are also determiners but they aren’t deictic.

Dialect

A variety of language that is specific to a particular region, e.g. Cockney in East London, Geordie in Durham.

Dialectic

A form of reasoning which moves towards a synthesis (truth?) by playing opposites, thesis and antithesis, against each other. In philosophy it leads nowhere; in poetry it leads to epiphanic moments, when the ‘soul’, as James Joyce puts it, ‘of the commonest object seems to us radiant’.

Diction

The kinds of words used by a writer in order to create a desired tone of voice, best understood by looking at opposites like formal/informal; abstract/concrete; figurative/ literal. Words derived from Latin, like ‘expectorate’ are abstract and tend to be formal; words derived from Anglo-Saxon, like ‘spit’ are concrete and tend to be informal.

Didactic

Literature that seeks to teach some moral lesson; so allegories and satires are nearly always didactic. ‘An Inspector Calls’ by J.B. Priestley is didactic because it seeks to teach audiences that capitalism is bad and socialism is good. Shakespeare’s plays, on the other hand, are not didactic: they allow audiences to make up their own minds about moral issues. Didacticism is out of favour these days, and is frequently conflated with propagandist writing.

Differance

A French aural pun coined by the philosopher, Jacques Derrida, which needs to be read (seen on the page as a deliberate misspelling) to be partly understood. It combines the words ‘differ’ and ‘defer’ and suggests that words have no absolute meaning. We are stuck in a delightful paradox where you need words to define words - to use something essentially meaningless to define meaninglessness.

Poets have always known of this conundrum; here is Feste the clown in Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’:

‘A sentence is but a chev’ril* glove to a good wit - how quickly the wrong side may be turned outward!’

‘Viola: Thy reason, man?

Clown: Troth, sir, I can yield you none without words, and words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them.’

And here is Romeo in ‘Romeo and Juliet’:

‘What’s in a name? That which we call a rose

By any other name would smell as sweet.’

*kid leather - stretchable and flexible

Dionysian and Apollonian

Derived from the German philosopher, Friedrich Nietzsche, these terms, two ancient Greek gods, represent the binary nature of protagonists and antagonists alike in the western canon. A character’s reason (Apollonian) is in constant conflict with their instinct (Dionysian); what T. S. Eliot called ‘a dissociation of sensibility’. What Hamlet admires in his friend and confidant, Horatio, is the latter’s ability to resolve the binary, the Cartesian split:

‘... and blessed are those

Whose blood and Judgement are so well co-mingled

That they are not a pipe for fortune’s finger

To sound what stop she please.’

For ‘blood’ read Dionysian; for ‘judgement’ read Apollonian.

This is not to conclude that Dionysian equals evil and Apollonian equals good. As Hamlet, probably the first existentialist in literature says, ‘There is nothing either good or bad, but thinking makes it so’. In ‘Othello’ the wicked Iago - ‘...I will wear my heart upon my sleeve / For daws to peck at. I am not what I am’ - is predominantly Apollonian, while the good Othello - ‘Speak of me as I am .... Of one that loved not wisely but too well’ - is predominantly Dionysian.

Dipthong

Two vowel sounds in one syllable, e.g. ‘deer’, ‘toy’.

Dirge

A lament for the dead; different from an elegy in that it offers little consolation. Here is the opening of Edgar Allan Poe’s dirge, ‘Lenore’:

‘Ah, broken is the golden bowl! the spirit flown forever!

Let the bell toll!- a saintly soul floats on the Stygian river;

And, Guy de Vere, hast thou no tear?- weep now or nevermore!

See! on yon drear and rigid bier low lies thy love, Lenore!

Come! let the burial rite be read- the funeral song be sung!-

An anthem for the queenliest dead that ever died so young-

A dirge for her the doubly dead in that she died so young.’

Discourse markers

One of the most common discourse markers, these days is ‘so’. It marks the change from one bit of conversation to another. Other examples are ‘well’, ‘right’, and ‘okay’. In linguistics, discourse means a unit of language that is longer than a single utterance, like a conversation.

Discursive

An essay that develops an argument using facts and opinions.

Dissociation of sensibility

Coined by T.S. Eliot to describe a separation of Apollonian thought and Dionysian feeling in literature. Robert Frost, on the same wavelength, defined a poem as a ‘felt thought’. It’s a useful phrase but Eliot applied it incorrectly when he claimed that all British poets since John Milton (1608 -74) suffered from this binary condition.

This is how Eliot put it in his essay on the Metaphysical poets: ‘Tennyson and Browning are poets, and they think; but they do not feel their thought as immediately as the odour of a rose. A thought to Donne was an experience; it modified his sensibility.’

Here is Browning with his sensibility intact:

‘Meeting at Night

The grey sea and the long black land;

And the yellow half-moon large and low;

And the startled little waves that leap

In fiery ringlets from their sleep,

As I gain the cove with pushing prow,

And quench its speed i’ the slushy sand.

Then a mile of warm sea-scented beach;

Three fields to cross till a farm appears;

A tap at the pane, the quick sharp scratch

And blue spurt of a lighted match,

And a voice less loud, thro’ its joys and fears,

Than the two hearts beating each to each!’

Domestic tragedy

In Aristotle’s definition of tragedy he insists that the protagonist must be someone of noble rank like a king or a prince, and the play must deal with affairs of state like war or succession. In domestic tragedy the protagonist is middle or working class, in a play that deals with family matters. The plays of Tennessee Williams and Arthur Miller could be classed as domestic tragedies. Characters like Willy Loman (low man) may be regarded as tragic victims rather than tragic heroes. Here are the final words of Miller’s play, ‘Death of a Salesman’ spoken by the protagonist's long-suffering wife, Linda (Willy killed himself):

‘Willy, dear, I can’t cry. Why did you do it? I search and search, and I search, and I can’t understand it, Willy. I made the last payment on the house today. Today, dear. And there’ll be nobody home [A sob rises in her throat.] We’re free and clear [Sobbing more fully, released] We’re free.’

Dramatic monologue

A poetic form favoured by Robert Browning, where the poet impersonates someone historical or fictitious. The persona talks to a silent listener or listeners, and in doing so, unwittingly reveals their true personality. Here is the beginning of Tennyson’s poem, ‘Ulysses’:

‘It little profits that an idle king,

By this still hearth, among these barren crags,

Matched with an aged wife, I mete and dole

Unequal laws unto a savage race,

That hoard, and sleep, and feed, and know not me.

I cannot rest from travel; I will drink

Life to the lees.’

Dumb show

A miniature mimed play within a play, usually to reflect or comment on the play’s wider issues. The most famous dumb show is that which precedes the play within the play, ‘Hamlet’, which is called ‘The Mouse-trap’. Hamlet produces it in order to ‘catch the conscience of the king’. So here you have a play about a play about a play about playing (or acting). This reduplication is sometimes called metafiction or mise-en-abyme (infinite regression).

When actors act Hamlet they are acting an actor who acts himself as an actor of actors.

Dystopia

George Orwell’s, ‘1984’ is, arguably, the most influential dystopian novel ever written. The word was coined as a response to utopian literature, which imagines a paradise on earth.

Much dystopian literature is in the form of science fiction or satire; or the two genres combined as in the writings of Kurt Vonnegut. Here are two of his comments:

‘Human beings will be happier - not when they cure cancer or get to Mars or eliminate racial prejudice or flush Lake Erie but when they find ways to inhabit primitive communities again. That's my utopia.’

‘The arts are not a way to make a living. They are a very human way of making life more bearable. Practicing an art, no matter how well or badly, is a way to make your soul grow, for heaven's sake.’

Egotistical sublime

John Keats’ phrase for poetry, however brilliant, that is too self-centred. He was thinking of William Wordsworth when he wrote this in a letter to his friend Richard Woodhouse. In the same letter he attempts to define an opposite state, which he aspired to:

‘... it is not itself - it has no self - it is everything and nothing - it has no character - it enjoys light and shade; it lives in gusto, be it foul or fair, high or low, rich or poor, mean or elevated …. What shocks the virtuous philosopher delights the chameleon poet.’

‘Gusto’ for Keats, is the threshold where opposites merge, and the imagination roars into life.

Elaborated code

The theory that privileged schoolchildren use an elaborated code while under-privileged children use a restricted code. These are not dialects. The former is standard English adopted by most schools; the latter is non-standard English spoken in working class communities. ‘Would you mind keeping the noise down?’ is elaborated code; ‘Shut up!’ is restricted code.

Elegy

This term has a long history but is generally regarded as a lyrical lament for the dead. Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy in a Country Churchyard’ has become the template for the form. It is written in quatrains which rhyme abab:

‘The curfew tolls the knell of parting day,

The lowing herd winds slowly o’er the lea,

The ploughman homeward plods his weary way,

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.’

Gray’s poem is a meditation on death in general but most elegies lament the passing of an individual for example, Auden’s ‘In Memory of W. B. Yeats'. Here is an extract (the form is unconventional):

‘You were silly like us; your gift survived it all;

The parish of rich women, physical decay,

Yourself: mad Ireland hurt you into poetry.’

Unlike the dirge, the elegy provides some sort of consolation. In Auden’s poem it is the consolation that Yeat’s poetry will survive his death; in Gray’s poem it is the consolation that death has saved those buried in the churchyard from the miseries, the vanities, of life:

‘Far from the madding crowd’s ignoble strife

Their sober wishes never learned to stray;

Along the cool sequestered vale of life

They kept the noiseless tenor of their way.’

Elision

When you put two or three words together usually by omitting certain vowels, you get elision, or contraction. Examples are ‘didn’t’, aren’t’ and ‘wanna’. In speech, sentences are called utterances, and they are full of elisions.

Ellipsis

One of the most characteristic features of spoken language is incomplete utterances, and the more familiar the speakers are with each other, the more is left out. This is known as ellipsis. The adjective is elliptical. Here is an example:

so you will, then/

sure

when

usual time

right (1) under the clock/

the clock

TRANSCRIPTION KEY

/ rising intonation

pause in seconds

Frequently confused, elision shortens words while ellipsis shortens sentences. In poetry, elision usually came about for the sake of metre. Here, for example, is Thomas Gray using elision, suppressing vowels (syllables), in order to keep to an iambic pentameter line: ‘Yet e’en these bones from insult to protect’ ; and: ’Their name, their years, spelt by th’ unlettered Muse’. Other common examples of elision in poetry are ‘’twas’, ‘o’er’, and, at a time when the now silent ‘e’ was pronounced, ‘wither’d’. To the contemporary ear these omissions are quaint, archaic. In speech there are many elisions, slurring of syllables, for example ‘could’ve’ (could have), ‘gonna’ (going to).

Ellipsis shortens sentences by leaving out words or phrases without altering the meaning. As pointed out, It is very common in conversation, especially among people who know each other well. Look at another example:

‘Will you come to dinner tonight?’

‘Maybe.’

The reply, in this exchange, is elliptical, a shortened form of ‘I might come to dinner tonight’.

In ‘Macbeth’, when Malcolm decides to flee, he says ‘I’ll to England’. He is employing both elision and ellipsis. 

Encomium

This goes back to the choral songs in ancient Greek processions, which would elaborately praise the hero of some campaign or other. Synonyms are ‘eulogy’ and ‘panegyric’. The tradition has been kept alive in Africa by the genre of praise poetry performed by poets like the South African, Mzwakhe Mbuli. Here is a translation of the beginning of a Shona poem in praise of the Shava (eland) clan.

SHAVA - MUSEYAMWA

Thank you Shava

The Great Eland bull, The Runaway

Thank you very much The-one-who-carries heavy-loads

Those who challenged each other at Janga

Those who were given wives in the country of the Njanja people

Thank you my dear Mutekedza, those in uHera Mukonde

It has been done Great Animal, those with tails that are intimate with body

Unfortunately this once noble genre has degenerated into obsequious obituaries, propagandistic speeches, and full-page advertisements in newspapers hyperbolising about some corrupt patron or other. Nowadays you can hear or read any number of these fulsome outpourings from servile praise singers for government leaders, first ladies, and army generals.

Enjambment

Also called ‘run-on’ lines, and common in blank verse, enjambment carries the sense of one line into the next by avoiding the end-stops (punctuation marks) you find in poems like Robert Herrick’s, ‘To the Virgins, to make much of Time’:

‘Gather ye rosebuds while ye may,

Old Time is still a flying:

And this same flower that flies today,

Tomorrow will be dying.

One effect of enjambment is to make the poem seem more prosaic, as in this extract from ‘Paradise Lost’ by John Milton:

‘Forthwith, upright, he rears from off the pool

His mighty stature; on each hand the flames

Driven backward slope their pointing spires, and, rolled

In billows, leave i’ the midst a horrid vale.’

Another effect, in rhyming poems, is to play down the rhyme, which might dominate the poem. Here is the beginning of ‘Endymion’ by John Keats:

‘A thing of beauty is a joy forever:

Its loveliness increases; it will never

Pass into nothingness; but still will keep

A bower quiet for us, and a sleep

Full of sweet dreams, and health, and quiet breathing.’

Epic

The ancient Greeks invented three types of poetry: lyric, dramatic, and epic. Epic poetry consists of extremely long stories of heroic deeds, combining myth, legend, and history. The greatest of the Greek epic poets was Homer (if he ever existed!). To him the writing of ‘The Odyssey’ and ‘The Iliad’, is attributed. Here is an extract from ‘The Odyssey’ translated by Alexander Pope:

‘“Close by, a rock of less enormous height

Breaks the wild waves, and forms a dangerous strait;

Full on its crown a fig’s green branches rise,

And shoot a leafy forest to the skies;

Beneath, Charybdis holds her boisterous reign

‘Midst roaring whirlpools, and absorbs the main:

Thrice in her gulfs the boiling seas subside,

Thrice in dire thunders she refunds the tide.’”

Although there are exceptions, Derek Walcott’s ‘Omeros’ comes to mind, the epic, in modern times, is hardly ever presented in the form of poetry. It has become the novel, which in turn is becoming the feature film.

Epigrams

Condensed, witty (sometimes wise) expressions, which enter popular culture as proverbs. They frequently rhyme. The heroic couplets of Alexander Pope’s satires lend themselves to epigrammatic lines: ‘Eternal smiles his emptiness betray, / As shallow streams run dimpling all the way’; ‘True wit is nature to advantage dressed, / What oft was thought but ne’er so well expressed’; ‘We may see the small value God has for riches by the people he gives them to’.

Oscar Wilde’s writings are full of epigrams, often paradoxical: ‘In matters of grave importance, style, not sincerity, is the vital thing’; ‘A man cannot be too careful in the choice of his enemies’; ‘Experience is the name everyone gives to their mistakes’.

Epitaphs on gravestones are sometimes epigrammatic:

Mrs. Aphra Behn (1640-89)

Here lies a Proof that Wit can never be

Defence enough against Mortality.

Henry Page (1648-1719)

Epigraph

In fiction this is a quotation, frequently from another writer, at the beginning of a book, which points to its theme. Chinua Achebe, with deliberate irony, chooses epigraphs from famous white writers, for example, W.B. Yeats in ‘Things Fall Apart’, and T.S. Eliot in ‘No Longer At Ease’. Indeed both his titles come from the epigraphs.

In my novel, ‘Hatchings’, which is centred on baby dumping, my epigraph consists of three quotations including this one from Byron:

‘And if I laugh at any mortal thing

‘Tis that I may not weep’

Epiphany

The Irish author, James Joyce, secularized this Christian term. He defined it as ‘a sudden spiritual manifestation… when the soul of the commonest object seems to us radiant’. Wordsworth called it ‘spots of time’; Keats called it ‘the feel of not to feel’. It has been called a moment of eternity, transcendence, ecstasy (in the sense of experiencing timelessness). Many lyric poems strive to be epiphanic, as in Robert Frost’s beautiful poem, ‘Nothing Gold Can Stay’:

‘Nature’s first green is gold,

The hardest hue to hold.

Her early leaf’s a flower;

But only so an hour.

Then leaf subsides to leaf.

So Eden sank to grief,

So dawn goes down today.

Nothing gold can stay.’

Nature (transience) is immortalised by art (the poem).

Epithet

Usually an adjective, which has attached itself to a noun and become a fixed expression, like ‘doubting Thomas’, ‘Ethelred the unready’, ‘the mighty Warriors’. A Homeric epithet is a formulaic phrase, for example, always describing the sea as ‘wine-dark’, and the dawn as ‘rosy-fingered’. A synonym is antonomasia.

A transferred epithet (also known as hypallage) is when you transfer the adjective describing a subject to the object. For example ‘The ploughman homeward plods his weary way’ from Gray’s ‘Elegy’. The word ‘weary’ is transferred from the ploughman to the road. This is also an example of personification.

Eponym

Words like ‘hoover’ (vacuum cleaner), ‘Obamacare’ and ‘Altzheimer’s’are eponyms. They are named after whoever invented or discovered them.

Equivocation

When, in ‘The Merchant of Venice’, Antonio says of Shylock: ‘The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose’, he is indirectly accusing Shylock of being a equivocator. Equivocators are intentionally ambiguous, so they can’t be pinned down. Politics is riddled with them.

Etymology

The study of a word’s history, how it was formed and how its meaning might have changed over time.

Exclusion

Using language in a social setting which makes certain individuals feel excluded. Inclusion is the opposite. 

Exegesis

Also known as ‘hermeneutics’ it refers to the close analysis and interpretation of a text, particularly from the Bible. For example, the parallelism used in Hebrew poetry - the repetition of the same idea in different words - was misunderstood by the author of Matthew’s gospel. In the Old Testament the prophet, Zechariah, describes the king entering Jerusalem as:

‘humble and riding on a donkey,

on a colt, the foal of a donkey’

The colt and the donkey, typical of Hebrew parallelism, are the same animal. The author of Matthew has Jesus entering the Holy City on two animals!:

‘Look your king is approaching,

humble and riding on a donkey

and on a colt,

the foal of a beast of burden’

Scholars who detect misunderstandings like this are known as exegetes.

Exophoric reference

This occurs when a word or phrase refers to something outside the conversation and relies on some shared knowledge between speaker and listener or writer and reader, e.g. ‘The president did it again’. Which ‘president’? What ‘it’? It is a hypernym of deixis.

Expurgate

The literary equivalent of placing a fig leaf over the genitals of naked statues. Also known as bowdlerize, after the Victorian, Dr Thomas Bowdler, who undertook the publication of ‘The Family Shakespeare’, which censored huge chunks of the Bard’s texts deemed to be unsuitable for decent people.

Eye dialect

Matching spelling to pronunciation, e.g. ‘gawn’ for gone.

Eye rhyme

It looks but doesn’t sound like a rhyme, for example ‘cough’/’bough’; ‘love’/’prove’. The latter might have sounded like a rhyme in Shakespeare’s day:

‘If this be error, and upon me prov’d,

I never writ, nor no man ever lov’d.’

Fable

A type of allegory which tells a story, often with animal characters, to point a moral. It’s an ancient form, part of the oral tradition in all cultures. One of the oldest fabulists in the western tradition is Aesop, whose story, ‘The Hare and the Tortoise’ is summed up in the epigram: ‘slow and steady wins the race'. An example of a modern fable is ‘Lord of the Flies’ by William Golding.

Face

A person’s sense of her own self-image and how she is perceived by others. In politeness theory, Brown and Levinson write of a positive face and a negative face. The former refers to self-image, hoping that others approve of it; the latter refers to the expectation of deference from others for the person’s perceived rights and freedoms.

Face-threatening acts

Things like finger-pointing and verbal challenging which undermine a person’s ‘face’.

Falling rhythm

Listen to the falling rhythm in this line from Thomas Hardy’s poem ‘The Voice’: ‘Woman much missed, how you call to me, call to me’. The pattern is one stressed syllable falling or descending to two unstressed syllables (see ‘dactyl’). The effect here is waltz-like. Here is another example from Longfellow’s ‘The Song of Hiawatha’: ‘By the shining Big-Sea-Water’. The pattern is one stressed syllable falling to one unstressed syllable (see ‘trochee’). In English poetry falling rhythm is less common than rising rhythm, like the ‘iamb’.

Fancy

The Romantic poet, S.T. Coleridge, made an interesting distinction between fancy and the imagination. The analogy of a mixture and a compound is useful here. A mixture (fancy) contains ingredients that do not lose their individual properties; a compound (the imagination) contains ingredients that combine to form something new. Soup is a mixture; beer is a compound!

More relevant, perhaps, would be an analogy of the senses. Fancy, like memory, can play with the five senses, a bit like throwing dice; imagination, on the other hand (which Coleridge complicates by dividing into primary and secondary) can combine the five senses into a sixth, or eidetic, sense, the sense of the unknown, the numinous, where the act of creation takes place.

Here is poetry of the fancy:

‘For the moon never beams, without bringing me dreams 

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; 

And the stars never rise, but I feel the bright eyes 

Of the beautiful Annabel Lee; 

And so, all the night-tide, I lie down by the side 

Of my darling—my darling—my life and my bride, 

In her sepulchre there by the sea— 

In her tomb by the sounding sea.’

From ‘Annabel Lee’ by Edgar Allan Poe

Here is poetry of the imagination:

Beneath the lamp the lady bowed, 

And slowly rolled her eyes around; 

Then drawing in her breath aloud, 

Like one that shuddered, she unbound 

The cincture from beneath her breast: 

Her silken robe, and inner vest, 

Dropt to her feet, and full in view, 

Behold! her bosom and half her side— 

A sight to dream of, not to tell! 

O shield her! shield sweet Christabel!

From ‘Christabel’ by Samuel Taylor Coleridge

Farce

A form of drama where plot, story-line, setting, characterization… play second fiddle to provoking uproarious laughter from the audience. ‘A willing suspension of disbelief’, as Coleridge once put it, is essential if you want to enjoy this genre, particularly ‘bedroom farce’ (named after Alan Ayckbourn’s play), usually set in a single room with too many exits and entrances, and focussed on adulterous behaviour.

Few substantial plays are farcical all the way through; Brandon Thomas’s ‘Charley’s Aunt’ is an exception. You will find moments of farce in television dramas like ‘Fawlty Towers’ and Shakespeare comedies like ‘The Taming of the Shrew’. Here is a farcical exchange in ‘A Midsummer Night’s Dream’: the tragic story of Pyramus and Thisbe rendered ridiculous by the mechanicals:

‘Bottom

(as Pyramus)

O, kiss me through the hole of this vile wall!

Flute

(as Thisbe)

I kiss the wall’s hole, not your lips at all.

Bottom

(as Pyramus)

Wilt thou at Ninny’s tomb meet me straight away?

Flute

(as Thisbe)

Tide life, tide death, I come without delay.

Feminine rhyme

A sexist term for lines that rhyme on an unstressed syllable, for example, this song from ‘Twelfth Night’:

‘Trip no further pretty sweeting;

Journeys end in lovers meeting.’

Feminine ending is where an iambic pentameter line adds an extra syllable at the end, which is unstressed, the most famous in all literature being, ‘To be, or not to be; that is the question’. My answer to that problem posed by Hamlet also employs a feminine ending: ‘To be and not to be - that is the answer.’

Fin de siecle

Refers to the cult of art for art’s sake which pervaded the arts towards the end of the nineteenth century. Also known as decadence and aestheticism, and centred on French poets like Rimbaud, Verlaine, and Mallarme, who were reacting to excessive realism in the writings of Zola (naturalism), Shaw, Ibsen, George Eliot and others, who saw art as having a social and moral function.

The literature of fin de siecle is pervaded by world-weariness, ennui, narcissism, and morbidity. Famous examples in English are ‘The Strange Case of Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde’ by Robert Louis Stevenson, ‘Dracula’ by Bram Stoker, and ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’ by Oscar Wilde. Here is an extract from the last named novel:

‘.... but it is what Dorian Gray has been to me. The merely visible presence of this lad - for he seems to me little more than a lad, though he is really over twenty - his merely visible presence - ah! I wonder can you realise all that that means? Unconsciously he defines for me the lines of a fresh school, a school that is to have in it all the passion of the romantic spirit that is Greek. The harmony of soul and body - how much that is! We in our madness have separated the two, and have invented a realism that is vulgar, an ideality that is void.’

Wilde succinctly defines this cult in his preface to the aforementioned novel when he writes, ‘All art is quite useless’. Fin de siecle paved the way for modernism, which dominated twentieth century European literature.

First-person narration

This is when the person telling the story appears as the ‘I’ in the text. In fiction, the narrator and the ‘I’ are not necessarily the same person. For example, ‘Huckleberry Finn’ seems to be narrated by Huck himself, while the actual narrator is Mark Twain (not his real name). Here is the opening of that novel:

‘You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of ‘The Adventures of Tom Sawyer’, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.’ Here the author is ironically impersonating his character.

Fixed expressions

Speech is riddled with these. They help to keep the conversation going. They are easy and familiar. Some examples are ‘at the end of the day’, ‘as a matter of fact’, and ‘to be honest’. Collocation is a fixed expression where one word habitually recalls another, for example, ‘done and dusted’, ‘black and white’, ‘the long and the short of it’. In writing, these idioms would be dismissed as cliches, but in speech they serve an important communicative purpose.

Folio

Latin for ‘leaf’, a folio refers to the format of a book. Folio editions are very large because the initial printer’s sheet of paper is folded only once, creating four pages. The first authorised edition of Shakespeare’s plays was printed in 1623 in folio format. If the printer’s sheet is folded twice, it’s called quarto (eight pages); if it’s folded yet again, it makes an octavo, and this is the one most commonly used today.

Let’s take ‘King Lear’ as a case study. Shakespeare died in 1616 so he would have had no control of the 1623 edition, the printing of which was supervised by his fellow actors, Heming and Condell. Previous to this there were manuscript copies tailored for actors, prompters, and producers; and then there were those printed for private reading: the quartos.

‘King Lear’ was first published in a quarto in 1608. It was inaccurate and poorly printed - a rushed job, bearing little evidence of Shakespeare’s personal involvement A second quarto dated the same year, not much different from the first, was published some years later. These quartos differ substantially from the 1623 folio.

Modern day editors combine these different sources to produce what they consider to be the best general sense of the play. Whether the Bard would have approved of editions like Arden, New Swan, or Cambridge, we’ll never know.

Foot

A unit of poetic metre based not on word-boundaries but on stressed and unstressed syllables. The four most common feet in English poetry are the iamb (unstressed/stressed), the trochee (stressed/unstressed), the anapaest (unstressed/unstressed/stressed), and the dactyl (stressed/unstressed//unstressed). In the following example from one of Wordsworth’s sonnets, the opening line is made of of five smooth iambic feet (iambic pentameter), while the next line is made of three hectic dactyls followed by two not so common spondees (stressed/stressed):

‘The world is too much with us; late and soon,

Getting and spending, we lay waste our powers.’

Foregrounding

Drawing attention to an important feature of the text by placing it at the beginning or end of a sentence or a paragraph. Headlines or different fonts are also ways of foregrounding.

Form

A confusing term because it is used to distinguish the ‘how’ from the ‘what’ when the ‘how’ and the ‘what’ can’t clearly be distinguished. For example, take this line from one of Hopkins’ poems: ‘I am soft sift in an hour glass’. The ‘what’ here may be the persona’s sense of mortality; the ‘how’ may be a metaphor of eight monosyllabic words; a simple sentence in the indicative mood made up of a pronoun, a verb, two adjectives, two nouns, and an indefinite article. One of the nouns also functions as a verb, while one of the adjectives also functions as a noun. The line can be scanned in more than one way but the pattern that occurs to me is: unstressed, unstressed / stressed, stressed / unstressed, unstressed / stressed, stressed/ (spondee, pyrrhic, spondee, pyrrhic). One effect of this structure is to depersonalize the normally stressed ‘I’ so that it fades, perhaps quite pleasantly, into the sands of time. Scansion of this line is complicated by the word ‘hour’, which may be pronounced as one or two syllables.

I could go on. The sibilants in the line, especially when they combine as alliteration, ‘soft sift’, generate an onomatopoeic sense of fine sand drifting from the top to the bottom of the ‘hour glass’. The fricatives in ‘soft sift’ draw out the vowel sounds, which slows the line down to a trickle.

How much of the line’s form, then, contributes to the line’s content? You could call what I am writing about here as organic form. A predetermined form like, say, a sonnet, could be called mechanic form.

The second line shocks us out of our iambic complacency, not just with the febrile metre but with treble assonance. Great poets use form to contribute to meaning.

Great poets merge form and content:

Horses in motion:

WALK [Thomas Hardy]

Only a man harrowing clods

In a slow, silent walk

With an old horse that stumbles and nods

Half asleep as they stalk.

*

TROT [William Wordsworth]

And now we reached the orchard plot;

And as we climbed the hill,

Toward the roof of Lucy’s cot

The moon descended still.

In one of those sweet dreams I slept,

Kind nature’s gentlest boon!

And all the while my eyes I kept

On the descending moon.

My horse moved on; hoof after hoof

He raised and never stopped:

When down behind the cottage roof,

At once the bright moon dropped.

*

CANTER [Alfred Noyes]

The wind was a torrent of darkness among the gusty trees,

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas,

The road was a ribbon of moonlight over the purple moor,

And the highwayman came riding – riding – riding –

The highwayman came riding, up to the old inn-door.

*

GALLOP [Lord Byron and Robert Browning]]

The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold,

His cohorts were gleaming in orange and gold.

*

I sprang to the stirrup, and Joris, and he,

I galloped, Dirck galloped, we galloped all three.

Free verse

The only thing that distinguishes prose from poetry is metre (rhyme is optional); all other features like repetition, figures of speech, assonance, alliteration, onomatopoeia… are shared. Free verse, or vers libre, is concentrated prose that is shaped to look like a poem on the page. It goes back a long way. The Biblical psalms, originally in Hebrew, were translated as free verse: ‘Keep me as the apple of an eye; hide me under the shadow of thy wings’ [XV11. 8]. One of the earliest and most influential practitioners of free verse was the North American writer, Walt Whitman:

‘I think I could turn and live with animals, they are so placid and self-contained,

I stand and look at them long and long, they do not sweat and whine about their condition,

They do not lie awake in the dark and weep for their sins,

They do not make me sick discussing their duty to God,

Not one is dissatisfied, not one is demented with the mania of owning things,

Not one kneels to another, nor to his kind that lived thousands of years ago,

Not one is respectable or unhappy over the whole earth.’ [from ‘Song of Myself’]

Today free verse is, by a very long way, the most widely practised form in English. Metre is a difficult skill to acquire.

Fricative

Forced sounds like ‘f’ and ‘th’, pushed through the teeth. The sibilants, ‘s’ and ‘z’ are also fricatives.

Genderlect

Deborah Tannen coined this word to describe the difference between males and females in spoken language and social groups. Her categories are fluid, especially in western cultures where feminism has been quite successful in restoring the gender imbalance.

Tannen argues that females seek connection in conversation, while males seek status. Females are more likely to use terms of emotion like ‘so’ and ‘such’ ('i am so happy that you have had such success'), while males tend to see emotion as a sign of weakness. They prefer to emphasize facts (‘my speedometer was reading 140 at the time of the accident’).

Females engage more in private conversations (gossip?), while males prefer the public forum (boasting?). Females are listeners; males are interrupters; females are less inclined to swear than males; less inclined to tell politically incorrect jokes… in short, Deborah Tannen seems to have been influenced by the old rhyme:

Girls are made of sugar and spice

and all things nice;

boys are made of snakes and snails

and puppy dogs’ tails.

Genre

A French word meaning ‘kind’ in the sense of style, which has succumbed to promiscuity. For example, what used to be called ‘pulp fiction’ - formulaic stories that seldom rise above narrative and plot (cause and effect) - is now given the more politically correct appellation, ‘genre fiction’. Literary genres used to be restricted to different kinds of writing like poetry, with sub-genres like epic, dramatic, lyric; and prose, with sub-genres like the novel, the biography, the essay….

If the novel is a sub-genre of prose, ‘science fiction’, ‘satire’, ‘romance’, ‘horror’ etc. must be sub-sub-genres. Following on from there we now have sub-sub-sub-genres like ‘high seriousness’, ‘the unreliable narrator’, and ‘organic unity’. By becoming too useful, ‘genre’ has lost much of its usefulness.

Georgic

Unlike the pastoral, a mode of writing which sentimentalizes the countryside, the georgic extols its practical benefits like bee-keeping and viniculture (the cultivation of grape vines). Here is a translation of an extract from the Roman poet, Virgil’s, ‘Georgics’:

‘How blest beyond all blessings are farmers, if they but knew their happiness! Far from the clash of arms, the most just earth brings forth from the soil an easy living for them’.

Gloss

A simplification of a difficult text, e.g. the gloss for ‘to terminate with extreme prejudice’ is ‘to kill’.

Gothic

A subgenre of Romanticism, Gothic novels reacted to Newtonian rationality by focussing on irrational subjects like madness and the supernatural. They are sometimes described as the romance of terror. They are usually set in ruined castles or monasteries and located in mediaeval times. A typical Gothic character might be a decaying aristocrat like Count Dracula or a crazy scientist like Dr Frankenstein.

The first known Gothic novel is ‘The Castle of Otranto’ (1764) by Horace Walpole. Later the genre was dominated by Ann Radcliffe, whose most famous book is ‘Mysteries of Udolpho’ (1794). The Scottish poet Lord Byron, who was described by one of his lovers, Lady Caroline Lamb, as ‘mad, bad, and dangerous’ became the model for a number of Gothic romances, including ‘The Vampyre’, written by his personal physician, John Polidori. More recent practitioners of the genre are Edgar Allan Poe and Robert Louis Stevenson. Most recent is Stephen King who once said ‘Monsters are real, and ghosts are real too. They live inside us, and sometimes, they win’.

Gothic has had something of a revival in recent times. Young people are frequently seen dressed and made up to look like living corpses.

Here is Jane Austen, in her novel, ‘Northanger Abbey’, making fun of the gothic novel:

“…Dorothy has given you to understand that there is a secret subterraneous communication between your apartment and the chapel of St. Anthony, scarcely two miles off… you will proceed into this small vaulted room, and through this into several others, without perceiving anything very remarkable in either. In one perhaps there may be a dagger, in another a few drops of blood, and in a third the remains of some instrument of torture; … your lamp being nearly exhausted, you will return towards your own apartment. In repassing through the small vaulted room, however, your eyes will be attracted towards a large, old-fashioned cabinet of ebony and gold, which, though narrowly examining the furniture before, you had passed unnoticed. Impelled by an irresistible presentiment, you will eagerly advance to it, unlock its folding doors, and search into every drawer; -- but for some time without discovering anything of importance -- perhaps nothing but a considerable hoard of diamonds. At last, however, by touching a secret spring, an inner compartment will open -- a roll of paper appears: you seize it -- it contains many sheets of manuscript -- you hasten with the precious treasure into your own chamber, but scarcely have you been able to decipher…”

Grotesque

A flat character who never changes from whatever characteristic his creator has adorned her or him with. Indeed grotesques, or caricatures, take their appointed roles to an extreme, whether wicked or good. Most of Charles Dickens’ characters are grotesques: Agnes in ‘David Copperfield’ is excessively saintly, while Mr Pecksniff in ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’ is excessively hypocritical.

Here is an exchange, in ‘Our Mutual Friend’, between two grotesques, Mr Wegg and Mr Venus:

‘Good evening, Mr Venus. Don’t you remember?’

With slowly dawning remembrance, Mr Venus rises and holds his candle over the little counter, and holds it down towards the legs, natural and artificial, of Mr Wegg.

‘To be sure! he says, then. ‘How do you do?’

‘Wegg, you know,’ that gentleman explains.

‘Yes, yes,’ says the other. ‘Hospital amputation?’

‘Just so,’ says Mr Wegg.

‘Yes, yes,’ quoth Venus. ‘How do you do?’ Sit down by the fire, and warm your – your other one.’

Gynocriticism

Elaine Showalter coined this word to describe criticism of writings by women from a woman’s point of view. One of the most influential gynocritical texts is ‘The Madwoman in the Attic’ by Susan Gubar. The ‘Madwoman’ is a reference to Rochester’s first wife in Charlotte Bronte’s novel, ‘Jane Eyre’. Here is an extract from that great novel in which Rochester, witnessed by Jane, has a confrontation with his wife:

‘...the clothed hyena rose up, and stood tall on its hind-feet.

“Ah! sir, she sees you!” exclaimed Grace: “You’d better not stay.”

“Only a few moments, Grace: you must allow me a few moments.”

“Take care, then, sir! - for God’s sake, take care!”

The maniac bellowed: she parted her shaggy locks from her visage, and gazed wildly at her visitors. I recognized well that purple face - those bloated features. Mrs Poole [Grace] advanced.

“Keep out of the way,’ said Mr Rochester, thrusting her aside: ‘she has no knife now, I suppose? and I’m on my guard.”

“One never knows what she has, sir: she is so cunning: it is not in mortal discretion to fathom her craft.”

Hagiography

Nothing to do with witches, this kind of writing celebrates the lives of saints. It was common in mediaeval times; very rare today. Bernard Shaw’s ‘St Joan’ is a modern example. Here is an extract:

‘You think that life is nothing but not being stone dead. It is not the bread and water I fear: I can live on bread: when have I asked for more? It is no hardship to drink water if the water be clean. Bread has no sorrow for me, and water no affliction. But to shut me from the light of the sky and the sight of the fields and flowers; to chain my feet so that I can never again ride with the soldiers nor climb the hills; to make me breathe foul damp darkness, and keep from me everything that brings me back to the love of God when your wickedness and foolishness tempt me to hate Him: all this is worse than the furnace in the Bible that was heated seven times. I could do without my warhorse; I could drag about in a skirt; I could let the banners and the trumpets and the knights and soldiers pass me and leave me behind as they leave the other women, if only I could still hear the wind in the trees, the larks in the sunshine, the young lambs crying through the healthy frost, and the blessed blessed church bells that send my angel voices floating to me on the wind. But without these things I cannot live; and by your wanting to take them away from me, or from any human creature, I know that your counsel is of the devil, and that mine is of God.’

Nowadays the term is loosely used to mock biographers who are unduly reverential towards their subjects.

Haiku

A form of Japanese minimalist verse, which has had a strong influence on western poetry, because it shows rather than tells. In English, it is made up of three lines totalling seventeen syllables: five in the first line, seven in the second, and five in the third. It focusses on an image in nature which reflects a season. The word or phrase that triggers this reflection is called a kigo. One of the greatest haiku poets was Basho (1644 - 94). Here he is:

On a withered branch

A crow has alighted:

Nightfall in autumn.

*

Scent of chrysanthemums . . .

And in Nara

All the ancient Buddhas.

Hamartia

Aristotle’s word for a fatal error in the protagonist of a tragic drama, which leads to his or her downfall. The error could be an excessive weakness (as in Othello’s ingenuousness), or an excessive strength (as in Macbeth’s ambition). The most common hamartia in ancient Greek tragedy is hubris, or overweening pride, where you take it upon yourself to challenge the gods.

Here is the verbose Hamlet explaining this concept to his friends, Horatio and Marcellus. They are waiting for the ghost of Hamlet’s father to appear, and he does, directly after this boring speech:

‘So oft it chances in particular men

That, for some vicious mole of nature in them,

As, in their birth – wherein they are not guilty,

Since nature cannot choose his origin –

By the o’ergrowth of some complexion,

Oft breaking down the pales and forts of reason,

Or by some habit that too much o’erleavens

The form of plausive manners, that these men,

Carrying, I say, the stamp of one defect,

Being nature’s livery, or fortune’s star,

His virtue else – be they as pure as grace,

As infinite as man may undergo –

Shall in the general censure take corruption

From that particular fault.’

Hedges and vague expressions

In ‘Hamlet’, Polonius gives his spy this advice: ‘by indirections find directions out’. This is how a hedge works in conversation though not usually with the cunning intention of Polonius’ paradox. Usually it brings a tone of uncertainty into the conversation, a low modality, an indirectness, a hesitation, for the purpose of politeness, or for gaining time, time in which to formulate thoughts more clearly. Examples of this strategy are ‘you know’, ‘I guess’, ‘I might be wrong, but…’, ‘would you like to wash the dishes?’ So, while a hedge is usually a mitigating device, it can also be used, ironically, as an aggravating device.

A vague expression is just that: it violates Grice's maxims of relation or manner. A hedge, on the other hand, is anything but vague: it flouts Grice's maxims of relation or manner. It does this in two ways: as a strategy of politeness or as irony.

Robin Lackoff's Deficiency theory claims that women use hedges in their utterances much more than men. She seems to conflate hedges with vague expressions, and sees them as a sign of weakness. The general consensus, however, is that men use hedges and vague expressions as much as women do, and that the two are not synonymous.

Hellenism

The English poet and cultural critic, Matthew Arnold, distinguished between Hellenism (the life of intellect and beauty) with Hebraism (the life of moral obedience) as contending aspects of nineteenth century western culture:

‘Hebraism [doing]and Hellenism [knowing] - between these two points of influence moves our world. At one time it feels more powerfully the attraction of one of them, at another time of the other; and it ought to be, though it never is, evenly and happily balanced between them.’

It is convenient to place the Hellenistic age between the death of Alexander the Great (323 BC) and that of Cleopatra, whose ancestry was Greek, (31 BC). This period was rich in poetry, philosophy, and scientific achievements. Here is a translation of a poem by Callimachus (c310 - 240 BC)

When Love and Wine Inspire

If sober, and inclin'd to sport,

To you, my fair one, I resort;

The still-forbidden bliss to prove,

Accuse me then, and blame my love.

But if to rashness I incline,

Accuse me not, but blame the wine:

When Love and Wine at once inspire,

What mortal can control his fire.

Of late I came, I know not how,

Embrac'd my fair, and kiss'd her too;

It might be wrong; I feel no shame,

And, for the bliss, will bear the blame.

Hendiadys

Also known as collocation, when a single idea is expressed by two related words joined by ‘and’, for example ‘nice and tidy’; ‘law and order’; ‘done and dusted’.

Hermeneutics

Not to be confused with hermeticism (see below) hermeneutics began as a method of interpreting biblical texts before spreading to literature and philosophy. The hermeneutic circle operates like a synecdoche where the parts of a text help us to understand its whole, and vice versa. For example, in Shakespeare’s ‘Antony and Cleopatra’, Antony’s behaviour in Egypt is encapsulated, right at the beginning of the play, by the image of a tumbler spilling its contents (presumably wine): ‘Nay, but this dotage of our general’s / O’er flows the measure’. The sense of liquidity is female and represents Egypt epitomised by Cleopatra, while the sense of rigidity is male and represents Rome epitomised by Octavius Caesar. These extremes dramatize Antony’s conflict, which is universal: head versus heart.

Hermetics

A tendency in modern poetry to obscure reality with mysticism associated mainly with the French symbolists like Verlaine, Rimbaud, and Mallarme. Here is a sample from the North American poet, Emily Dickinson:

A Cloud withdrew from the Sky

A Cloud withdrew from the Sky

Superior Glory be

But that Cloud and its Auxiliaries

Are forever lost to me

Had I but further scanned

Had I secured the Glow

In an Hermetic Memory

It had availed me now.

Never to pass the Angel

With a glance and a Bow

Till I am firm in Heaven

Is my intention now.

Heroic couplet

First used, as far as I know, by Geoffrey Chaucer (c1340 - 1400), heroic couplets are iambic pentameter lines which rhyme in pairs. It’s a form that lends itself to satire, as demonstrated by Alexander Pope and John Dryden in the 18th century. Here is a sample from Dryden’s poem, ‘Absalom and Achitophel’:

‘A man so various that he seemed to be

Not one, but all mankind’s epitome.

Stiff in opinions, always in the wrong,

Was everything by starts, and nothing long:

But, in the course of one revolving moon,

Was chemist, fiddler, statesman, and buffoon.’

Heuristic function

When children use language to learn about their environment often by asking questions. It is one of Halliday’s seven functions of language.

Hiatus

A pause, usually for dramatic effect, indicated by three dots (a fourth dot signifies the end of a sentence). Not to be confused with an interruption, also indicated by three dots, though usually by a dash. Here is an example of hiatus from my novel, ‘The Giraffe Man’:

‘"Ever since Hebrides committed suicide because of some pervert who hacked Dougal to death, you have behaved strangely, Andrew … or, should I say, more strangely than usual. Now you turn up here dressed in some ridiculous costume, wielding that dreadful home-made knife of yours …. Who told you that I would be here?"’

In prosody, hiatus refers to a pronunciation break between two vowels, thus creating two syllables, for example, ‘going’. On the other hand, a word like ‘point’ is pronounced as one syllable. This is known as a diphthong.

Holophrastic

When a single word is used to express a complete demand. Typical of toddlers between the ages of 11 and 18 months. The word ‘juice’ could mean ‘I am thirsty’.

Homonym

There are two kinds: the homophone and the homograph. Homophones are words that sound the same but differ in meaning, for example, ‘to’, ‘two’ and ‘too’; homographs are words that are spelled the same but differ in meaning, for example, ‘bat’ (creature) and ‘bat’ (cricket). Homographs don’t necessarily sound the same, for example ‘lead’ (the metal) and ‘lead’ (guide).

English is riddled with homonyms; hence it’s a good language for punning: ‘At the alcoholic’s funeral, six of his friends carried the bier.’

Hubris

The pride that comes before a fall. Witness the death of Coriolanus in Shakespeare’s play. Pride can be a source of strength or of weakness; strength in times of war, weakness in times of peace. As a soldier, Coriolanus’ pride can be seen as virtus, or manliness; as a civilian, petulance, or childishness. Context is everything. As he says, somewhere in Act 2: ‘...yet oft, / When blows have made me stay, I fled from words’.

Here is Coriolanus speaking, without much conviction, as a politician. He is addressing a Roman citizen:

‘I will, sir, flatter my sworn brother the people, to earn a dearer estimation of them; ‘tis a condition they account gentle; and since the wisdom of their choice is rather to have my hat than my heart, I will practise the insinuating nod….’

Here he is, with much conviction, speaking as a soldier He is addressing his rival in war, Aufidius, who has just labelled him ‘a boy of tears’:

‘Cut me to pieces, Volsces, men and lads,

Stain all your edges on me. Boy! False hound!

If you have writ your annals true, ‘tis there,

That like an eagle in a dove-cote, I

Flutter’d your Volscians in Corioles.

Alone I did it. Boy!’

In this tragedy, the protagonist’s flaw or hamartia is hubris, overweening pride. Dare to challenge the gods and you will always lose.

Hudibrastics

A kind of doggerel, far less polished than Pope’s heroic couplets, invented by Samuel Butler (1612-1680), whose mock-heroic poem, ‘Hudibras’ satirised Cromwellian protestantism.

He wrote the poem after Charles 11 had been restored to the throne, when it was safe, once again, to be a royalist. Here is a sample:

For his Religion, it was fit

To match his learning and his wit;

'Twas Presbyterian true blue;

For he was of that stubborn crew

Of errant saints, whom all men grant

To be the true Church Militant;

Such as do build their faith upon

The holy text of pike and gun;

Decide all controversies by

Infallible artillery;

Sir Hudibras is a knight errant, a bit like Don Quixote though far less loveable. The form is iambic tetrameter with rhymes that are frequently crude and frequently unstressed (so-called feminine rhymes), for example: ‘For in what stupid age or nation / Was marriage ever out of fashion?’

Humour in Poetry

All humour in poetry, whether serious or flippant, depends on incongruousness. Consider this example from the mock-heroic poem, 'The Rape of the Lock' by Alexander Pope:

Then flashed the living lightning from her eyes,

And screams of horror rend th’affrighted skies,

Not louder shrieks to pitying heaven are cast,

When husbands or when lapdogs breathe their last.

Here the poem’s heroine, Belinda, is reacting to a trivial incident: the Baron sneaks up behind her and cuts off a lock of her hair with a pair of scissors. To react so excessively (note the humorous effect of hyperbole) to something trivial is incongruous. Belinda’s insincerity is revealed in the last line (note the humorous effect of bathos). The humour is enhanced by the strong iambic rhythm of the lines, and the epigrammatic rhyming couplets. To describe Pope’s poem as mock-heroic or mock-epic is to recognize incongruousness (or incongruity). The title itself is incongruous – comparing the cutting off of a lock of hair to rape! It is out of place, absurd – and that is why it is funny.

But what makes it even funnier, in an uncomfortable way, is that 'The Rape of the Lock' is a satire, and satire, ironically, is serious, very serious in the case of Wole Soyinka’s much anthologised poem, “Telephone Conversation”. While Pope makes fun of the beaux monde, the fashionable society of his day (the early 1700s), Soyinka makes fun of the racism he experienced while a student in 1950s England.

In Soyinka’s poem the telephone conversation takes place between a black man looking for accommodation and a white woman who has accommodation to let. Part of the humour is the way each persona puts a face to the voice they hear over the phone: “spectroscopic / flight of fancy”; part of the humour is the reversal of expectation (catching out the hypocrite reader) where the black man is clearly highly educated and the white woman is clearly a numbskull; part of the (uncomfortable) humour is the irony that the black man is apologetic, and the white woman, who should be ashamed of herself, is righteous; but the funniest part is where “Madam” gets her comeuppance, where Soyinka demonstrates just how ridiculous it is to judge a person by the colour of his or her skin:

Facially I am brunette, but, madam, you should see

The rest of me. Palm of my hand, soles of my feet

Are a peroxide blond. Friction, caused –

Foolishly, madam – by sitting down, has turned

My bottom raven black….

Another form of humour in poetry, closely associated with satire is parody, when an exaggerated imitation is placed incongruously with a well known poem.

Parody that makes fun of a poet’s style of writing is called burlesque or travesty, the difference being that burlesque treats a frivolous subject solemnly, while travesty treats a solemn subject frivolously. Alison Ziki’s travesty is funny, not just because it parodies a sentimental, universally loved lullaby, but because of its idiom – associated with people of mixed race. You can see the influence of modern day rap in her relentless rhymes. The funny thing about chronic theft of other people’s property is that it is not really funny, especially when you consider that it has its roots in the shocking gap, all over the world, between the relatively few rich and the poverty stricken multitudes. Here is an extract from her poem:

Hush my laaitie don't you cry

Daddy's gonna steal you a GTi,

And if that GTi don't Torque

Another GTi, I will stalk.

And if the stalking don't go too well

Daddy's gonna steal you a Caravelle

You might be familiar with the proverb: “Imitation is the sincerest form of flattery”. The point is that not all parody results in ridicule; sometimes it’s a way of showing that you admire the style of the writer you are imitating. This is the case with Karen Press’s parody of William Carlos William’s famous minimalist poem: “This is just to say”:

This is just to say

I ate the biscuit in your saucer

While you went to the toilet…

Derek Fenton is a Zimbabwean poet who has made his home in Australia. The funniest aspect of his poem is that it is written in the form of a sonnet, which is traditionally associated with unrequited love. The subject of dung beetles in the Diaspora, therefore, is incongruous to say the least! And that is another humorous aspect of the poem: the questions asked of the dung beetle clearly come from a typical “when we” attitude, particularly of white Zimbabweans, who acquire an excessive nostalgia for the “good old days”. The dung beetle (see the clinching final couplet), will have none of it. Notice the humorous effect of Fenton’s pun on “poo-poo”. The meaning in the title is to dismiss an idea with scorn; the meaning in the last line is clear!:

“Don’t Poo-Poo the Dung Ho Migrant”

Industrious little dung beetle do you ever miss

The shadow of an elephant upon your back,

The reassuring cadence of a cobra’s hiss

Or a friendly puff adder on a wildebeest track?

…

“Why do you ask me such questions when I have work to do?

The only thing that concerns me is poo, poo, poo!”

Praise poetry belongs to the oral tradition and is still evident in genuine rap artists who compose spontaneously, that is they don’t prepare beforehand what they are going to recite. The praise poets of Africa are often professionals who perform at public functions like the opening of parliament and the inauguration of a president – not functions we would typically associate with humour. South African praise poets are called Imbongi, and praise poems are called Isibongo. Although they are called praise poets, their poems sometimes mock their subject, and mockery is nearly always humorous. In our two extracts, the first is critical of Western ways in general while the second is a “greeting” to the Prince of Wales when he visited South Africa in 1925:

Let us leave it at that, men.

Because, were I to tell women to change their ways

And wear traditional leather skirts

They would be able to outrun us!...

She sent us the preacher, she sent us the bottle;

She sent us the Bible and barrels of brandy;

She sent us the breechloader, she sent us cannon;

O, roaring Britain! Which must we embrace?...

It sounds like a contradiction to talk of serious humour, but it’s a paradox (and it’s incongruous.) You need light to cast a shadow. In the words of the Scottish poet, Lord Byron: “And if I laugh at any mortal thing, / ‘Tis that I may not weep.” No Zimbabwean poet captures this sentiment better than the laconic Julius Chingono, with his compassion for the marginalized poor and his contempt for the powerfully corrupt:

20-044L

The number on my door

reads 20-044L,r

but it is not the number

of my house.

The scrap metals

that make the door

include

a motor car number plate.

I regret

any inconvenience caused.

Finally, we cannot underestimate the power of nonsense when it comes to humorous poetry, and here we have to go to England where nonsense flourishes. The name Lewis Carroll is a pseudonym for Reverend Charles Dodgson. He was a priest as well as a brilliant professor of mathematics. What a sensible man, you might think; yet he was the greatest nonsense writer in the English language, and his most famous poem is “Jabberwocky”. Carroll makes nonsense out of nonsense when he offers us the “literal meaning” of the first stanza of the poem: “It was evening, and the smooth, active badgers were scratching and boring holes in the hillside; all unhappy were the parrots; and the grave turtles squeaked out”. The Oxford Concise Dictionary of Literary Terms defines nonsense verse as “a kind of humorous poetry that amuses by deliberately using strange non-existent words and illogical ideas.” In other words, it depends on incongruousness.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves 

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

“Beware the Jabberwock, my son 

The jaws that bite, the claws that catch!

Beware the Jubjub bird, and shun 

The frumious Bandersnatch!”

He took his vorpal sword in hand; 

Long time the manxome foe he sought—

So rested he by the Tumtum tree, 

And stood awhile in thought.

And, as in uffish thought he stood, 

The Jabberwock, with eyes of flame,

Came whiffling through the tulgey wood, 

And burbled as it came!

One, two! One, two! And through and through 

The vorpal blade went snicker-snack!

He left it dead, and with its head 

He went galumphing back.

“And hast thou slain the Jabberwock? 

Come to my arms, my beamish boy!

O frabjous day! Callooh! Callay!” 

He chortled in his joy.

‘Twas brillig, and the slithy toves 

Did gyre and gimble in the wabe;

All mimsy were the borogoves,

And the mome raths outgrabe.

Humours

Nothing to do with laughter, at least not directly, are the four bodily fluids: blood, phlegm, yellow bile, and black bile. In Medieval Europe it was believed that these humours controlled human behaviour. Too much blood made you over-optimistic; too much phlegm made you laid back (phlegmatic); too much yellow bile made you bad-tempered (choleric); and too much black bile made you melancholic.

When Antonio opens ‘The Merchant of Venice’ with the memorable line, ‘In sooth I do not know why I am so sad’, the audience knows immediately that he, like Hamlet, is a melancholic, suffering from an excess of black bile.

Now you can understand the title of Ben Jonson’s play: ‘Every Man in His Humour’!

Hype and hyperbole: the difference

Although derived from 'hyperbole', 'hype', is pejorative. It is insincere. It is used by advertisers, fake prophets, and politicians to delude the gullible. Hyperbole, on the other hand, is a respectable figure of speech used, depending on the context, to generate humour or shock. The ‘e’ at the end is pronounced. A figure of speech that uses exaggeration either for dramatic or comic effect. An example of the former is Cassius’ description of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play: ‘Why, man, he doth bestride the narrow world / Like a colossus’. An example of the latter is this line from Pope’s ‘The Rape of the Lock’: ‘Belinda smiled and all the world was gay’. Pope is mocking fashionable society.

Since it is not expected to be taken literally, hyperbole is a form of irony. Its antonym is understatement.

Hyponyms and hypernyms.

A carrot is a vegetable. The specific umbelliferous plant, a tapering orange root, is the hyponym, while the generic term, any of various edible plants, is a hypernum. In child language acquisition the ability to distinguish between hypernyms and hyponyms takes place between the ages of three and five years.

Hypotaxis (and parataxis)

These terms are related to style in the construction of sentences. A hypotactic style embeds sentences with subordinate clauses, while a paratactic (or Biblical) style juxtaposes main clauses using very few connectives. For example, ‘I’ll go, but you must stay here’, is hypotactic; ‘I’ll go; you stay’, is paratactic.

Writers like Hemingway and Coetzee have paratactic styles, which gives their writing a laconic directness. Here is an example from Coetzee’s novel, ‘Age of Iron’:

‘“There is not only death inside me. There is life too. The death is strong, the life is weak. But my duty is to life. I must keep alive. I must.”’

Writers like Jane Austen and Henry James, on the other hand, have hypotactic styles, which gives their writing a flowing indirectness. Here is an example from James’s novel, ‘The Wings of the Dove’:

‘Her father’s life, her sister’s, her own, that of her two lost brothers - the whole history of their house had the effect of some fine, florid, voluminous phrase, say even a musical, that dropped first into words, into notes, without sense, and then, hanging unfinished, into no words, no notes at all.’

Icons (as opposed to symbols)

According to the philosopher, C. S. Pierce, an icon resembles what it represents, while a symbol does not. For example, a painting or a statuette of Jesus would be an icon. A white dove does not resemble peace, so it is a symbol. In language the only iconic words would be onomatopoeias, for example ‘tintinnabulation’, which resembles the sound of bells ringing.

The adjective, ‘iconic’ has become an annoying buzzword for the heroes and heroines of millennials.

Ideation

For me this is a creative process where one idea or image generates another and another and another, ad infinitum. Each one is different but connected to the one before. Take, for example, the ideation which occurs between these words of the Chinese philosopher, Lao Tzu, and my poem, 'Triangles':

'The way begets the one; one begets two; two begets three; three begets the myriad creatures.'

Triangles

Take the word, eagle,

From the word, sky;

Put it with the word, snake,

From the word, earth,

And you get the poem, dragon.

Take the word, bee,

From the word, active;

Put it with the word, flower,

From the word, passive,

And you get the poem, honey.

Take the word, light,

From the word, day;

Put it with the word, darkness,

From the word, night,

And you get the poem, dusk.

Take the word, god,

From the word, immortal;

Put it with the word, man,

From the word, mortal,

And you get the poem, Jesus.

Take the word, sex,

From the word, comedy;

Put it with the word, death,

From the word, tragedy,

And you get the poem, AIDS.

Take any word from any word,

Put it with any word from any word,

And you get the poem.

Idiolect

The words and phrases used by a character, which distinguishes them from other characters, for example, here is Mr Jingle speaking to the Pickwickians in ‘The Pickwick Papers’ by Charles Dickens. They are talking about cricket:

‘“You have played it Sir?” inquired Mr Wardle, who had been much amused by his loquacity.

“Played it! Think I have - thousands of times - not here - West Indies - exciting thing - hot work - very.”

“It must be rather a warm pursuit in such a climate,” observed Mr Pickwick.

“Warm! - red hot - scorching - glowing. Played a match once - single wicket - friend the Colonel - Sir Thomas Blaze - who should get the greatest number of runs. - Won the toss - first innings - seven o’clock, A.M. - six natives to look out - went in; kept in - heat intense - natives all fainted - taken away - fresh half dozen ordered - fainted also ….’

Mr Jingle’s elliptical, exaggerated, breathless speech habit may be called an idiolect.

Idiom

Idioms are weak metaphors, and English is full of them. That is one reason why it is such a difficult language for foreign speakers to learn. All first language speakers know that ‘I’m pulling your leg’ means ‘I’m joking’ or ‘I’m teasing you’; but foreign language speakers, taking the words literally, would be perplexed. Incidentally, this idiom has a curious origin: when a hangman botched his job, and the noose failed to break the victim’s neck, he would hang on to the dangling legs, adding sufficient weight to cause suffocation.

In literature an idiomatic style would be informal, colloquial - a style that imitates speech. Here is an example from Kurt Vonnegut’s ‘Slaughterhouse - Five’:

‘I couldn’t imagine what it was about me that could burn up Mary so. I was a family man. I’d been married only once. I wasn’t a drunk. I hadn’t done her husband any dirt in the war.

She fixed herself a Coca-Cola, made a lot of noise banging the ice-cube tray in the stainless steel sink.’

Idyll

A short poem set in an idealized countryside usually on the subject of love. It is synonymous with words like ‘rustic’, ‘bucolic’, and ‘pastoral’, and frequently features shepherds and their accoutrements. Here is an example from William Blake’s ‘Songs of Innocence’:

The Shepherd

How sweet is the shepherd’s sweet lot!

From the morn to the evening he strays;

He shall follow his sheep all the day,

And his tongue shall be filled with praise.

For he hears the lambs’ innocent call,

And he hears the ewes’ tender reply;

He is watchful, while they are in peace

For they know when their shepherd is nigh.

Tennyson extended the definition somewhat in his tales of King Arthur, entitled ‘Idylls of the King’

Imagery

An image is something you see but in literature imagery includes all the senses, and there is usually a purpose behind it. For example, Shakespeare uses the imagery of clothing to suggest the theme of appearance versus reality: ‘I wear not motley in my brain’, says Feste in ‘Twelfth Night’, meaning he might look like a fool but he doesn’t think like a fool.

If the purpose of an image has broad, even universal significance, it becomes a symbol, for example, the automobile in Fitzgerald’s ‘The Great Gatsby’ symbolises the corruption of ‘the American dream’.

Imagination

Coleridge’s definition still stands: ‘...the living power and prime agent of all human perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I AM’.

The imagination is kindled by the meeting of the conscious mind with the unconscious mind. The ‘image’ produced by this meeting is, according to Ezra Pound, ‘...that which presents an intellectual and emotional complex in an instant of time’.

Imaginative function

This, according to Halliday,is when children start using language to make up stories.

Implicature

Paul Grice’s word for a meaning that is suggested (implied) rather than stated openly. Closely linked to irony.

Inclusion

Using language in a way that makes everyone in the conversation feel included. The opposite is exclusion.

Inference

Working out the real meaning from the implied meaning.

Inflection

When you change the number or tense of a word by adding a prefix or a suffix or a change of vowel, for example adding an ‘s’ to ‘cat’ turns the singular into the plural.

In media res

The Bible begins at the beginning, Achebe’s ‘No Longer at Ease’ begins at the end, and Homer;s ‘Odyssey’ plunges the reader in media res, or into the middle of things - straight into the action. Here is how it begins:

Sing in me, Muse, and through me tell the story

of that man skilled in all ways of contending,

the wanderer, harried for years on end,

after he plundered the stronghold

on the proud height of Troy.

He saw the townlands

and learned the minds of many distant men,

and weathered many bitter nights and days

in his deep heart at sea, while he fought only

to save his life, to bring his shipmates home.

But not by will nor valor could he save them,

for their own recklessness destroyed them all —

children and fools, they killed and feasted on

the cattle of Lord Hęlios, the Sun,

and he who moves all day through the heaven

took from their eyes the dawn of their return. . . .

Translated by Robert Fitzgerald (1961)

Incantation

From the thaumaturgic stage of language development when the word could be made flesh, incantations are chants that have magical powers, powers to put spells on people as the witches do in their confrontation with Macbeth:

Double, double, toil and trouble;

Fire burn and cauldron bubble.

Incantations can also recall the dead back to life as in the following poem. The speaker is mother earth, addressing fallen soldiers:

The Recall

by Rudyard Kipling

I am the land of their fathers,

In me the virtue stays.

I will bring back my children,

After certain days.

Under their feet in the grasses

My clinging magic runs.

They shall return as strangers.

They shall remain as sons.

Over their heads in the branches

Of their new-bought, ancient trees,

I weave an incantation

And draw them to my knees.

Scent of smoke in the evening,

Smell of rain in the night--

The hours, the days and the seasons,

Order their souls aright,

Till I make plain the meaning

Of all my thousand years--

Till I fill their hearts with knowledge,

While I fill their eyes with tears.

Incarnadine

This beautiful word, from the Latin, ‘íncarnari’ (of raw flesh), is rarely found in literature. It is closely linked to the word, ‘incarnate’, which means ‘in the flesh’ as in ‘Christ is God incarnate’. Shakespeare uses it as a verb in this memorable speech from ‘Macbeth’:

Whence is that knocking?

How is't with me, when every noise appals me?

What hands are here? Hah! They pluck out mine eyes.

Will all great Neptune's ocean wash this blood

Clean from my hand? No; this my hand will rather

The multitudinous seas incarnadine,

Making the green one red.

And here is Joseph Heller in ‘Catch-22’, using it as an adjective:

The chaplain glanced at the bridge table that served as his desk and saw only the abominable orange-red, pear-shaped, plum tomato he had obtained that same morning from Colonel Cathcart, still lying on its side where he had forgotten it like an indestructible and incarnadine symbol of his own ineptitude.

And here am I, in my story, ‘Rosewater’, also using it as an adjective:

‘The characteristic smell of Rosewater had metamorphosed into a sight incarnadine, which gurgled away as I pulled the rubber plug.’

Instrumental function

According to Halliday, when a child uses language to express its needs.

Intensifier

High modality words, mainly adverbs of degree, used to add emphasis e.g. “really’, ‘absolutely’, ‘very’.

Interactional function

According to Halliday, when a child uses language to engage with others.

Interior monologue

This is when a writer takes the reader into the head of a character, into the character’s thoughts. It can be direct (present tense) or indirect (past tense). The whole of the final chapter (about 40 pages) of James Joyce’s novel, ‘Ulysses’, is indirect interior monologue (also known as ‘stream of consciousness’). There are no paragraphs and no full stops. Here is a sample:

‘...I wouldn’t give a snap of my two fingers for all their learning why dont they go and create something I often asked him atheists or whatever they call themselves go and wash the cobbles off themselves first then they go howling for the priest and they dying and why why because theyre afraid of hell on account of their bad conscience ah yes I know them well who was the first person in the universe before there was anybody that made it all ah that they dont know neither do I…’

And here is a sample of indirect interior monologue from Jane Austen’s ‘Emma’:

‘Mr Knightley thought highly of them; but they must be coarse and unpolished, and very unfit to be the intimates of a girl who wanted only a little more knowledge and elegance to be quite perfect. SHE would notice her; she would improve her; she would detach her from her bad acquaintance, and introduce her into good society; she would form her opinions and her manners.’

Interlocutor

Someone who takes part in a conversation,

Intertextuality

Not to be confused with plagiary, this term, coined by Julia Kristeva, describes texts within texts and how they relate to each other. For example, T.S. Eliot opens his poem, ‘The Waste Land’ with an ironic allusion to the opening of Chaucer’s ‘The Canterbury Tales’. Eliot’s poem begins:

‘April is the cruellest month, breeding

Lilacs out of the dead land, mixing

Memory and desire, stirring

Dull roots with spring rain’

Chaucer’s poem begins:

‘Whan that Aprille with his shoures soote

The droghte of March hath perced to the roote,

And bathed every veyne in swich licour,

Of which vertu engendred is the flour…’

The title of Chinua Achebe’s novel, ‘No longer at Ease’ is an ironic allusion to T.S.Eliot’s poem, ‘Journey of the Magi’, which is an ironic allusion to the Bible.

Intonation

The way the pitch of a voice rises and falls during speech. 

Intrusive narrator

Also known as authorial intrusion, this is when a writer interrupts their story to talk directly to the reader, for example, here is the moralising George Eliot (in her novel, ‘Middlemarch’) advising her readers on how to judge one of her characters:

‘If you think it incredible that to imagine Lydgate as a man of family could cause thrills of satisfaction which had anything to do with the sense that she was in love with him, I will ask you to use your power of comparison a little more effectively….’

In ‘Jane Eyre’, Charlotte Bronte intrudes indirectly through her fictional, first person narrator when Jane declares: ‘Reader, I married him’.

This device was popular among 19th century realist novelists, who felt it incumbent upon themselves to guide their readers in the ‘right’ direction. It lost favour for much of the more sceptical 20th century, but has returned with a vengeance in our so-called postmodern era, not in order to guide the reader but to thoroughly confuse them.

Can you identify the author’s intrusion in this extract from ‘Slaughterhouse-Five’ by Kurt Vonnegut:

‘Somewhere in there the poor old high school teacher, Edgar Derby, was caught with a teapot he had taken from the catacombs. He was arrested for plundering. He was tried and shot.

So it goes.’

Inversion

Most commonly seen in rhyming poetry, where the usual subject/verb order is reversed, for example, ‘I happy am’ in the first stanza of Blake’s poem, ‘Infant Joy’:

“I have no name:

I am but two days old.”

What shall I call thee?

“I happy am,

Joy is my name.”

Sweet joy befall thee.

The penultimate line is also a form of inversion.

The reversing of a metrical foot, usually for semantic emphasis, is also a form of inversion. Consider this line from Shakespeare’s sonnet number 12: ‘When lofty trees I see barren of leaves’: the word, ‘barren’ inverts the regular iambic metre of the rest of the line. It is a trochee.

A common form in prose is placing an adjective after its noun e.g. ‘the body politic’, ‘the ocean wide’.

Invocation

Epic poems of the classical period often begin with invocations (or apostrophes) to some higher power, a god or a muse, to help them with their creation, for example, ‘Tell me, muse, of the man of many wiles’ at the beginning of Homer’s ‘Odyssey’. Here is John Milton’s opening of ‘Paradise Lost’, clearly influenced by Homer:

“Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater Man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,

Sing Heav’nly Muse, that on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed,

In the beginning how the heavens and earth

Rose out of chaos: or if Sion hill

Delight thee more, and Siloa’s brook that flowed

Fast by the Oracle of God; I thence

Invoke thy aid to my advent’rous song,

That with no middle flight intends to soar

Above th’ Aonian mount, while it pursues

Things unattempted yet in prose or rhyme.

In religion, prayers that ask for help or a blessing can be termed invocations.

Irony

In English literature irony is pervasive: from puns to paradoxes. Any word, phrase or sentence that may, in its context, have more than one meaning, is a form of irony. When the poet, Andrew Marvell describes Oliver Cromwell as ‘restless’, he is being ironical in the sense that he uses the word ambiguously. It could suggest admiration for Cromwell’s untiring activity or it could be a warning that his activity (subjugating the English royalists, the Irish, and about to subjugate the Scots) might need to be curbed. We could call this verbal irony.

In the novels of Thomas Hardy, where the characters seem to be victims of a mocking fate, we think of cosmic irony, described in the opening stanza of his poem, ‘Hap’:

‘If but some vengeful god would call to me

From up the sky, and laugh: “Thou suffering thing,

Know that thy sorrow is my ecstasy,

That thy love’s loss is my hate’s profiting!”’

The disingenuous debater, who pretends to be ignorant about something in order to trap his opponent, is indulging in Socratic irony. Other forms of irony include sarcasm, satire, meiosis (understatement), litotes (using a negative to express a positive)… the list goes on.

An important form of irony for students of literature, especially plays, is dramatic irony, in which the audience knows more about the situation on stage than some of the characters. In ‘Twelfth Night’, for example, only the audience (and possibly Feste the clown) know, until the very end, that Viola/Cesario is a woman disguised as a man. One effect of dramatic irony is that it flatters the audience into feelings of superiority over some of the characters; it makes them, somehow, participators in the drama.

Closely linked to dramatic irony is structural irony where you have an unreliable narrator like Huck Finn in the novel that bears his name, or a protagonist like Othello who is naively unaware of the true circumstances surrounding him. In both examples, author and reader are aware of the real situation.

Irony can be deliberate as in the celebrated opening sentence of Jane Austen’s novel, ‘Pride and Prejudice’, or accidental in the case of William Golding’s best-selling novel, ‘Lord of the flies’, which was rejected by 20 publishers.

Isogloss

An area where a particular linguistic feature occurs, e. g. in Matabeleland the word ‘suburbs’ is pronounced ‘sebubs’.

Jacobean

Shakespeare is sometimes placed in the Elizabethan, sometimes in the Jacobean period. In truth he straddled both periods: his earlier work, Elizabethan, his later, Jacobean. The latter belongs to the period 1603 - 1625 (Shakespeare died in 1616). Jacobean refers to the reign of James 1 of England. Here is a sample of the Elizabethan Shakespeare followed by the Jacobean:

‘Now is the winter of our discontent

Made glorious summer by this son of York’

[from King Richard 111]

‘We are such stuff

As dreams are made on; and our little life

Is rounded with a sleep.’

[from The Tempest]

Janus words

The ancient Greek god, Janus, had two faces, front and back. The first month of the year is named after him because it looks forward to the new year and back to the old year.

Janus words are paradoxes: they are their own opposites. 'Cleave', for example, means to split and to adhere; 'clip' means to hold things together and to separate them; when you 'draw' the curtains are you opening them or closing them?

Poets love Janus words because poets revel in paradoxes. Look how John Keats exploits the Janus word, 'still', in the opening line of his ''Ode on a Grecian Urn': 'Thou still unravished bride of quietness!' He is referring to the engraving of a young woman on the urn, who is about to be embraced by her lover. She is still in the sense that she is fixed in art and, paradoxically, that she will always be about to embrace:

'Bold Lover, never, never canst thou kiss, 

Though winning near the goal—yet, do not grieve; 

She cannot fade, though thou hast not thy bliss, 

For ever wilt thou love, and she be fair!'

Can you find the Janus word in this extract from 'The Windhover' by Gerard Manley Hopkins :

Brute beauty and valour and act, oh, air, pride, plume, here 

Buckle! AND the fire that breaks from thee then, a billion 

Times told lovelier, more dangerous, O my chevalier!

Jargon

Field-specific words and phrases which may be unintelligible to outsiders. Latin phrases like ipso facto, corpus delicti, and de jure are part of legal jargon.

Jeremiad

Derived from the name of the Old Testament prophet, a Jeremiad is a long and bitter lament for the breakdown of spiritual and moral values in society. Its tone of self-righteousness does not go down very well with contemporary students of literature.

In ‘Wuthering Heights’ Lockwood’s behaviour in his first dream in which he is attending a sermon by the Reverend Jabes Branderham, suggests that the sermon is a jeremiad: ‘Oh, how weary I grew! How I writhed, and yawned, and nodded, and revived! How I pinched and pricked myself, and rubbed my eyes, and stood up, and sat down again….’

The reader is spared Lockwood’s agony but they do get a sample of the preacher’s jeremiadic style:

‘Thou art the man!’ cried Jabes, after a solemn pause, leaning over his cushion. ‘Seventy times seven times didst thou gapingly contort thy visage - seventy times seven did I take counsel with my soul - Lo! this is human weakness: this also may be absolved! The first of the seventy first is come. Brethren, execute upon him the judgement written.’

Jingle

If a poem is called a jingle it is not a compliment! However, children’s rhymes and radio advertisements use jingles very effectively. Here is an advert for Brylcreem, which I remember from my boyhood:

‘Brylcreem, a little dab’ll do ya,

Brylcreem, you look so debonair,

Brylcreem, the girls will all pursue ya,

They love to rub their fingers in your hair.’

And here’s a nonsense rhyme from my childhood:

‘There was a man from Thessaly

And he was wondrous wise:

He jumped into a bramble bush

And scratched out both his eyes;

And when he saw his eyes were out,

with all his might and main,

He jumped right back into the bush

and scratched them in again.’

So jingles are short, staccato, rhyming verses, very repetitive - a bit like the way Mr Jingle talks in Dickens’ early novel, ‘The Pickwick Papers’.

Jouissance (French for ‘enjoyment’)

That feeling you get while reading a sentence in a novel or a line in a poem that gives you ineffable bittersweetness. The critic, Roland Barthes, described it as an erotic experience. The psychoanalyst, Jacques Lacan, used it to describe an unbearable experience brought about by either too much or too little stimulation. They both conflate pleasure and pain, as Wordsworth does in his key word, ‘joy’. A synonym, I guess, would be ‘passion’.

Here is a fragment from Andrew Marvell’s poem, ‘The Garden’, which gives me a feeling of jouissance:

‘Annihilating all that’s made

To a green thought in a green shade.’

Juvenalian

Two Roman poets, Juvenal and Horace, have given their names to describe the varying tone of satirical writing. Juvenalian satire is vicious, unforgiving, full of hate; Horatian satire is good-natured. Here are some quotes from Juvenal’s satires to give you a taste of his mind:

‘There is hardly a case in which the dispute was not caused by a woman.’

‘Limits the Romans’ anxieties to two things - bread and circuses.’

‘Put on a lock! Keep her in confinement!’ But who is to guard the guards themselves? Your wife is as cunning as you, and begins with them.’

The greatest Juvenalian satirist in English is Alexander Pope, who was a hunchback. Here is a couplet from his ‘Epistle to Dr Arbuthnot’:

‘Yet let me flap this bug with gilded wings,

This painted child of dirt, that stinks and stings.’

Kenning

In Anglo-Saxon poetry you find figurative compounds (usually two words, hyphenated), which became fixed expressions such as ‘whale-road’ for the sea, ‘bone-beak’ for an axe, ‘wind-racers’ for horses. Two writers strongly influenced by kennings are Gerard Manley Hopkins and James Joyce. Here is a sample from Hopkins’ ‘The Windhover’:

‘I caught this morning morning’s minion, king-

dom of daylight’s dauphin, dapple-dawn-drawn Falcon, in his riding.’

And here is a sample from Joyce’s ‘Finnegan’s Wake’:

‘... a once wallstrait oldparr is retaled early in bed and later on life down through all christian minstrelsy. The great fall of the offwall…’

You can see the influence of kennings in modern-day expressions like ‘eye candy’, ‘First lady’, and ‘bean counter’.

Lacuna

Old manuscripts often have gaps, missing bits, ellipses, and these are called lacunae (or lacunas). In literary theory, according to Wolfgang Iser, texts have ‘leerstellen’ (blanks), which have to be filled in by the reader. The text only becomes meaningful when somebody reads it. Iser called this ‘reader response theory’. So when Macbeth calls the witches ‘secret, black, and midnight hags’, Shakespeare’s contemporary reader (audience), may have responded differently from, say, a female African American student in the 21st century at a progressive university; and both may have been different from the author’s intended (implied) reader.

Lament

A poem or song of sorrow for a lost loved one, or regret for a vanished past. As Francois Villon put it: ‘But where are the snows of yesteryear?’ These are sometimes called ‘ubi sunt’ (Latin for ‘where are’) poems. Other synonymous terms are ‘elegy’, ‘dirge’ and ‘threnody’. Here is a lament by Oscar Wilde:

Requiescat

Tread lightly, she is near

Under the snow,

Speak gently, she can hear

The daisies grow.

All her bright golden hair

Tarnished with rust,

She that was young and fair

Fallen to dust.

Lily-like, white as snow,

She hardly knew

She was a woman, so

Sweetly she grew.

Coffin-board, heavy stone,

Lie on her breast,

I vex my heart alone,

She is at rest.

Peace, Peace, she cannot hear

Lyre or sonnet,

All my life's buried here,

Heap earth upon it.

Lampoon

Juvenalian satire at its most personal. Laws of libel have restricted its use in more modern times. Here is the Earl of Rochester lampooning King Charles 2:

‘Here lies our Sovereign Lord, the King,

Whose word no man relies on:

He never says a foolish thing,

Nor ever does a wise one.’

This is not an epitaph, as the present tense will tell you; apparently it was written on the door of the king’s bedroom.

Language Acquisition Device (LAD)

Chomsky’s theory that the human brain is hard-wired to learn language. We have to learn to read and write but language acquisition is innate.

Language Acquisition Support System (LASS)

Bruner’s theory that the interaction of caregivers helps children develop language in a sociable direction.

Legend

Over time, the villains and heroes of history, especially the oral tradition, become legends: Billy the Kid, Joan of Arc, Robin Hood are examples. While myths tend to focus on gods and on creation stories, legends focus on mortals, real or fictional.

It seems contradictory to describe someone (say Sir Alex Ferguson) as a ‘living legend’ but the word, like ‘icon’, has become quite promiscuous.

Leitmotif (or motif)

The term comes from music criticism to describe repeated sounds (melodies) linked to particular places or characters. In literature these are replaced by symbols and images. In ‘Romeo and Juliet’, for example, the theme of fate is suggested by references to the stars. The chorus calls the lovers ‘star-crossed’, and Romeo echoes this on several occasions: ‘... my mind misgives / Some consequences yet hanging in the stars’; ‘Then I defy you, stars’; ‘inauspicious stars’.

Lemma

The word you look up in a dictionary, and then go on to learn its meanings and its other parts of speech.

Lexis

The total vocabulary of a language.

Limerick

Edward Lear did not invent the limerick but he made it famous. It is likely that this English verse form was not invented by any one person, but simply grew out of the oral tradition - where all poetry begins. The limerick is one five-line stanza with an aabba rhyme scheme. The third and fourth lines are shorter than the others. The rhythm is basically anapaestic (one stressed followed by two unstressed syllables). Limericks are notorious for being politically incorrect, and positively rude. Here is one I made up about a famous German philosopher:

‘There was an old German called Hegel

whose theories were ever so vaguel:

his manner was hectic,

his thoughts dialectic,

and as deep as the hole in a bagel.’

Limpid

This adjective has nothing to do with a weak handshake or a type of sea snail that clings tightly to rocks. Literally it means clear and transparent, and is used to describe things like water or eyes. Figuratively, and this is where our interest lies, it describes a prose style, a style that is clear and unambiguous.

Here is George Orwell being limpid:

'The great enemy of clear language is insincerity. When there is a gap between one's real and one's declared aims, one turns, as it were, instinctively to long words and exhausted idioms, like a cuttlefish squirting out ink.’

Lingua franca

A language that is formed in order that people who speak different languages can communicate with each other. Today simple English is the world’s most common lingua franca.

Lisible

The critic Roland Barthes separates texts into those, like pulp (or genre) fiction, which satisfy the reader’s expectation, and those, like T. S. Eliot’s ‘The Waste Land’, which place intellectual demands on the reader. The former are lisible (or readerly), while the latter are scriptible (or writerly).

Here is an example of a lisible text; it is the opening couple of sentences of P.G. Wodehouse’s novel, ‘Uncle Fred in the Springtime’:

‘The door of the Drones Club swung open, and a young man in form-fitting tweeds came down the steps and started to walk westwards. An observant passer-by, scanning his face, would have fancied that he discerned on it a keen, tense look, like that of an African hunter stalking a hippopotamus.’

Now here is an example of a scriptible text; the opening couple of sentences of James Joyce’s novel, ‘Ulysses’:

‘Stately, plump Buck Mulligan came from the stairhead, bearing a bowl of lather on which mirror and razor lay crossed. A yellow dressing-gown, ungirdled, was sustained gently behind him by the mild morning air. He held the bowl aloft and intoned:

“Introibo ad altare Dei.”’

Litotes

A figure of speech which uses a negative to express a positive. This makes it a form of irony. Many common examples like ‘not bad’, ‘no small measure’, ‘not seldom’, are understatements. It’s a kind of discreet way of issuing praise. Linguists might call it hedging.

Here is an example from literature:

“I am not unaware how the productions of the Grub Street brotherhood have of late years fallen under many prejudices.” (Jonathan Swift, A Tale of 

a Tub)

Logocentrism

Used pejoratively by deconstructionists like Jacques Derrida, to describe Platonic and Christian notions of an ultimate truth, an ideal. For Christians this would be God, the Logos, the word made flesh; for Platonists it would be the Idea, a theory of Forms.

The deconstructionists, without acknowledging the contributions to this issue by poets like Shakespeare, argue that words have no fixed meaning, so they can’t direct us to any Absolute, any Truth.

A connected word is ‘phonocentrism’, which is critical of those academics who claim that the spoken word is more meaningful than the written word. Don’t ask me to explain!

Here is a sample of Derrida’s writing:

“Therefore we will not listen to the source itself in order to learn what it is or what it means, but rather to the turns of speech, the allegories, figures, metaphors, as you will, into which the source has deviated, in order to lose it or rediscover it—which always amounts to the same.”

Lyric

The words of popular songs are called lyrics, but in literature lyric poetry is distinguished from other genres like epic and dramatic poetry. Lyric poems are relatively short, and song-like. The latter effect is created by forms of repetition like metre, rhyme, and alliteration.

Epic poetry has been more or less taken over by the novel, while dramatic poetry has been more or less taken over by the play. Lyric poetry continues to thrive, especially in its less lyrical form, free verse. Its content tends to be personal, confessional, often ironically presented.

In ancient Greece these poems were accompanied by a small harp-like instrument called a lyre. Hence the name.

Here is one of my favourite lyric poems by the Irish poet, Louis Macneice:

The sunlight on the garden

Hardens and grows cold,

We cannot cage the minute

Within its nets of gold;

When all is told

We cannot beg for pardon.

Our freedom as free lances

Advances towards its end;

The earth compels, upon it

Sonnets and birds descend;

And soon, my friend,

We shall have no time for dances.

The sky was good for flying

Defying the church bells

And every evil iron

Siren and what it tells:

The earth compels,

We are dying, Egypt, dying

And not expecting pardon,

Hardened in heart anew,

But glad to have sat under

Thunder and rain with you,

And grateful too

For sunlight on the garden.

Machiavel

Named after the Italian political philosopher, Niccolo Machiavelli, whose book, ‘The Prince’ (1513), argued that in matters of governance, the ends justify the means. Today we call it Realpolitik, where only lip-service is paid to issues of morality. An example of a Machiavel in Shakespeare’s plays is Richard 111. Here is an extract from his opening soliloquy:

‘And therefore, since I cannot prove a lover

To entertain these fair well-spoken days,

I am determined to prove a villain,

And hate the idle pleasures of these days.

Plots have I laid, inductions dangerous,

By drunken prophecies, libels, and dreams,

To set my brother Clarence and the King

in deadly hate, the one against the other.’

Magic Realism

A recent genre, which combines realistic stories with elements of dreams, and the supernatural. It is popular in Africa and South America, where the ancestral spirits and the spirits of the unborn are never very far away.

Ben Okri is an African writer whose books are rich in Magic Realism. Here is the opening of his novel, 'The Famished Road':

'In the beginning there was a river. The river became a road and the

road branched out to the whole world. And because the road was once

a river it was always hungry.

In that land of beginnings spirits mingled with the unborn. We could

assume numerous forms. Many of us were birds. We knew no

boundaries. There was much feasting, playing and sorrowing. We

feasted much because of the beautiful terrors of eternity. We played

much because we were free. And we sorrowed much because there

were always those amongst us who had just returned from the world

of the living.'

Some people argue that the prototype of modern Magic Realism is Gabriel Garcia Marquez’s extraordinary novel, 'One Hundred Years of Solitude'. Here is a sample from early on in the novel:

'One night when she could not sleep, Ursula went out into the courtyard 

to get some water and she saw Prudencio Aguilar by the water jar. He

was livid, a sad expression on his face, trying to cover the hole in his throat

with a plug made of esparto grass. It did not bring on fear in her but

pity. She went back to the room and told her husband what she had seen,

but he did not think much of it. “This just means that we can’t stand the

weight of our conscience.” Two nights later Ursula saw Prudencio 

Aguilar again, in the bathroom, using the esparto plug to wash the 

clotted blood from his throat. On another night she saw him strolling

in the rain. Jose Arcadio Buendia, annoyed by his wife’s hallucinations,

went out into the courtyard armed with the spear. There was the dead 

man with his sad expression.

“You go to hell,” Jose Arcadio Buendia shouted at him. “Just as many times

as you come back, I’ll kill you again.”

Prudencio Aguilar did not go away, nor did Jose Arcadio Buendia dare

throw the spear. He never slept well after that. He was tormented by the 

immense desolation with which the dead man had looked at him through

the rain, his deep nostalgia as he yearned for living people, the anxiety

with which he searched through the house looking for some water with

which to soak his esparto plug’.

Malapropism (mal a propos)

Based on a character in Sheridan’s play, ‘The Rivals’, a malapropism is a word which sounds a bit like the intended word but has such a different meaning that the sense is ridiculous. Here is Mrs Malaprop: ‘Illiterate [meaning ‘obliterate’] him, I say, quite from your memory’.

Before it got its name, Shakespeare made quite frequent use of malapropisms. Here is old Gobbo in ‘The Merchant of Venice’: ‘He hath a great infection [meaning ‘affection’], Sir, (as one would say) to serve-’.

Mannerism

This is a vague term in the world of literature. (In the world of art and architecture it has a more specific application.) Mannerism describes any writing from any period that is self-consciously over-decorative. Here is an extract from ‘Euphues’ by John Lyly:

‘There dwelt in Athens a young gentleman of great patrimony, and of so comely a personage, that it was doubted whether he were more bound to Nature for the lineaments of his person, or to Fortune for the increase of his possessions. But Nature impatient of comparisons, and as it were disdaining a companion or copartner in her working, added to this comeliness of his body such a sharp capacity of mind, that not only she proved Fortune counterfeit, but was half of that opinion that she herself was only current. This young gallant, of more wit than wealth, and yet of more wealth than wisdom, seeing himself inferior to none in pleasant conceits, thought himself superior to all in honest conditions, insomuch that he deemed himself so apt to all things, that he gave himself almost to nothing, but practicing of those things commonly which are incident to these sharp wits, fine phrase….’

You can apply the word to the way people dress, for instance, it was one of Oscar Wilde’s mannerisms to wear a green carnation in his lapel. Mannerisms of speech, like repeatedly saying ‘I kid you not’, are called, by linguists, idiolects.

Masculine Ending (and rhyme)

English is still a sexist language. If the last syllable of a line of poetry is stressed, it is a masculine ending; if it is unstressed, it is a feminine ending. This also applies to rhyme. In this stanza from Auden’s poem, ‘As I Walked Out One Evening’, the first and third lines have feminine endings while the second and fourth lines have masculine endings:

‘In the burrows of the Nightmare

Where justice naked is,

Time watches from the shadow

And coughs when you would kiss.

Maxim

Yet another word for a proverb or a saying or an adage or an aphorism or an apothegm… a maxim is a wise and often witty generalisation, for example, ‘Three may keep a secret, if two of them are dead’. Here is Jonathan Swift:

‘’Tis an old maxim in the schools,

That flattery’s the food of fools;

Yet now and then your men of wit

Will condescend to take a bit.’

And here is Winston Churchill in a speech on the eve of the First World War: ‘The maxim of the British people is “Business as usual”’.

Meiosis

In biology it refers to a type of cell division but in rhetoric it is,like litotes, a form of understatement, which can be ironically humorous, as in this scene from ‘Romeo and Juliet’ where Tybalt mortally wounds Mercutio and runs away:

‘Mercutio: I am hurt

A plague on both your houses! I am sped.

Is he gone and hath nothing?

Benvolio: What, art thou hurt?

Mercutio: Ay, ay, a scratch, a scratch.’

Melodrama

‘Sensational’ comes to mind! Originally melodrama was used to describe plays that were interspersed with music and song, but nowadays we think of it as drama where character and action are sacrificed to emotional exaggeration. It has become a pejorative word. Melodramatic movies are sometimes called ‘tearjerkers’. Incidentally, the village I grew up in, Colleen Bawn, is the title of a melodrama by the 19th-century Irish Playwright, Dion Boucicault. Dickens is often melodramatic, but he does it with style. Here is Bill Sykes murdering his girlfriend, Nancy:

‘The man struggled violently to release his arms; but those of the girl were clasped round his, and tear as he would, he could not tear them away.

“Bill,” cried the girl, striving to lay her head upon his breast, “the gentleman and that dear lady, told me tonight of a home in some foreign country where I could end my days in solitude and peace. Let me see them again, and beg them, on my knees, to show the same mercy and goodness to you; and let us both leave this dreadful place, and far apart lead better lives, and forget how we have lived, except in prayers, and never see each other more. It is never too late to repent. They told me so - I feel it now - but we must have time - a little, little time!”

The housebreaker freed one arm, and grasped his pistol. The certainty of immediate detection if he fired, flashed across his mind even in the midst of his fury; and he beat it twice with all the force he could summon, upon the upturned face that almost touched his own.

She staggered and fell: nearly blinded with the blood that rained down from a deep gash in her forehead; but raising herself, with difficulty, on her knees, drew from her bosom a white handkerchief - Rose Maylie’s own - and holding it up, in her folded hands, as high towards Heaven as her feeble strength would allow, breathed one prayer for mercy to her Maker.

It was a ghastly figure to look upon. The murderer staggering backward to the wall, and shutting out the sight with his hand, seized a heavy club and struck her down.’

Mere

This is a curious word because it means the opposite, today, of what it meant in Shakespeare's (or even Yeats's) time. Today it means small or insignificant; for the poets mentioned it meant absolute or undiluted. This is the sense in which it came to English via the Dutch, 'meer', which is a lake.

In this extract from 'The Merchant of Venice', Bassanio's 'dear friend' is his benefactor, Antonio, whose 'mere enemy' is Shylock.:

'I have engaged myself to a dear friend,

Engaged my friend to his mere enemy

To feed my means.'

And here is an extract from Yeats's apocalyptic poem, 

'The Second Coming':

'Turning and turning in the widening gyre 

The falcon cannot hear the falconer; 

Things fall apart; the centre cannot hold; 

Mere anarchy is loosed upon the world,’

Metadrama (or Metatheatre)

Shortly after the assassination of Julius Caesar in Shakespeare’s play, one of the conspirators, Brutus, suggests that they wash their hands with Caesar’s blood, so the deed would appear more of a sacrifice than a murder. Cassius agrees and says:

‘Stoop then, and wash. How many ages hence

Shall this our lofty scene be acted over,

In states unborn, and accents yet unknown?’

Brutus replies: ‘How many times shall Caesar bleed in sport…?’

This is drama about drama, or metadrama.

Metafiction

‘The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn’ by Mark Twain, begins:

‘You don’t know about me, without you have read a book by the name of “The Adventures of Tom Sawyer”, but that ain’t no matter. That book was made by Mr Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth.’

This is an example of metafiction: fiction about fiction. Although metafiction is popular with so-called postmodern novelists, it was employed extensively in Laurence Sterne’s novel, ‘Tristram Shandy’, which was written in the late seventeen hundreds. Here is an example:

‘I will not finish that sentence till I have made an observation upon the strange state of affairs between the reader and myself, just as things stand at present - an observation never applicable before to any one biographical writer since the creation of the world.’

Metalanguage

Language used to comment on language, e.g. ‘In other words…’; ‘what I mean is…’.

Metaphor

The generic term for all figures of speech that find similarities in differences. Language is intrinsically metaphorical; as Derrida puts it, ‘Abstract notions always hold a sensory figure’. An abstract word like sanguine (hopeful) can be traced to the Latin word for blood. Some of the more well known metaphors are simile, personification, conceit, synecdoche and metonymy.

Dead metaphors are those that have lost their figurative impact, like ‘the foot of the mountain’ or ‘the leg of a chair’. If you apply two metaphors in a single comparison, e.g. ‘to take arms against a sea of troubles’ [‘Hamlet’], you have created a mixed metaphor.

The critic, I. A. Richards, called the literal term of a comparison the ‘tenor’ and the figurative term the ‘vehicle’. So, in the metaphor, ‘my mother is an angel’, ‘mother’ is the tenor, and ‘angel’ is the vehicle.

In the following poem the poet uses metaphors to give us an idea of what it’s like to be heavily pregnant:

Metaphors

by Sylvia Plath

I’m a riddle in nine syllables,

An elephant, a ponderous house,

A melon strolling on two tendrils.

O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers!

This loaf’s big with its yeasty rising.

Money’s new-minted in this fat purse.

I’m a means, a stage, a cow in calf.

I’ve eaten a bag of green apples,

Boarded the train there’s no getting off.

Metonymy

A figure of speech which sits uneasily between a simile and a metaphor. Contemporary literary theory has complicated it to such an extent that it is very difficult to define. In the past its Greek meaning was a useful guide: ‘a change of name’. So if we referred to Shakespeare as ‘the bard’, we felt comfortable calling it an example of metonymy. Not so these days.

The Russian linguist, Roman Jakobson distinguished between metaphor and metonymy by locating the former predominantly in poetry, and the latter predominantly in prose. Metaphor combines (finds similarities in) two things that are not contiguous (related) e.g. a swamp and the US stock market; metonymy combines two things that are contiguous e.g. Wall Street and the US stock market.

Metonymy equals, and even exceeds the power of metaphor, when it (only rarely) achieves the transcendence of synecdoche e.g. ‘to see a world in a grain of sand’ [William Blake].

Metre

There are several ways to measure a line of poetry but the so-called accentual-syllabic metre is the one most common in English verse. A unit of measurement is called a foot, which can be disyllabic (made up of two syllables) or trisyllabic (made up of three syllables). The theory and practice of metre in poetry is called prosody (or metrics).

The disyllabic iamb dominates all other metrical feet. It is made up of an unstressed followed by a stressed syllable as in ‘before’, regard, ‘a rose’. Here is how it works in verse, the first stanza of Lewis Carroll’s nonsense poem, ‘The Walrus and the Carpenter’:

‘The sun was shining on the sea,

Shining with all his might:

He did his very best to make

The billows smooth and bright -

And this was odd, because it was

The middle of the night.’

Notice how the iambic metre is broken once, the foot, ‘shining’ in the second line. Here the first syllable is stressed and the second unstressed. This is the opposite of an iamb, and it is called a trochee. The word ‘shining’ occurs again in these totally trochaic lines from Longfellow’s ‘The song of Hiawatha’:

‘By the shores of Gitche Gumee,

By the shining Big-Sea-Water,

Stood the wigwam of Nokomis,

Daughter of the Moon, Nokomis.’

The trochee has more of a staccato sound than the iamb. In both these examples there are four feet to the line: tetrameter. More serious poets seem to prefer five feet to the line: pentameter.

The two most common trisyllabic feet are the dactyl (stressed/unstressed/ unstressed), and the anapaest (unstressed/unstressed/stressed). Accents can vary depending on context, so the utterance, ‘Shame on you!’ can sound like a dactyl or an anapaest. Prosody is not an exact science. Here is the dactyl at work in Tennyson’s poem, ‘The Charge of the Light Brigade’:

‘“Forward, the Light Brigade!”

Was there a man dismay’d?’

And here is the anapaest at work in Byron’s ‘The Destruction of Sennacherib’:

‘And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,

When the blue wave rolls nightly on deep Galilee.’

Micropause

A pause in speech approximating a comma in writing.

Militate and mitigate

These two verbs are sometimes used as if they mean the same thing, but they have almost opposite meanings. 'Militate' is usually followed by the preposition , 'against', and it means to resist or to counter, for example, 'His refusal to co-operate will militate against his chances of acquittal.'

'Mitigate' (frequently used in the law courts), means to moderate or to make milder, for example, 'His sentence might be mitigated by the fact that he was drunk at the time’.

Mimesis

This is another word that has been made seriously complicated by philosophers, social anthropologists, and literary critics. It simply means imitation, and in aesthetics: the act of showing, not telling (diegesis). Here is Hamlet’s advice to the players:

‘...suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance, that you o’erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so o’erdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end both at the first, and now, was and is, to hold as ‘twere the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of this time his form and pressure.’

Oscar Wilde contradicts Hamlet when he claims: ‘Nobody noticed fog before Whistler painted it.’

Thus Hamlet says art should be the appearance of reality, while Oscar suggests that reality is the appearance of art. Take your pick.

Minimalism

You can’t get more (or less) minimalist than Samuel Beckett’s 1969 play, ‘Breath’, which lasts for 30 seconds. Here are the writer’s stage directions:

Curtain.

1. Faint light on stage littered with miscellaneous rubbish. Hold for about five seconds.

2. Faint brief cry and immediately inspiration and slow increase of light together reaching maximum together in about ten seconds. Silence and hold about five seconds.

3. Expiration and slow decrease of light together reaching minimum together (light as in I) in about ten seconds and immediately cry as before. Silence and hold for about five seconds.

Rubbish. No verticals, all scattered and lying.

Cry. Instant of recorded vagitus. Important that two cries be identical, switching on and off strictly synchronized light and breath.

Breath. Amplified recording.

Maximum light. Not bright. If 0 = dark and 10 = bright, light should move from about 3 to 6 and back.

Literary minimalism manifests itself in forms like the haiku, the epigram, and the synecdoche. It uses as few words as possible to say what it wants to say. Here is my minimalist sonnet:

Malnourished Sonnet

The unburnt pot

on my desk

could never carry water

from the Umzingwane Dam,

or beer brewed

in a forty gallon drum,

or the spirit

of a stillborn baby;

but it is a useful receptacle

for my pen,

screwdriver,

tweezers,

nail clippers,

and Ingrid Jonker medal.

Mise-en-Abyme (placed in the abyss)

The French author Andre Gide borrowed this phrase from heraldry where you sometimes see a shield depicted in a shield. A literary equivalent would be the apparition in ‘Macbeth’ where the spirit of Banquo holds up a mirror reflecting his descendants: a king holding up a mirror reflecting a king, holding up a mirror reflecting a king holding up a mirror, and so on . ‘What!’ cries the tyrant, ‘will the line stretch out to th’ crack of doom?’

Another example is the play within the play within the play in ‘Hamlet’. The ‘dumb show’ reflects ‘The Murder of Gonzago’, which reflects ‘Hamlet’, which reflects the breakdown of the ‘fourth wall’ in the auditorium.

Here is my take:

Mise-en Abyme

When actors

act Hamlet,

they are acting

an actor

who acts himself

as an actor

of actors.

Misprision

The critic, Harold Bloom, theorised that younger poets feel threatened by their more established, more revered predecessors whom they deliberately misread in an effort to displace them, thus providing space for their own imaginations. Bloom writes about this in his book ‘The Anxiety of Influence’ (1973). John Milton was targeted in this way by the Romantics in general, and among the latter, the older, more famous Wordsworth was ‘misunderstood’ by his younger contemporaries, Keats and Shelley. This is what Bloom means by the word,’misprision’, which he borrows from the law. There it means deliberately concealing your knowledge of a serious crime, like treason.

I guess I’m guilty of misprision in my poem, ‘Scrub Robin’, which ‘re-writes' Keats’ great ode, ‘To a Nightingale’. Here is my opening stanza:

1

I’m not reclining beneath a plum tree

on Hampstead Heath; I’m not about to fade

into oblivion. True, I can’t see

what’s going on about my feet displayed

in the season’s first mud. They say the act

of observation changes whatever

is observed. Does that apply to birdsong?

Can sound be seen? Cool seepage soothes my cracked

heels as I, a Friday’s child, endeavour

to locate it bob, bob, bobbin’ along.

Mock epic

Very long burlesques where a trivial subject is given ‘serious’ treatment, using the elevated style of true epic, for example, Virgil’s ‘Aeneid’ where the fate of an entire nation is decided by the exploits of a single hero. Called mock-heroic when applied to shorter poems.

The greatest mock epic poem in English is ‘The Rape of the Lock’ by Alexander Pope [1688-1744]. Compare the way it begins with the way the ‘Aeneid’ begins:

What dire offence from am’rous causes springs,

What mighty contests rise from trivial things,

I sing - This verse to Caryll, Muse! is due:

This, ev’n Belinda may vouchsafe to view:

Slight is the subject, but not so the praise,

If she inspire, and He approve my lays.

Say what strange motive, Goddess! could compel

A well-bred Lord t’assault a gentle Belle?

Oh say what stranger cause, yet unexplor’d,

Could make a gentle Belle reject a Lord?

In tasks so bold, can little men engage,

And in soft bosoms dwells such mighty Rage?

Arms, and the man I sing, who, forc’d by fate,

And haughty Juno’s unrelenting hate,

Expelled and exiled, left the Trojan shore.

Long labours, both by sea and land, he bore,

And in the doubtful war, before he won

The Latian realm, and built the destin’d town;

His banish’d gods restor’d to rites divine,

And settled sure succession in his line,

From whence the race of Alban fathers come,

And the long glories of majestic Rome.

[translated by John Dryden]

Modality

Modality can be conveniently divided into low and high forms. Linked to hedging, low modality terms like ‘maybe’, ‘perhaps’, ‘possibly’ suggest uncertainty, which provides space for negotiation. It is a strategy of politeness.

High modality, on the other hand, is forthright, not conducive to polite conversation. Examples are ‘indeed’, ‘definitely’, doubtless’.

The contraction, ‘I’ll’, has put paid to the modal differences of ‘shall’ and ‘will’. When I was at school, a long time ago, ‘I shall’ expressed a wish (low modality), while ‘I will’ expressed certainty (high modality). This was reversed in the second person, ‘you’.

Modernism

A vague term for literature (and other arts), which rebelled against nineteenth century realism by experimenting with forms like free verse in poetry, stream of consciousness in prose, and absurdity in drama.

It has been called a philosophical movement because it is all-embracing. It is a reaction against the horrors of the First World War, traditional religions, and rapid urbanisation with its concomitant materialism. Famous modernist authors from the three major literary genres are Virginia Woolf (prose), Samuel Beckett (drama), and Ezra Pound (poetry). Here are short samples from each one:

From ‘Mrs Dalloway’ by Virginia Woolf

‘He was alone with the sideboard and the bananas. He was alone, exposed on this bleak eminence, stretched out - but not on a hill-top; not on a crag; on Mrs Filmer’s sitting-room sofa. As for the visions, the faces, the voices of the dead, where were they?’

From ‘Waiting for Godot’ by Samuel Beckett

‘ESTRAGON: Well? Shall we go?

VLADIMIR: Pull on your trousers.

ESTRAGON: What?

VLADIMIR: Pull on your trousers.

ESTRAGON: You want me to pull off my trousers?

VLADIMIR: Pull ON your trousers.

ESTRAGON: (realizing his trousers are down). True.

He pulls up his trousers.

VLADIMIR: Well? Shall we go?

ESTRAGON: Yes, let’s go.

They do not move.’

From ‘The Return’ by Ezra Pound

‘See, they return; ah, see the tentative

Movements, and the slow feet,

The trouble in the pace and the uncertain

Wavering!

See, they return, one, and by one,

With fear, as half-awakened;

As if the snow should hesitate

And murmur in the wind,

and half turn back.’

Modernism grew along with the growth of cinema, and was especially influenced by the latter’s use of juxtaposition and the fragmentation of images. So-called postmodernism, the period we are now in, is simply a continuation, weakening in intensity, of modernism’s mood of existential angst.

Monologue

An extended address by one person in a play or a poem or a novel, usually dramatic. Here is Maurya in John M. Synge’s play, ‘Riders to the Sea’, recounting all the men in her family, including six sons, lost at sea:

‘ I looked out then, and there were men coming after them, and they holding a thing in the half of a red sail, and water dripping out of it--it was a dry day, Nora--and leaving a track to the door. There does be a power of young men floating round in the sea, and what way would they know if it was Michael they had, or another man like him, for when a man is nine days in the sea, and the wind blowing, it's hard set his own mother would be to say what man was it.’

The poet, Robert Browning wrote a number of dramatic monologues in ironical tones. Here is an extract from ‘Andrea Del Sarto’:

‘But do not let us quarrel any more,

No, my Lucrezia; bear with me for once:

Sit down and all shall happen as you wish.

You turn your face, but does it bring your heart?’

Here is a bit of monologue from my novel, ‘The Giraffe Man’:

‘What’s that scuffling sound outside? Not, I hope, one of those coprophiliac curs - labradors mostly - that abound in this neighbourhood. They’re forever digging up my corpses and half dragging them out of their graves. I really must go deeper. Trouble is, I’m on granite mostly, and it’s damn difficult to excavate with a pick and shovel.’

Other forms of monologue in literature are the soliloquy and the stream of consciousness.

Morality play

Medieval plays with Biblical themes and allegorical characters with names like Everyman, Death, and Fellowship. One character that survives to this day in various forms, sinister and comic, is the Vice. The Biblical devil would be his prototype - the tempter, the equivocator. A striking example of this type is Iago in Shakespeare’s ‘Othello’.

Most of these plays are anonymous, and the most well known is ‘Everyman’, which can still be found on school and university syllabuses. Here is a sample:

‘DETHE.

Almighty God, I am here at your wyll, 

Your commaundement to fulfyll.

GOD.

Go thou to Everyman, 

And shewe hym in my name 

A pylgrymage he must on hym take, 

Whiche he in no wyse may escape ; 

And that he brynge with hym a sure reckenynge 

Without delay or ony taryenge.’

Morality plays are usually about the battle, between the forces of good and evil, for the soul of man. The technical term for this is psychomachy. Genres linked to these plays are Miracle plays, Mystery plays, and Interludes.

Morpheme

The smallest grammatical unit from which larger ones grow, e.g. ‘disliked’ is made up of three morphemes: ‘dis’, ‘like’, ‘ed’.

Motherese

In child directed speech, parents and older siblings speak to the baby (and sometimes the pet!) in a different tone of voice. The intonation rises, the pitch grows wider, the pace slows down, the lexis is limited to things in the immediate surroundings. Pronouns are avoided. ‘Oopsy, did baba do a pooey poo? Let Mama change baba’s nappy wappy.’ This is known in linguistics as motherese or caretaker speech. I prefer to call it baby talk.It confirms the Social Interaction Theory of psychologists like Bruner and Vygotsky

Motif

An image or situation in a text, which elaborates into the general theme/s, for example, a motif of falling leaves might elaborate into the theme of mortality. If the image recurs it is called a leitmotif. In Dickens’ novel, ‘Great Expectations’, fire, whether it be to assist Joe in his blacksmith’s trade or to destroy Miss Havisham in her bitterness, is an example.

A common motif in Victorian literature is that of a fallen character being redeemed after almost dying from some illness or injury. Once again, in ‘Great Expectations’, we see this happening to Pip. Joe nurses him through his long, almost fatal illness, and when he finally recovers he resolves to do the right thing by his childhood sweetheart, Biddy, and ask her to marry him - only to find that she has married a much more deserving person, Joe. Before his illness, Pip would have been mortified by this, but now:

‘“Dear Biddy,” said I, “you have the best husband in the whole world, and if you could have seen him by my bed you would have - but no, you couldn’t love him better than you do.”

“No, I couldn’t indeed,” said Biddy.

“And dear Joe, you have the best wife in the whole world, and she will make you as happy as even you deserve to be, you dear, good, noble Joe!”

Joe looked at me with a quivering lip, and fairly put his sleeve before his eyes.

“And Joe and Biddy both, as you have been to church today, and are in charity and love with all mankind, receive my humble thanks for all you have done for me and all I have so ill repaid!”'

Mythic

Not to be confused with mythical, which pertains to obsolete religions, mythic describes writers such as William Blake and W.B. Yeats who developed their own fictional stories of creation. Myth criticism or mythopoetics was given influence by the Canadian critic, Northrop Frye, who presented his theory in a study called ‘Anatomy of Criticism’ (1957). Frye was strongly influenced by armchair anthropologist, J. G. Frazer’s book, ‘The Golden Bough’; so was T.S. Eliot (see ‘The Waste Land’).

Here is an extract from one of Blake’s mythic poems, ‘The First Book of Urizen’:

‘Enraged & stifled with torment,

He threw his right Arm to the north,

His left Arm to the south

Shooting out in anguish deep,

And his feet stamp’d the nether Abyss

In trembling & howling & dismay.

And a seventh Age passed over,

And a state of dismal woe.’

Narrative Point of View

Let’s start with first, second, and third person narration. The following passage from my novel, ‘D G G Berry’s THE GREAT NORTH ROAD’, is in the third person:

‘With a shrug collapsing into a sigh, Duiker gathered his belongings, shook them free of sand, and left the beach. He decided to walk round the back of the changerooms, not because it was a short cut but because it would take him past a sheltered, beautifully lawned area that was popular with bathing - or rather sun-tanning - beauties of all sexes. It was the slightly more curved sex that interested Duiker. None of your pooftah business with this Matabele.’

Now I’ll put it into the first person:

‘With a shrug collapsing into a sigh, I gathered my belongings, shook them free of sand, and left the beach. I decided to walk round the back of the changerooms, not because it was a short cut but because it would take me past a sheltered, beautifully lawned area that was popular with bathing - or rather sun-tanning - beauties of all sexes. It was the slightly more curved sex that interested me. None of your pooftah business with this Matabele.’

Now, the second person:

‘ With a shrug collapsing into a sigh, you gathered your belongings, shook them free of sand, and left the beach. You decided to walk round the back of the changerooms, not because it was a short cut but because it would take you past a sheltered, beautifully lawned area that was popular with bathing - or rather sun-tanning - beauties of all sexes. It was the slightly more curved sex that interested you. No pooftah business with this Matabele.’

In the first, original, example the narrator is omniscient (all-knowing), and he is based outside the novel. He seems to be detached from his characters. He seems to be reliable. In the second example the narrator is a character in the text. It could be fictional; it could be autobiographical; it could be a mixture of both. It could be a form of ironic impersonation as in ‘Huckleberry Finn’ where Mark Twain, the author, pretends to be Huck Finn, the fictional character. First person narration can sometimes seem to be unreliable. In the third example the reader becomes implicated in the text. Epistolary novels, like ‘The Colour Purple’, are necessarily written in the second person. Second person narratives are quite rare because they are difficult to sustain. Notice how I had to make a notable change in the last sentence of the ‘second person’ example above.

In this context the phrase ‘point of view’ has less to do with attitude and more to do with technique.

Nasal

The letters, ‘n’ and ‘m’ are nasals. You sound them through your nose.

Nativism

Another term for innatism - Chomsky’s claim that humans are born with the ability to acquire language. Opposite to the tabula rasa claim.

Naturalism

In literature this term needs to be considered alongside the similar but different ‘realism’. Both words take us back to Aristotle and the word, ‘mimesis’, which is Greek for ‘imitation’: the idea that art should imitate nature.

Realism uses tricks of verisimilitude (the appearance of being real), while naturalism records it as it is. Of course this is doomed to failure since words can not replace things in any ‘real’ sense. One consequence of this is that naturalist writers like Emile Zola and Theodore Dreiser produce texts that are more real than real. Here is a sample taken at random from Dreiser’s novel, ‘An American Tragedy’:

‘In another drug store he observed a small, shriveled and yet dapper and shrewd-looking man of perhaps thirty-five, who appeared to him at the time as satisfactory enough, only, as he could see from the front, he was being briskly assisted by a young woman of not more than twenty or twenty-five. And assuming that she would approach him instead of the man - an embarrassing and impossible situation - or if the man waited on him, was it not probable that she would hear? In consequence he gave up that place, and a third, a fourth, and a fifth, for varying and yet equally cogent reasons - customers inside, a girl and a boy at a soda fountain in front, an owner posed near the door and surveying Clyde as he looked in and thus disconcerting him before he had time to consider whether he should enter or not.’

Modernism broke from this tradition, relying more on art imitating art than art imitating nature.

Negative Capability

The poet, John Keats, used this paradox to explain poets and dramatists like Shakespeare, who leave their egos behind (or seem to) when they compose. By contrast, a polemical writer like Bernard Shaw is present in all his characters. They are his puppets. Keats got the idea from the great essayist, William Hazlitt. T. S. Eliot seems to approve of ‘negative capability’ when he writes ‘Poetry … is not the expression of personality but an escape from personality’. This is how Keats put it in a letter to his brothers:

‘At once it struck me, what quality went to form a Man of Achievement especially in literature & which Shakespeare possessed so enormously - I mean Negative Capability, that is when a man is capable of being in uncertainties, mysteries, doubts, without any irritable reaching after fact & reason.’

Negative face

The desire not to be imposed upon during conversation, to have your point of view respected by others. Linked to politeness.

Negritude

At certain times of our lives we pose the question, ‘Who am I?’ The proponents of Negritude, originally Francophone African and Caribbean intellectuals living in Paris in the late 1920s, modified this to, ‘What are we in this white world?’ The aim of poets like Leopold Senghor (Senegal) and Aime Cesaire (Martinique) was to unify all black people against the fragmentation caused by slavery and colonialism. Later, more politically motivated black writers, criticized Negritude for being too concerned with aesthetics and philosophy. For example, Wole Soyinka famously wrote: ‘The tiger does not proclaim his tigritude - he pounces’.

Lines like these from Aimé Césaire's 'The Notebook for a Return to the Native Land', which suggest that black people are more intuitive than rational, would be dismissed by a later generation of more radicalised black intellectuals:

'Those who have invented neither powder nor the compass

Those who have tamed neither gas nor electricity

Those who have explored neither the seas nor the skies

…

But they abandon themselves, possessed, to the essence of all things

Ignoring surfaces but possessed by the movement of all things

Heedless, taking no account, but playing the game of the world.

Truly the elder sons of the world

Porous to every breath of the world

Flesh of the flesh of the world throbbing with the very movement of the world.’

Nemesis

A minor Greek goddess, daughter of the night, Nemesis carries out retributive justice for mortals who dare to challenge the gods, mortals, in other words, who are guilty of hubris (overweening pride).

Here is Shakespeare’s Richard 111 receiving his nemesis:

‘King Richard: A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

Catesby: Withdraw, my lord; I’ll help you to a horse.

King Richard: Slave! I have set my life upon a cast,

And I will stand the hazard of the die.

I think there be six Richmonds in the field:

Five have I slain today instead of him.

A horse! A horse! My kingdom for a horse!

[Richard and Richmond fight and Richard is slain]

Richmond: God, and your arms, be prais’d, victorious friends:

The day is ours; the bloody dog is dead.’

Here Richmond is the agent of Nemesis but in other texts mortals can be nemeses; for example, Moriarty (‘the Napoleon of crime’) is the nemesis of Sherlock Holmes, and the Joker is the nemesis of Batman. These ‘good versus evil’ nemeses are a corruption of the function of the goddess who is responsible for carrying out the vengeance of the gods.

Neoclassicism

The 18th century saw a revival of classical (Greek and Roman) features in English literature. It is also known as the Augustan Age, after the Roman emperor who presided over a period of stability and prosperity. The satirical poet, Alexander Pope (1688 - 1744), exemplifies neoclassicism. Poets and critics were profoundly influenced by the rediscovery of Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’ and Horace’s ‘Ars Poetica’. Reason and decorum were preferred to emotion and idiosyncrasy. The ordered society prevailed over the chaotic individual. Romanticism - Sturm und Drang - would reverse this in years to come.

For the neoclassicists there was nothing new to be said. The ancient Greeks and Romans had said it all. Here is an extract from Pope’s manifesto, ‘An Essay on Criticism’:

‘Words are like leaves; and where they most abound,

Much fruit of sense beneath is rarely found.

False eloquence, like the prismatic glass,

Its gaudy colours spreads on every place;

The face of Nature we no more survey,

All glares alike, without distinction gay:

But true expression, like th’ unchanging sun,

Clears and improves whate’er it shines upon,

It gilds all objects but it alters none.’

Neoplatonism

A mystical form of Platonism developed by Plotinus (205 - 270) and a powerful influence on Christianity (especially those churches that promote divinization), Transcendentalism, and Romanticism.

Coleridge’s theory of the imagination is strongly influenced by neoplatonism. Here is what he says about it in his ‘Biographia Literaria’:

‘The Imagination then I consider either as primary, or secondary. The primary Imagination I hold to be the living Power and prime Agent of all human Perception, and as a repetition in the finite mind of the eternal act of creation in the infinite I Am. The secondary I consider as an echo of the former, co-existing with the conscious will, yet still as identical with the primary in the kind of its agency, and differing only in degree, and in the mode of its operation. It dissolves, diffuses, dissipates, in order to re-create; or where this process is rendered impossible, yet still at all events it struggles to idealize and to unify. It is essentially vital, even as all objects (as objects) are essentially fixed and dead.’

Neoplatonism sees the individual as a microcosm of the One (ineffable God). Through a mystical process the individual, therefore, can go beyond simply knowing Oneness, but can become Oneness by losing itself in oneness. This is not dissimilar to Buddhism. It is reminiscent of a figure of speech called synecdoche, a paradox where the part is the whole and the whole is the part. As William Blake put it :

‘To see a world in a grain of sand,

And a heaven in a wild flower,

Hold infinity in the palm of your hand,

And eternity in an hour.’

New Criticism

What English literary critics called Practical Criticism, after I. A Richard’s influential book of that name (1929), North American literary critics called The New Criticism, after John Crowe Ransom’s book of that name (1941).

These movements foregrounded textual analysis, with emphasis on features like diction, imagery, rhythm, and tone. This approach works well with short, lyric poems, not so well with drama and fiction. It has been more or less relegated to the dustbins of secondary school syllabuses mainly because of its indifference to context.

Possibly the two most significant books on New Criticism are ‘The Well-Wrought Urn’ by Cleanth Brooks (1947) and ‘The Verbal Icon’ by William K. Wimsatt’ (1954)’ Here is Cleanth Brooks in full cry:

“The poet wants to ‘say’ something. Why, then, doesn’t he say it directly and forthrightly? Why is he willing to say it only through his metaphors? Through his metaphors, he risks saying it partially and obscurely, and risks saying nothing at all. But the risk must be taken, for direct statement leads to abstraction and threatens to take us out of poetry altogether.”

“If we allow ourselves to be misled by the heresy of paraphrase, we run the risk of doing even more violence to the internal order of the poem itself. By taking the paraphrase as our point of stance, we misconceive the function of metaphor and meter. We demand logical coherences where they are sometimes irrelevant, and we fail frequently to see imaginative coherences on levels where they are highly relevant.”

New Historicism

This method of literary criticism can be seen as a reaction to ahistorical methods like New Criticism. It sees context, not just of the author and their times, but of the reader and their times, as critical. It is influenced by theories like Marxism and post-structuralism. In Shakespeare’s time, his play, ‘Coriolanus’, would have been seen primarily as a dramatization of the war/peace dialectic; the Soviet Union, in more recent times, saw it as a polemic against fascism, while the Nazis saw it as a polemic against communism. Perspectives change in time.

A prominent new historicist critic is Stephen Greenblatt. Here are some samples from his influential book: ‘The Swerve: How the World Became Modern’:

“I think the writing of literature should give pleasure. What else should it be about? It is not nuclear physics. It actually has to give pleasure or it is worth nothing.”

“The discussion itself is what most matters, the fact that we can reason together easily, with a blend of wit and seriousness, never descending into gossip or slander and always allowing room for alternative views.”

“The quintessential emblem of religion  and the clearest manifestation of the perversity that lies at its core  is the sacrifice of a child by a parent.

Almost all religious faiths incorporate the myth of such a sacrifice, and some have actually made it real. Lucretius had in mind the sacrifice of Iphigenia by her father Agamemnon, but he may also have been aware of the Jewish story of Abraham and Isaac and other comparable Near Eastern stories for which the Romans of his times had a growing taste. Writing around 50 BCE he could not, of course, have anticipated the great sacrifice myth that would come to dominate the Western world, but he would not have been surprised by it or by the endlessly reiterated, prominently displayed images of the bloody, murdered son.”

Nonstandard English

A politically correct term for ungrammatical English.

Nothing: A brief essay on it

Before poetry beguiled me I thought that the word ‘nothing’ was nothing more than the opposite of the word ‘everything’. Enter England’s greatest wordsmith, William Shakespeare. Out pour the puns: ‘no thing’(no penis); ‘note-ing’ (a musical note is a ‘prick’); ‘nutting’ (a folklore slang term for sexual intercourse); ‘knotting’ (copulation); 0, O (female sex organs)…. Shakespeare uses the word, ‘nothing’ more than 500 times in his poems and plays. Here is just one example:

‘Hamlet: Do you think I meant country matters?

Ophelia: I think nothing, my Lord.

Hamlet: That’s a fair thought to lie between maids’ legs.

Ophelia: What is, my Lord?

Hamlet: Nothing.’

To fully understand this exchange you need to remember that, in Shakespeare’s day, female parts were played by boys. The pun here is ‘no thing’. ( Can you detect another pun in Hamlet’s opening words?)

Next time you attend a performance of ‘Much Ado about Nothing’, feel free to think twice about the title. Next time you read Wordsworth’s poem, ‘Nutting’, feel free to think twice about the title, especially when you come to these lines:

‘ Then up I rose,

And dragged to earth both branch and bough, with crash

And merciless ravage: and the shady nook

Of hazels, and the green and mossy bower,

Deformed and sullied, patiently gave up

Their quiet being.’

Earlier in the poem he describes this as a ‘virgin scene’. Wordsworth lost his innocence in the French Revolution but recovered it when he became a distributer of revenue stamps for the English government.

Is there nothing I can do to stop nothing messing with my mind? What does King Lear mean when he tells his favourite daughter, ‘Nothing will come of nothing’? Am I, like Gratiano in ‘The Merchant of Venice’ beginning to ‘speak an infinite deal of nothing’? One thing is certain: only grammatical words like ‘the’, and only out of context, are not slippery, not fishy, not beguiling.

Novella

Neither a long short story nor a short novel, the novella is a genre in its own right. Some famous novellas are ‘Heart of Darkness’ by Joseph Conrad, ‘Death in Venice’ by Thomas Mann, and ‘The House of Hunger’ by Dambudzo Marechera.

Since it’s the festive season, here is an extract from Charles Dickens' much loved novella, ‘A Christmas Carol’:

'“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

“Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”

“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”

“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.”’

Objective Correlative

We live in two worlds: the world out there, the objective world, and the world in here (in our heads), the subjective world. In real life, for example, the weather doesn’t always correlate with a person’s feelings. Depending on circumstances, you can be happy when it is overcast, and sad when the sun is shining. In literature, on the other hand, particularly in descriptive writing, you can manipulate things so that an overcast day correlates with feelings of misery, and a sunny day correlates with feelings of happiness. It becomes a metaphor.

T. S. Eliot used this phrase in an essay on ‘Hamlet’ in which he concludes that the play is a failure because the objective world of the play is too flimsy for Hamlet’s powerful emotions - there is no correlation.

The world out there is not only the weather; it begins with the clothes you wear, extends to your home, your environment, your country….

If you are asked to focus on mood and atmosphere in a descriptive essay, read ‘mood’ as the subjective world, what the persona is feeling, and ‘atmosphere’ as the objective world, how the world out there contributes, metaphorically to the persona’s feelings.

Here is Dickens creating a dismal mood in the opening chapter of ‘Bleak House’:

‘Smoke lowering down from chimney pots, making a soft, black drizzle, with flakes of soot in it as big as full-grown snowflakes - gone into mourning, one might imagine, for the death of the sun. Dogs, undistinguishable in the mire. Horses, scarcely better; splashed to their very blinkers. Foot passengers, jostling one another’s umbrellas….’

Ode

Now a rather vague term for a song of praise for a special occasion or a subject, abstract or concrete, that inspires the poet, the ode has a pedigree going back to the ancient Greeks. The Pindaric ode, after the great lyric poet, Pindar, was in three stanzas: the strophe (turning), the antistrophe(counter-turning), and the epode (standing still). So the chanting was accompanied by a dance. Most of Pindar’s odes were devoted to athletes. The Latin poet, Horace, continued with the ode form but in a more private mode.

The greatest odes in English literature come from the Romantics: Keats, Shelley, Wordsworth, and Coleridge. They tend to be lengthy, lyrical, and formal in tone. Here are parts 1 and 5 of Shelley’s ‘Ode To the West Wind’:

I

O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being,

Thou, from whose unseen presence the leaves dead

Are driven, like ghosts from an enchanter fleeing,

Yellow, and black, and pale, and hectic red,

Pestilence-stricken multitudes: O thou,

Who chariotest to their dark wintry bed

The wingèd seeds, where they lie cold and low,

Each like a corpse within its grave, until

Thine azure sister of the Spring shall blow

Her clarion o’er the dreaming earth, and fill

(Driving sweet buds like flocks to feed in air)

With living hues and odours plain and hill:

Wild Spirit, which art moving everywhere;

Destroyer and Preserver; hear, O hear!

V

Make me thy lyre, even as the forest is:

What if my leaves are falling like its own!

The tumult of thy mighty harmonies

Will take from both a deep, autumnal tone,

Sweet though in sadness. Be thou, Spirit fierce,

My spirit! Be thou me, impetuous one!

Drive my dead thoughts over the universe

Like withered leaves to quicken a new birth!

And, by the incantation of this verse,

Scatter, as from an unextinguished hearth

Ashes and sparks, my words among mankind!

Be through my lips to unawakened Earth

The trumpet of a prophecy! O Wind,

If Winter comes, can Spring be far behind?

Oeuvre

The entire output of an author, artist, composer. French for ‘work’ (Latin, opera). Corpus (‘body’) is a near synonym. Here, from Merriam-Webster, is an example of how the word may be used in a sentence:

‘...scrupulously examines Dickens' oeuvre in order to demonstrate how his convictions helped to determine the shape of his novels.’

—G. J. Worth

Omniscient narrator

Unlike the first person narrator, the omniscient or third person narrator has an unlimited point of view. The word means ‘all-knowing’ and, indeed, the omniscient narrator has godlike powers over their characters, their plot, and their setting. They stand outside the narrative, controlling it like a puppeteer controls their puppets.

Yvonne Vera’s novel, ‘The Stone Virgins’, mingles first and third (omniscient) person narration. Compare the two in the following extracts:

‘My name is Sibaso. I have crossed many rivers with that name no longer on my lips, forgotten. It is an easy task to forget a name. Other names are assumed, temporary like grief; in a war you discard names like old resemblances, like handkerchiefs torn, leave them behind like tributaries dried.’

‘Nonceba falls. She spins her head away from him. She falls over her arms, her hands trapped between her breasts. She views him from one side of her body, sees only his shoes. She crawls away, on her stomach, away. Then she is up. He has raised her from the ground.’

Vera gives her prose immediacy by writing in the present tense; most of the earlier British novelists, like Mrs Gaskell, Thackeray, Scott, Dickens, George Eliot, who used an omniscient narrator, preferred writing in the past tense.

Onomatopoeia

Greek for ‘word-making’, this figure of speech refers to words that sound their meaning, words like ‘zip’, ‘hiss’, and ‘creak’. Like alliteration, assonance, and rhyme, it enhances the sound, the aural effect, of a piece of writing, especially poetry. It is possible that mankind’s first attempts at language were vocal imitations of the sounds they heard about them.

Here is Edgar Allan Poe making wonderful use of the onomatopoeic word, ‘tintinnabulation’, which means the ringing of bells:

‘Hear the sledges with the bells--

Silver bells!

What a world of merriment their melody foretells!

How they tinkle, tinkle, tinkle,

In the icy air of night!

While the stars that oversprinkle

All the heavens, seem to twinkle

With a crystalline delight;

Keeping time, time, time,

In a sort of Runic rhyme,

To the tintinnabulation that so musically wells

From the bells, bells, bells, bells,

Bells, bells, bells--

From the jingling and the tinkling of the bells.’

Can you find two other onomatopoeic words in this stanza?

Oral tradition

The literature of pre-literate society. Most of the stories, proverbs, and songs of this tradition are eventually written down, fixed on the page, so they lose their flexibility. A song, for example, in the oral tradition would be altered by succeeding generations producing several versions for the post-literate recorder to contemplate. Some of these songs, especially ones that are easily parodied - often in an unsavoury manner - like ‘Mary had a Little Lamb’, have not lost their flexibility, not even on the written page.

It is characteristic of Chinua Achebe to spice his novels (a European, written genre) with proverbs, songs, and allegories of pre-colonial Nigeria. The effect, I think deliberate, is conducive to the nervous conditions (Sartre) of his protagonists. Here is an example from ‘No Longer at Ease’:

‘At this stage one of the older members of the meeting raised his voice. He was a very pompous man.

“Everything you have said is true. But there is one thing I want you to learn. Whatever happens in this world has a meaning. As our people say: ‘Wherever something stands, another thing stands beside it’. “you see this thing called blood. There is nothing like it. That is why when you plant a yam it produces another yam, and if you plant an orange it bears oranges. I have seen many things in my life but I have never yet seen a banana tree yield a coco yam. Why do I say this? You young men here I want you to listen because it is from listening to old men that you learn wisdom.”’

Ottava rima

Resembling the first part of a Petrarchan sonnet, though with a different rhyme scheme, the ottava rima is a stanza (8 lines rhyming abababcc) also invented in Italy (perfected by Ariosto), which was introduced to England by Thomas Wyatt (1503 - 1542). Byron used it in his great mock-epic poem, ‘Don Juan’. Here is a random stanza:

XXXVI 

They err'd, as aged men will do; but by 

And by we'll talk of that; and if we don't, 

'T will be because our notion is not high 

Of politicians and their double front, 

Who live by lies, yet dare not boldly lie: 

Now, what I love in women is, they won't 

Or can't do otherwise than lie, but do it 

So well, the very truth seems falsehood to it.

Overextension

When a toddler uses a word to mean more than it means, e.g. using ‘kitty’ to refer to another animal like a rabbit.

Oxymoron

A compressed paradox, intentional as in Milton’s ‘darkness visible’, unintentional as in ‘creation science’. Some examples of oxymorons in common speech are ‘true lies’, ‘bittersweet’ and ‘busy doing nothing’. Part of the fascination for zombies is that they are oxymoronic: the living dead.

The most famous oxymoron in English literature may be found in Shakespeare’s ‘Macbeth’: ‘Fair is foul, and foul is fair’.

Palimpsest

Before paper was invented people wrote on vellum or parchment, rare and expensive items. Consequently they were re-used. One text would be scratched out, seldom completely, and another would be written over it. This also happened with engravings on brass. These layered texts are called palimpsests, a word that has become useful, in its figurative sense, for literary critics.

In ‘The Book Thief’ by Markus Zusak, Max paints his manuscript about his friendship with Liesl over the pages of Hitler’s notorious anti-semitic, ‘Mein Kampf’, thus creating a palimpsest: each text ironically affecting the other.

My sonnet, ‘For the Disappeared’, layers its text upon Wilfred Owen’s sonnet, ‘Anthem for Doomed Youth’; thus you could call it a palimpsest:

For the Disappeared

For those who burn or float face down, what tears;

what family protests smashed by rifle butts;

what withered whispers in what wasted ears,

of spilling, like beans, the brains and the guts?

For those in anthills or in mine shafts stuffed

like unironed washing, load on jumbled load

(one still in rusty leg-irons, one handcuffed),

what bells, what bugles, what intended ode?

But vigils, tongueless, levitate the night

while Law-and-Order’s boots respond to spit,

and somewhere in a rural hut, a light

is casting restless shadow-shapes that flit

and flicker, not fading before the dawn,

but waiting, like winking coals, to be born.

Panegyric

Synonymous with terms like encomium and eulogy, which have a more general application, the panegyric is a speech or a poem that praises, in somewhat overblown rhetoric, a famous person or institution. Here is an extract from a panegyric on the Zulu king, Shaka:

He is like the cluster of stones of Nkandhla,

Which sheltered the elephants when it had rained.18 

The hawk which I saw sweeping down from Mangcengeza;

When he came to Pungashe he disappeared.

He invades, the forests echo, saying, in echoing,

He paid a fine of the duiker and the doe.

He is seen by the hunters who trap the flying ants;

He was hindered by a cock in front,

By the people of Ntombazi and Langa [mother and father of Zwide]

He devoured Nomahlanjana son of Zwide;

He devoured Mdandalazi son of Gaqa of the amaPela;

He was lop-eared.

He devoured Mdandalazi son of Gaqa of the amaPela;

He was lop-eared.

The Driver-away of the old man born of Langa’s daughter!

The Ever-ready-to-meet-any-challenge!

Shaka!

Pantomime

In classical times a single actor would mime all the character parts of a story from mythology. Meanwhile a chorus would sing the story. This was pantomime.

A version of classical pantomime can be found in Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’, in the ‘dumb show’, where Hamlet performs the role of chorus. Here is an extract:

'Enter a King and a Queen very lovingly; the Queen embracing him, and he her. She kneels, and makes show of protestation unto him. He takes her up, and declines his head upon her neck: lays him down upon a bank of flowers: she, seeing him asleep, leaves him. Anon comes in a fellow, takes off his crown, kisses it, and pours poison in the King's ears, and exit. The Queen returns; finds the King dead, and makes passionate action. The Poisoner, with some two or three Mutes, comes in again, seeming to lament with her. The dead body is carried away. The Poisoner wooes the Queen with gifts: she seems loath and unwilling awhile, but in the end accepts his love

Exeunt

OPHELIA 

What means this, my lord?

HAMLET 

Marry, this is munching mallicho; it means mischief.

OPHELIA 

Belike this show imports the argument of the play.

HAMLET

We shall know by this fellow. The players cannot keep counsel, they tell all.'

Nowadays pantomimes are for children. They are usually versions of fairy tales full of stock characters like the villain in his red-lined black cloak. Using crude dramatic irony, they encourage the audience to participate with gusto.

Parable

Jesus used allegory to teach his disciples lessons. Short stories like ‘The Prodigal Son’ and ‘The Good Samaritan’, which teach good behaviour, are called parables. Aesop’s fables are also parables but with a much wider range of applicability - not always moral. Also, most of their characters are animals. Here is one called ‘The Ass’s Shadow’:

‘A traveler hired an Ass to convey him to a distant place. The day being intensely hot, and the sun shining in its strength, the Traveler stopped to rest, and sought shelter from the heat under the Shadow of the Ass. As this afforded only protection for one, and as the Traveler and the owner of the Ass both claimed it, a violent dispute arose between them as to which of them had the right to the Shadow. The owner maintained that he had let the Ass only, and not his Shadow. The Traveler asserted that he had, with the hire of the Ass, hired his Shadow also. The quarrel proceeded from words to blows, and while the men fought, the Ass galloped off.’

A famous modern parabolic tale is John Steinbeck’s, ‘The Pearl’.

Paradigm shift

This occurs when one theory is dramatically replaced by another, for example when science (Copernicus) displaced dogma (the mediaeval church). The church claimed that the world, more specifically, Rome, was the centre of our solar system; Copernicus discovered, by scientific investigation, that it was the sun. Darwin’s theory of evolution created another paradigm shift. These shifts are not as neat as this definition makes them seem. There is plenty of overlap involving denial, death, and damnation.

In the study of literature, paradigm shifts occurred in the twentieth century when a historical approach gave way to practical criticism and when practical criticism gave way to branches of theory (poetics) like structuralism, mythopoetics, Marxism, formalism, post-structuralism, deconstruction, and so on. You can talk of a ‘Derridean paradigm of literary theory’.

In a general sense a paradigm is a clear example or pattern of the subject in question. For example: ‘Venus is the paradigm of classical beauty’. Don’t confuse it with paragon, which means excellent in the supreme: ‘Venus is (also) the paragon of classical beauty’.

In linguistics a paradigm is the vertical (paradigmatic) structure of a sentence. For example the word ‘his’ in the horizontal (syntagmatic) sentence, ‘I stole his apple’ has got hovering above it words like ‘her’, ‘an’, ‘that’, ‘their’....

Some writers, in my opinion, who have created paradigm shifts in the history of English literature are Geoffrey Chaucer (1340? - 1400), William Shakespeare (1564 - 1616), John Milton (1608 - 1674), and William Wordsworth (1770 - 1850).

Paradox

A form of irony where a seeming contradiction turns out to be a profound truth, for example, Jesus words: ‘So the last shall be first, and the first last.’ Or a message from Ecclesiastes: all things are full of emptiness.

Paradoxes trap philosophers but set poets free, reveal to them, in the words of T.S. Eliot, ‘the still point of the turning world’.

Paradoxes are not only figures of speech; humans are living paradoxes: they kill to live, for example, they fight for peace; the more they know, the less they know.

The earth is a paradox: it feels still, yet it is hurtling through space and spinning on its axis. It doesn’t feel like a carousel.

Here is that master of paradox, Andrew Marvell, in an extract from his poem, ‘Eyes and Tears’:

‘Yet happy they whom grief doth bless,

That weep the more, and see the less;

And, to preserve their sight more true,

Bathe still their eyes in their own dew.

So Magdalen in tears more wise

Dissolved those captivating eyes,

Whose liquid chains could flowing meet

To fetter her redeemer’s feet.’

Vision is an inadequate means of perceiving the world.

Parallax

I find this word, which literally refers to optical illusions in space, a useful trope for lexical ambiguity, whether deliberate or accidental. For example, if a rap artist says, of a recording session, 'Let's wrap it up', is he flouting or violating Grice's maxim of manner? Is it a deliberate or an accidental pun? The context of the utterance may help.

Parallelism

One way writers give coherence to very long sentences (or paragraphs) is the use of parallelism, a rhetorical device much used in the Bible because of the parallel nature of Hebrew poetry, where a statement is made and then is repeated in a changed form, thus creating a balance: “There the wicked cease from troubling; and there the weary be at rest.” Incidentally there is an amusing example in the Bible of a New Testament misreading of Old Testament parallelism. The prophet Zechariah describes the king entering Jerusalem as “humble and riding on a donkey, on a colt, the foal of a donkey”. The donkey and the colt are the same beast but Matthew misreads this, and he has the disciples bring two animals to Jesus, which he rides at the same time: “Look your king is approaching, humble and riding on a donkey, and on a colt”

The two main kinds of parallelism are the balanced sentence and the antithetical sentence. Here is a balanced sentence from Jane Austen’s novel Emma: “The real evils, indeed, of Emma’s situation were the power of having rather too much her own way, and a disposition to think a little too well of herself.” Can you see that “rather too much” is balanced by “a little too well”? And here is an antithetical sentence from the same novel: “A single woman with a very narrow income must be a ridiculous, disagreeable old maid! the proper sport of boys and girls; but a single woman of good fortune is always respectable, and may be as sensible and pleasant as anybody else!” Here “very narrow income” contrasts with (is antithetical to) “good fortune”. The balanced sentence is often controlled by the conjunction “and”, while the antithetical sentence is often controlled by the conjunction “but”.

Parody

They say imitation is the sincerest form of flattery, and in some cases it is, but most parodies intend to make fun of whatever they are imitating. In literature a parody is a piece of writing that mocks another piece of writing by imitating it in an exaggerated way. If it treats a frivolous subject with exaggerated solemnity it is called burlesque; if it treats a serious subject with exaggerated frivolity it is called travesty. Here is an example of an unknown writer parodying Henry Wadsworth Longfellow’s trochaic poem, ‘The Song of Hiawatha’. First, the section of the poem that is parodied:

He had mittens, Minjekahwun,

Magic mittens made of deerskin;

When upon his hands he wore them

He could smite the rocks asunder,

He could grind them into powder.

Now here is the parody, and you can decide if it’s a burlesque or a travesty:

He killed the noble Mudjokivis.

Of the skin he made him mittens,

Made them with the fur side inside,

Made them with the skin side outside.

He, to get the warm side inside,

Put the inside skin side outside.

He, to get the cold side outside,

Put the warm side fur side inside.

That’s why he put the fur side inside,

Why he put the skin side outside,

Why he turned them inside outside.

Passion play

Of medieval origin, and dramatizing the suffering, death, and resurrection of Christ, passion plays are still performed today, most notably, every 10 years at Oberammergau in Germany. 

They can be extremely violent. In the Corpus Christi Cycle’s Crucifixion pageant performed by the citizens of York Minster, the protagonist has very few words to say. Here is a sample:

‘Behold mine head, mine hands, my feet,

And fully feel now ere ye fine [i.e. before you pass]

If any mourning may be meet [i.e. equal]

Or mischief measured unto mine.’

Two other kinds of medieval drama, the Miracle and Mystery plays, also use Biblical subjects but with greater variety. Miracle plays about the saints or the Virgin Mary were frequently non-scriptural while Mystery plays (or pageants) represented both the Old and New Testaments. A famous example, from Chester, is ‘Noah’s Flood’.

Pastiche

Frequently used pejoratively to describe writing which lacks originality, pastiche has been given a kind of respectability by the so-called post-modernists. It’s a piece of writing made up of pieces of writing ‘borrowed’ from other writers, so it’s a bit like a collage.

I produced a pastiche of Dorothy Wordsworth’s journals by rearranging selected words and phrases to make them look like a poem and to bring out an unspoken truth in her recollections. Here is a sample:

‘William worked at the cuckow poem. I sewed beside him.

The fire flutters, the watch ticks. I hear nothing else save

the breathing of my beloved.

I must wash myself then off. No letters! I expected one

fully from Coleridge. But as I climbed the Moss, the moon came out.

O the unutterable darkness

of the sky and the earth below the moon. It gave me exquisite

feelings. I got tea when I reached home. Read Spenser

while he made a pillow of my shoulder.’

Pastoral

In the way that you need darkness to appreciate light, you need the city to appreciate the countryside. Pastorals originated in Ancient Greece with the poet, Theocritus, whose ‘countryside’ was Sicily; and were popularized by the Roman poet, Virgil, whose ‘countryside’ was Arcadia. For Christians of the Middle Ages it was the garden of Eden; for you and me, today, it might be our childhood, it might be the movies, it might be our weekends.

The world of the pastoral doesn’t really exist; it’s a wish beyond the shadow of a dream. The ancient Greeks called it a Golden Age, a yearning for something that has gone.

It is a highly artificial mode of writing and includes, among its participants, shepherds and nymphs. There is lots of music-making, lots of flirtation, lots of lounging about in a timeless world of perpetual spring. It is a mode that is easy to satirise.

Some famous pastorals in English literature are Edmund Spenser’s, ‘The Shepherd’s Calendar’, Sir Philip Sidney’s ‘Arcadia’, and Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’, where the world of Everyday, the Duke’s court, is juxtaposed with the world of Holiday, the Forest of Arden. Here is a pastoral poem by Christopher Marlowe:

The Passionate Shepherd to His Love

Come live with me, and be my love,

And we will all the pleasures prove

That hills and valleys, dale and field,

And all the craggy mountains yield.

There will we sit upon the rocks,

And see the shepherds feed their flocks,

By shallow rivers to whose falls

Melodious birds sing madrigals.

There I will make thee beds of roses

And a thousand fragrant posies,

A cap of flowers, and a kirtle

Embroider'd all with leaves of myrtle;

A gown made of the finest wool

Which from our pretty lambs we pull;

Fair linèd slippers for the cold,

With buckles of the purest gold;

A belt of straw and ivy buds,

With coral clasps and amber studs;

And if these pleasures may thee move,

Come live with me, and be my love.

Thy silver dishes for thy meat

As precious as the gods do eat,

Shall on an ivory table be

Prepared each day for thee and me.

The shepherd swains shall dance and sing

For thy delight each May-morning:

If these delights thy mind may move,

Then live with me and be my love.

Pathetic fallacy

This curious term, coined by the Victorian art critic, John Ruskin, refers to the personification of nature in a way that will reflect the mood of a character. So, to put it crudely, if the sun smiles down upon Jane Eyre, she is happy; if the storm clouds frown upon her, she is sad.

T. S. Eliot’s version of this is the ‘objective correlative’. In this case the atmosphere that affects mood needn’t be personified. 

An apostrophe, where an inanimate object like a spade (Wordsworth) is addressed as if it were human, could be seen as an example of the ‘pathetic fallacy’. For ‘pathetic’, read ‘sympathetic’.

Here is an example from ‘Macbeth’:

“By th’clock ’tis day,

And yet dark night strangles the travelling lamp;

Is’t night’s predominance, or the day’s shame, 

That darkness does the face of earth entomb

When living light should kiss it?”

Patois

A dialect of the language of a particular region considered to be nonstandard or of low status, e.g. pidgin in Nigeria.

Pentameter

A line of poetry made up of ten (occasionally eleven) syllables or five ‘feet’. The rhythm is nearly always iambic - an unstressed syllable followed by a stressed syllable, as in the word ‘avoid’.

If you take a line like ‘/ Shall I / compare / thee to / a sum / mer’s day? /’ from one of Shakespeare’s sonnets, your ear is treated to iambic pentameter. Indeed, the third foot, ‘thee to’, is not in itself iambic’ it is trochaic. ‘Thee’ is the stressed syllable. But as part of the pentameter line it gets drawn into the iambic pattern. Notice, the rhythm is based on syllables, so complete words, in this case, ‘summer’s’, can be broken up.

Some of the greatest poetry in English is written in pentameters, either as heroic couplets (Chaucer) or as blank verse (Milton). Here are the opening lines of Robert Frost’s poem, ‘Mending Wall’ (notice how he draws attention to the significant opening foot, ‘something’, by making it a trochee rather than an iamb) :

‘Something there is that doesn’t love a wall,

That sends the frozen-ground-swell under it,

And spills the upper boulders in the sun;

And makes gaps even two can pass abreast.

The work of hunters is another thing….’

Periodic sentence

Another way to classify sentences is according to where the main point of the sentence comes. Let’s play around with the beautiful concluding sentence of 'Wuthering Heights':

'The sleepers in that quiet earth made me wonder, as I lingered

under the benign sky, watching the moths fluttering among the

heath and harebells, and listening to the soft wind breathing through the grass, how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for them.'

This is a cumulative or loose sentence because the main point is at the beginning. Now let’s re-work it into a balanced sentence where the main point is in the middle:

'Under that benign sky, I watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, lingered round the sleepers in that quiet earth, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for them.'

Emily Bronte’s version, the best choice, is a periodic sentence where the main point appears at the very end:

'I lingered round them, under that benign sky; watched the moths fluttering among the heath and harebells, listened to the soft wind breathing through the grass, and wondered how anyone could ever imagine unquiet slumbers for the sleepers in that quiet earth.’

Peripeteia (reversal)

One of Aristotle’s words. In comedy a sudden reversal of fortune that leads to happiness, and in tragedy, the opposite. It can be forced, a little too coincidental, a little too much of a deus ex machina, but it works. Here is the peripeteia in ‘The Merchant of Venice’, which leads to Shylock’s downfall:

'PORTIA

Tarry a little. There is something else.

This bond doth give thee here no jot of blood.

The words expressly are “a pound of flesh.”

Take then thy bond, take thou thy pound of flesh,

But in the cutting it if thou dost shed

One drop of Christian blood, thy lands and goods

Are by the laws of Venice confiscate

Unto the state of Venice.

GRATIANO

O upright judge!—Mark, Jew.—O learnèd judge!

SHYLOCK

Is that the law?'

In ‘Othello’, the peripeteia is the handkerchief, Othello’s gift to his wife, which Iago contrives to give to Cassio. Here Othello demands from Iago tangible proof that Desdemona is being unfaithful to him:

"Villain, be sure thou prove my love a whore; Be sure of it. Give me the ocular proof."

Once he sees Cassio with the hanky in his possession, it’s tickets.

Periphrasis

If you say ‘The old man has joined the heavenly throng’ instead of, ‘The old man has died’, you are using periphrasis (also known as circumlocution).

Decorum was very important to poets of yesteryear. They avoided using what they considered to be vulgar words by rephrasing them, so a fish might be called a ‘finny prey’, and death, ‘that fell arrest’. Hamlet quaintly describes Ophelia having sex for the first time as ‘your chaste treasure open’.

In Dickens' David Copperfield, Mr. Micawber is periphrastic in his directions to David:

‘Under the impression... that your peregrinations in this metropolis have not as yet been extensive, and that you might have some difficulty in penetrating the arcana of the Modern Babylon in the direction of the City Road - in short... that you might lose yourself - I shall be happy to call this evening, and install you in the knowledge of the nearest way.’

Can you find the periphrasis in this stanza of Laurence Binyon’s poem, ‘For the Fallen’?:

'They shall grow not old, as we that are left grow old:

Age shall not weary them, nor the years condemn.

At the going down of the sun and in the morning,

We will remember them.’

Perseveration

In linguistics this is the repetition of a word or phrase to an exceptional degree, or beyond a desired point. Here are two examples from transcripts in recent CIE exam papers:

'it certainly gives some of the elements of a computer (.) its certainly important not to mistake it for being a computer (.) but certainly it gives access to certainly (.) the internet...'

'and that happened at day and at night so at night time I distinctly remember lying in bed with this (.) this sheet lying on top of me because of the force of the wind and then this dust coming down and when you woke up…'

Persona

Is it possible to distinguish between the author, even in an autobiography, and the ‘I’ of the text? The word, ‘persona’ (or ‘mask’) tries to do this. It is linked to words like ‘tone’ and ‘voice’. Literature aside, we all wear masks, not real ones like those that are worn at carnivals or by burglars, but metaphorical ones - to hide our true feelings, perhaps, or to deceive.

Robert Browning’s personae in his dramatic monologues are as fascinating as they are confusing. In ‘My Last Duchess’ the speaker (or persona) is the Duke of Ferrara, and he is addressing the representative of the nobleman whose daughter he is going to marry. The painting on the wall is of the Duke’s last wife, whom he had killed for no justifiable reason, it seems. Here are the opening lines:

'That’s my last Duchess painted on the wall,

Looking as if she were alive. I call

That piece a wonder, now: Frà Pandolf’s hands

Worked busily a day, and there she stands.

Will ‘t please you sit and look at her? I said

‘Frà Pandolf’ by design, for never read

Strangers like you that pictured countenance,

The depth and passion of its earnest glance,

But to myself they turned (since none puts by

The curtain I have drawn for you, but I)

And seemed as they would ask me, if they durst,

How such a glance came there; so, not the first

Are you to turn and ask thus. Sir, ‘t was not

Her husband’s presence only, called that spot

Of joy into the Duchess’ cheek.’

Personal function

According to Halliday, language used by children to express thoughts about themselves.

Personification

A metaphor that makes an implicit comparison between something human and something non-human, abstract or concrete. (Remember the pathetic fallacy). In the following minimalist poem by T.E. Hulme, the moon is personified as a farmer while the stars are personified as children:

‘Autumn

I walked abroad,

And saw the ruddy moon lean over a hedge

Like a red-faced farmer.

I did not stop to speak, but nodded,

And roundabout were the wistful stars

With white faces like town children.’

In both cases the personifications develop into similes. Incidentally, this is a genre of poetry called imagism.

Petrarchan

Also known as the Italian sonnet, since Petrarch (1304 - 74) was a native of that boot-shaped country, the Petrarchan sonnet differs from the Shakespearean or English sonnet in its rhyme scheme. Both are made up of 14 lines in iambic pentameter but, whereas the Shakespearean sonnet is made up of three quatrains and a couplet, rhyming abab cdcd efef gg, the Petrarchan is made up of an octave and a sestet, rhyming abbaabba cdecde. Because the sestet registers a change in mood or argument from the octave, it usually begins with a volta (or turn) often signified by connectives like ‘now’ and ‘but’.

The conventional subject of Petrarchan sonnets is courtly love, in other words, unrequited love, in other words, unrequited sex. It’s very much a male thing. These poets fantasise about ideal women - in Petrarch’s case, Laura, in Dante’s case, Beatrice, in Marvell’s case, Julia. They like to catalogue or blazon their muses’ cherry lips, pearly teeth, snowy breasts, and honeyed breath.

The great sonneteers of more recent times: Milton, Wordsworth, Keats, Hopkins… adapted these earlier forms to suit their own concerns. Wordsworth sticks quite closely to the Petrarchan form in his great sonnet, ‘Composed upon Westminster Bridge’:

‘Earth has not anything to show more fair:

Dull would he be of soul who could pass by

A sight so touching in its majesty:

This City now doth, like a garment, wear

The beauty of the morning; silent, bare,

Ships, towers, domes, theatres, and temples lie

Open unto the fields, and to the sky;

All bright and glittering in the smokeless air.

Never did sun more beautifully steep

In his first splendour, valley, rock, or hill;

Ne’er saw I, never felt, a calm so deep!

The river glideth at his own sweet will:

Dear God! the very houses seem asleep;

And all that mighty heart is lying still!’

Phatic

This is the linguistic term for small talk, an important component of conversation. Greetings and farewells (not to mention comments about the weather) are phatic; they help to relax participants, and to get the conversation going with tags and adjacency pairs, for example:

‘Hi, Ruby, hot enough for you?’

‘Oh, hi, Jack, indeed. Long time no see.’

‘For sure. How’re the kids?’

‘The kids are flourishing, thanks. And yours?’

This is called an archetypal start to a conversation. It is managed by tags, adjacency pairs, and phatic speech. An archetypal end to a conversation might be:

‘Goodness, look at the time! The wife will kill me.’

‘Yes. Amazing how time flies. Great to catch up, Jack.’

‘Lovely to see you again, Rubes.’

‘’Bye.’

There are no tags here, but the phatic speech and the adjacency pairs are cooperative and polite.

Phenomenology

When ‘Huckleberry Finn’ was published in 1884 it was banned one month later by the Library of Concord who described it as ‘not suitable for trash’. In 2015 a high school in the U.S. banned it because its use of the N-word was not ‘inclusive’ and made scholars uncomfortable.

In 1902 the Brooklyn Public Library banned it because Huck says ‘sweat’ when he should say ‘perspiration’. Recently some publishers, yielding to pressure from their readers, have substituted the N-word for ‘slave’ or ‘servant’. The point I’m making is that the novel was banned in the early days for its use of ‘vulgar’ language, and in more recent times for its use of ‘racist’ language. History changes the way texts are received by readers.

Which brings me to the philosophical movement that was founded by Edmund Husserl early in the twentieth century. Phenomenology (to put it simply) eschews metaphysics and focuses on things (phenomena) that the human consciousness can perceive. Through Husserl’s student, Martin Heidegger, phenomenology became the basis of existentialism and modern theories of how texts should be interpreted. One of these is reader-response theory, which reminds us how important context is when it comes to evaluating text. Here is an extract from what many agree to be North America’s greatest novel:

‘Sometimes we'd have the whole river all to ourselves for the longest time. Yonder was the banks and the islands, across the water; and maybe a spark which was a candle in a cabin window and sometimes on the water you could see a spark or two on a raft or a scow, you know; and maybe you could hear a fiddle or a song coming over from one of them crafts. It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky, up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made, or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could a laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.’

Picaresque

This genre of novel began in Spain as a mocking reaction to the long-winded medieval tales of knights in shining armour and damsels in distress. The picaroon is a lovable rogue like Huckleberry Finn or Tom Jones (in poetry, Byron’s Don Juan). It is episodic in structure, crudely realistic, and usually in the first person. Two picaresque heroines who come to mind are Becky Thatcher in ‘Vanity Fair’ by William Makepeace Thackeray and Moll Flanders in the novel of that name by Daniel Defoe. Here is an extract from ‘Vanity Fair’:

‘But when Miss Rebecca Sharp and her stout companion lost themselves in a solitary walk, in which there were not above five score more of couples similarly straying, they both felt that the situation was extremely tender and critical, and now or never was the moment Miss Sharp thought, to provoke that declaration which was trembling on the timid lips of Mr. Sedley. They had previously been to the panorama of Moscow, where a rude fellow, treading on Miss Sharp's foot, caused her to fall back with a little shriek into the arms of Mr. Sedley, and this little incident increased the tenderness and confidence of that gentleman to such a degree, that he told her several of his favourite Indian stories over again for, at least, the sixth time.

"How I should like to see India!" said Rebecca.

"SHOULD you?" said Joseph, with a most killing tenderness; and was no doubt about to follow up this artful interrogatory by a question still more tender (for he puffed and panted a great deal, and Rebecca's hand, which was placed near his heart, could count the feverish pulsations of that organ), when, oh, provoking! the bell rang for the fireworks, and, a great scuffling and running taking place, these interesting lovers were obliged to follow in the stream of people.’

The gold standard of picaresque novels is ‘Don Quixote’ by Miguel de Cervantes, a Spanish contemporary of Shakespeare’s.

Plagiarism

It is sometimes difficult to distinguish, in this postmodern era between honest and dishonest intention in the unacknowledged use of someone else’s idea or text. If it’s honest it’s called allusion or intertextuality or imitation, or pastiche; if it’s dishonest it’s called plagiarism.

In his seminal modernist poem, ‘The Waste Land’, T.S. Eliot uses material from at least thirty texts, only relatively few of which he acknowledges in his not very enlightening notes at the end of the poem. Yet it’s hard to think of Eliot as a plagiarist, even though he himself wrote, ‘Immature poets imitate, mature poets steal; bad poets deface what they take, and good poets make it into something better, or at least something different.’ Here is a sample from ‘The Waste Land’:

‘I remember

Those are pearls that were his eyes.

“Are you alive, or not? Is there nothing in your head?”

But

O O O O that Shakespeherian Rag—

It’s so elegant

So intelligent

“What shall I do now? What shall I do?”

“I shall rush out as I am, and walk the street

“With my hair down, so. What shall we do tomorrow?

“What shall we ever do?”

The hot water at ten.

And if it rains, a closed car at four.

And we shall play a game of chess,

Pressing lidless eyes and waiting for a knock upon the door.’

Platonism

The world we see around us is a mere shadow of the real (ideal) world, which is made up of what Plato called Forms. So the table you are sitting at is an imitation of an ideal table, which is beyond human perception (neoplatonists, after Plotinus, contested this). If you write a poem about the table you are sitting at you are beneath contempt because you have made an illusion out of an illusion. Nevertheless, poets, especially in the Renaissance and the age of Romanticism were strongly influenced by Platonism. You can see it in Shelley’s ‘A Defense of Poetry’. Here is an extract:

‘Hence men, even in the infancy of society, observe a certain order in their words and actions, distinct from that of the objects and the impressions represented by them, all expression being subject to the laws of that from which it proceeds. But let us dismiss those more general considerations which might involve an inquiry into the principles of society itself, and restrict our view to the manner in which the imagination is expressed upon its forms.

In the youth of the world, men dance and sing and imitate natural objects observing in these actions, as in all others, a certain rhythm or order. And, although all men observe a similar, they observe not the same order, in the motions of the dance, in the melody of the song, in the combinations of language, in the series of their imitations of natural objects. For there is a certain order or rhythm belonging to each of these classes of mimetic representation, from which the hearer and the spectator receive an intenser and purer pleasure than from any other: the sense of an approximation to this order has been called taste by modern writers. Every man in the infancy of art observes an order which approximates more or less closely to that from which this highest delight results….’

Pleonasm

Phrases with unobtrusive redundancies like ‘tiny little’, ‘safe haven’, ‘tuna fish’... are pleonasms. They are more common in spoken than written language, and they can sometimes be quite effective, as in Mark Antony’s description of the stab wound in Julius Caesar for which his dear friend, Brutus, was responsible:

‘This was the most unkindest cut of all.’

Plot

Aristotle called it mythos, and he insisted it should have a beginning, a middle, and an end. He had drama in mind. E.M. Forster (I think it was) drew an analogy with music. As melody is to story so counterpoint is to plot. The story runs horizontally; the plot runs vertically.

In any event, a plot is what gives a story its structure; It holds the narrative together; it is the inter-relationship of the main events and associated characters in the piece of writing. Aristotle’s model is a good one: beginning, middle, end: though not necessarily in that order. The plot is often the most contrived part of a story. In the words of Anthony Burgess:

‘As for plot, more and more novelists are revolting against what they regard as “contrivance”, the manipulation of coincidences to produce a neat conclusion.’

Poetic justice

What we call karma in the real world we call poetic justice in the world of literature (see ‘nemesis’). Thus the wicked are punished and the good are rewarded. This simplistic outcome is seldom evident in great literature though it abounds in sanitized fairy tales and Westerns. Here is Hamlet gleefully plotting to foil Claudius’ plan to have him executed in England. His ‘two schoolfellows’ are Rosencrantz and Guildenstern who are spying on him and reporting to Claudius. (To be hoist with your own petard means to be blown up by your own bomb - not intentionally!):

‘There's letters seal'd, and my two schoolfellows,

Whom I will trust as I will adders fang'd—

They bear the mandate, they must sweep my way

And marshal me to knavery. Let it work;

For 'tis the sport to have the enginer

Hoist with his own petard, an't shall go hard

But I will delve one yard below their mines

And blow them at the moon.’

Poetic licence

When the effect of a piece of writing is more important than facts or grammatical accuracy. Consider the title of Amos Tutuola’s novel, ‘The Palm wine Drinkard’, or the reference to a clock in Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’:

Brutus: “Peace! Count the clock.”

Cassius: “The clock has stricken three.”

There were no clocks in Roman times. This is a deliberate anachronism for maximum dramatic effect.

Poetics

As a theoretical study of the principles of literature, poetics is not new. It goes back as far as Aristotle. In the western canon, the most influential early theorists were themselves poets. Names like Sydney, Wordsworth, Coleridge, Arnold, and Eliot come to mind.

More recently, poetics, now simply called theory, has helped to make the literary text less worthy of study than its context and has turned English literature into a pseudoscience like social anthropology or psychology.

Students of literature no longer study Shakespeare or the Brontes, they study Derrida, Foucault and Kristeva, and they become enamoured of words like ‘subaltern’, ‘essentialism’, and ‘liminality’. Theory today is the process of wrenching an art into a science - let the physicists and the biochemists beware!

Point of view

This has a different meaning in poetics from the way it is used in everyday communication. A writer’s point of view is not their attitude towards something but their narrative technique: how they use the narrative voice to manipulate reader sympathy. For example, we see much of the play, ‘Macbeth’ from the character Macbeth’s point of view. Consequently we feel more sympathy towards him than we perhaps should. The first person, ‘I’, draws us closer to a narrator than the third person, ‘she’ or ‘he’. With multiple narrators you get multiple points of view, which some readers find frustrating, others invigorating.

In ‘The Nun’s Priest’s Tale’, for example, we have the real narrator, Chaucer, the fictitious Chaucer, who is one of the pilgrims and whose story about Sir Thopas is so bad the host forces him to abandon it - ‘Thy drasty rymyng is nat worth a toord’ - we have the Nun’s Priest who tells the story of Chauntecleer, the cock, and we have Chauntecleer himself, who dramatizes much of his story. This layering of narrative points of view is sometimes called imbrication.

The novel, ‘Bleak House’ by Charles Dickens is told from two distinct points of view: a third-person narrator writing in the present tense, and a first person narrator writing in the past tense. Here are random samples:

‘On the Eastern borders of Chancery Lane, that is to say, more particularly in Cook’s Court, Cursitor Street, Mr Snagsby, Law-Stationer, pursues his lawful calling.’

‘It was curious that this should make me uncomfortable, but I think it did. I know it did.’

Polemic

A hard-hitting attack on an ideology, for instance, George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ is a polemic against totalitarianism, Soviet style, while J. B. Priestley’s ‘An Inspector Calls’ is a polemic against capitalism, British style. Other polemical writers in English are John Milton and Jonathan Swift. Here is Inspector Goole, who speaks for Priestley, in ‘An Inspector Calls’:

“But remember this. One Eva Smith has gone- but there are millions and millions and millions of Eva Smiths and John Smiths still left with us, with their lives, their hopes and fears, their suffering and chance of happiness, all intertwined with our lives, and what we think and say and do. We don’t live alone. We are members of one body. We are responsible for each other. And I tell you that the time will soon come when, if men will not learn that lesson, then they will be taught it in fire and blood and anguish. Good night.”

Politeness strategies

The attempt by speakers to minimise face-threatening acts.

Positive face

In conversation this is when you act in a way that you hope will be approved of.

Postmodernism

This word has grown into a dragon, which I shall not attempt to slay. Its simplest use is to describe that period in the development of literature and the arts which comes after the period known as modernism, and which is still with us. Where modernism sought to find some form of coherence in existence by moving away from nineteenth century realism towards movements like expressionism and surrealism… the list is long, postmodernism accepts that existence is chaotic, absurd, empty, and celebrates it with writing, painting, and music that is chaotic, absurd, and empty. Its claim is that this situation helps to break down hierarchical structures in society like patriarchy, for example, and class. I think that postmodernism is more of an extension of modernism than a movement in its own right. In literature its main influence has been with the novel. Here is a sample from ‘The Crying of Lot 49’ by Thomas Pynchon:

“She touched the edge of its voluptuous field, knowing it would be lovely beyond dreams simply to submit to it; that not gravity's pull, laws of ballistics, feral ravening, promised more delight. She tested it, shivering: I am meant to remember. Each clue that comes is supposed to have its own clarity, its fine chances for permanence. But then she wondered if the gemlike "clues" were only some kind of compensation. To make up for her having lost the direct, epileptic Word, the cry that might abolish the night.”

Poststructuralism

The Algerian born philosopher, Jacques Derrida, called it ‘deconstruction’. It opposes structuralism, which sees text (langue) as a fixed structure. It emphasizes the instability of language, and since humans are products of language, they are intrinsically unstable, subject to the whims of textuality, what Derrida, combining the words ‘differ’ and ‘defer’, calls differance.

Poststructuralism fits into the postmodernist philosophy that reason, science, can not be trusted to reveal the Truth. There are no absolutes. Everything is relative. Should this make us anxious? Not at all. Not being certain of anything should provide us with the serenity of a cow in India. Here are three well known Derrida quotes:

“There is nothing outside the text”

“What is called "objectivity," scientific for instance (in which I firmly believe, in a given situation) imposes itself only within a context which is extremely vast, old, firmly established, or rooted in a network of conventions ... and yet which still remains a context.

“1) Différance is the systematic play of differences, of the traces of differences, of the spacing by means of which elements are related to each other. This spacing is the simultaneously active and passive (the a of différance indicates this indecision as concerns activity and passivity, that which cannot be governed by or distributed between the terms of this opposition) production of the intervals without which the "full" terms would not signify, would not function.”

Post-telegraphic stage

The stage when children speak in more or less complete sentences - about three years old.

Practical Criticism

This approach to literary analysis, especially with short poems, is still evident in the curricula of examining boards like Cambridge. It was initiated by I. A. Richards in his influential book, ‘Practical Criticism’ (1929). As opposed to more recent approaches like Marxist, Feminist, Historicist, practical criticism prioritises text over context. This leads to close reading or explication, where the form and the content of a poem are thoroughly investigated. Terms like diction, tone, imagery, and rhythm become significant. This approach soon crossed the sea to the United States where it became known as the New Criticism. ‘It is never what a poem says that matters’, Richards wrote, ‘but what it is’.

Postmodernist literary theory is contemptuous of practical criticism, linking it to patriarchal hegemony, aka 'the west'.

Pre-Raphaelites

Dante Gabriel Rossetti started this movement with fellow Victorian artists and poets like Millais, Holman Hunt, and Rossetti’s sister, Christina. They protested against contemporary (1848) art, which they found too academic and too influenced by the renaissance Italian painter, Raphael. They advocated a return to simpler medieval times, as did the Romantics like John Keats.

The Pre-Raphaelite influence is strongly evident in the poems of Algernon Charles Swinburne. Here is a sample, the first stanza of ‘A ballad of Dreamland’:

I hid my heart in a nest of roses,

Out of the sun's way, hidden apart;

In a softer bed than the soft white snow's is,

Under the roses I hid my heart.

Why would it sleep not? why should it start,

When never a leaf of the rose-tree stirred?

What made sleep flutter his wings and part?

Only the song of a secret bird.

Prescriptivism and descriptivism

If a London cockney says 'nuffink' instead of 'nothing', he is not being ignorant, he is using a sociolect. It's the way cockneys speak. The role of the linguist is descriptive, not prescriptive.

Prestige

Overt prestige is when you impress by using standard English; covert prestige is when you impress by using non-standard English.

Primitivism

Linked to the genre of the pastoral and the myth of the golden age, primitivism in English literature can be seen as a reaction to rapid urbanization. It was strongly influenced by the writings of Jean-Jacques Rousseau who saw great dignity in what he somewhat patronisingly called the ‘noble savage’. This idea is put to the test in Shakespeare’s complex play, ‘The Tempest’.

In the visual arts, painters like Gauguin and Picasso borrowed motifs from Tahitian and African culture to enhance their work. In musical composition, Stravinsky’s ‘The Rite of Spring’, has been described as primitivist because it celebrates paganism.

William Wordsworth had strong primitivist instincts, calling upon poets to use simple language and write about simple subjects like garden spades and leech gatherers. Here is an extract from his poem entitled ‘Resolution and Independence’:

He told, that to these waters he had come 

To gather leeches, being old and poor: 

Employment hazardous and wearisome! 

And he had many hardships to endure: 

From pond to pond he roamed, from moor to moor; 

Housing, with God's good help, by choice or chance; 

And in this way he gained an honest maintenance.

The old Man still stood talking by my side; 

But now his voice to me was like a stream 

Scarce heard; nor word from word could I divide; 

And the whole body of the Man did seem 

Like one whom I had met with in a dream; 

Or like a man from some far region sent, 

To give me human strength, by apt admonishment.

Prolepsis

When, shortly after the murder of Duncan, Lady Macbeth tries to reassure her husband by saying, ‘A little water clears us of this deed’, she (or rather Shakespeare) is being proleptic. She is unconsciously anticipating the sleepwalking scene, much later in the play, where the guilt-ridden queen is seen attempting to wash her hands for fifteen minutes at a time, crying ‘Here’s the smell of blood still: all the perfumes of Arabia will not sweeten this little hand’. Prolepsis, then, is the opposite of a flashback. Outside literature, in a debate, for example, prolepsis anticipates the objection to an argument before it is even made.

Propagandism

Both George Orwell and George Bernard Shaw have claimed that all art is propaganda. However, they don’t mean it disparagingly; they link it to terms like didactic or polemic; that is writing that attempts to persuade its readers to take up a particular moral position. When the text is ambiguous, as in Shakespeare’s ‘Julius Caesar’ for example, it has been used as propaganda by diametrically opposed ideologies. The reactionaries may be shocked by the assassination of Caesar while the radicals may be thrilled.

Propagandism in literature is at its most effective when it is written for its time, like ‘An Inspector Calls’ by J.B. Priestley or ‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ by Harriet Beecher Stowe. Here is an extract from the latter novel:

"Now, they say," said Haley, assuming a candid and confidential air, "that this kind o' trade is hardening to the feelings; but I never found it so. Fact is, I never could do things up the way some fellers manage the business. I've seen 'em as would pull a woman's child out of her arms, and set him up to sell, and she screechin' like mad all the time; – very bad policy – damages the article – makes 'em quite unfit for service sometimes. I knew a real handsome gal once, in Orleans, as was entirely ruined by this sort o' handling. The fellow that was trading for her didn't want her baby; and she was one of your real high sort, when her blood was up. I tell you, she squeezed up her child in her arms, and talked, and went on real awful. It kinder makes my blood run cold to think of 't; and when they carried off the child, and locked her up, she jest went ravin' mad, and died in a week. Clear waste, sir, of a thousand dollars, just for want of management, – there's where 't is. It's always best to do the humane thing, sir; that's been my experience."

‘Uncle Tom’s Cabin’ is anti-slavery propaganda, which hasn’t weathered well. Abraham Lincoln is reported to have said when he met Stowe, “So you’re the little woman who wrote the book that made this great war.”

Prose

What a line is to poetry, a sentence is to prose. The latter, however, shares a number of features commonly associated with poetry. These days, indeed, the only difference between the two genres seems to be the way they appear on the page. Look at this sentence: ‘So much depends upon a red wheelbarrow glazed with rain water beside the white chickens.’ Now look at William Carlos Williams’ famous minimalist poem:

Red Wheelbarrow

So much depends

upon

a red wheel

barrow

glazed with rain

water

beside the white

chickens.

Prose tends to be less rhythmical than poetry, and it seldom rhymes, but in every other way, it’s the look on the page that counts. On the other hand, the prose of a master craftsman like Charles Dickens is nearly always more rhythmical than contemporary free verse. Nearly every sentence he writes is partly iambic. Here is the randomly chosen opening sentence of Chapter 2 in ‘Bleak House’: ‘It is but a glimpse of the world of fashion that we want on this same miry afternoon.’ There are two anapaests (‘it is but’, ‘of the world’), while the rest of the sentence is iambic.

Prose poem

I find the idea of poetry written in prose contradictory, smacking of postmodernism, but it is not a new form. You can trace its European origins to the 19th century. In Asian countries it goes back even further.

A prose poem is short like a lyric poem but it has a right-hand margin, and it uses paragraphs instead of stanzas. Flash fiction, where there is a strong narrative element, may be seen as an offshoot of the prose poem. Here is a snippet from Bob Dylan’s prose poem, ‘Tarantula’:

‘manuscript nitemare of cut throat high & low & behold the prophesying blind allegiance to law fox, monthly cupid & the intoxicating ghosts of dogma… nay & may the boatmen in bathrobes be banished forever & anointed into the shelves of alive hell, the unimaginative sleep, repetition without change & fat sheriffs who watch for doom in the mattress.. hallaluyah & bossman of the hobos cometh & ordaining the spiritual gypsy davy camp now being infiltrated by foreign dictator, the pink FBI & the interrogating unknown failures of peacetime as holy & silver & blessed with the texture of kaleidoscope & the sandal girl… to dream of dancing pillhead virgins & wandering Apollo at the pipe organ/ unscientific ramblers & the pretty things lucky & lifting their lips & handing down looks & regards from the shoulders of adam & eve’s minstrel peekaboo…’

Prosody

The study of rhythm and its associated sounds in poetry (and more recently, via linguistics, in prose) is called metrics or prosody. Because of its associations with the western canon, going back to the ancient Greeks, it is now ignored, or even condemned for being reactionary.

Prosody, for example, acknowledges a number of different rhyme forms, like assonance, alliteration, eye rhyme, feminine rhyme, masculine rhyme, slant rhyme, and internal rhyme. Here is an example of internal (or leonine) poetry from Tennyson’s ‘The Princess’:

The splendour falls on castle walls 

And snowy summits old in story: 

The long light shakes across the lakes, 

And the wild cataract leaps in glory. 

Blow, bugle, blow, set the wild echoes flying, 

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

O hark, O hear! how thin and clear, 

And thinner, clearer, farther going! 

O sweet and far from cliff and scar 

The horns of Elfland faintly blowing! 

Blow, let us hear the purple glens replying: 

Blow, bugle; answer, echoes, dying, dying, dying.

Psalm

The sacred songs in the Bible, attributed to King David, are known as psalms. The most popular English translations, found in ‘The Book of Common Prayer’, were translated by Miles Coverdale. Here is the beginning of Psalm 22 in the King James version:

‘My God, my God, why hast thou forsaken me? why art thou so far from helping me, and from the words of my roaring?

2 O my God, I cry in the day time, but thou hearest not; and in the night season, and am not silent.

3 But thou art holy, O thou that inhabitest the praises of Israel.

4 Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.

5 They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.

6 But I am a worm, and no man; a reproach of men, and despised of the people.’

It is interesting that Jesus calls out something from this psalm in his dying moments on the cross: 'Eloi Eloi lama sabachthani?' The fulfilment of Old Testament prophecy in the New Testament is known as typology. The Biblical psalms had a strong influence on the development of free verse in modern English poetry.

Pseudo-statement

The literary critic, I. A. Richards, coined this not very helpful term to describe so-called poetic truth - neither scientific nor dogmatic but epiphanic. It’s a kind of truth that recognizes the necessity of opposites, as in the yin and yang of Buddhism. I guess you could call it metaphorical truth that neither affirms nor denies but, somehow, transcends the binaries. An example of a pseudo-statement would be ‘death makes life precious’. Can you find a pseudo-statement in this stanza from ‘Ode On a Grecian Urn’ by John Keats:

‘O Attic shape! Fair attitude! with brede 

Of marble men and maidens overwrought, 

With forest branches and the trodden weed; 

Thou, silent form, dost tease us out of thought 

As doth eternity: Cold Pastoral! 

When old age shall this generation waste, 

Thou shalt remain, in midst of other woe 

Than ours, a friend to man, to whom thou say'st, 

"Beauty is truth, truth beauty,—that is all 

Ye know on earth, and all ye need to know.”’

Psychomachy (stress the syllable, ‘chom’)

Poems that deal with the battle for a person’s soul were popular in the middle ages. In his sonnets, Shakespeare sometimes presents two of his lovers, a young man and a ‘dark’ lady, as good and bad angels. You can see this at work in sonnet 144:

Two loves I have of comfort and despair,

Which like two spirits do suggest me still;

The better angel is a man right fair, 

The worser spirit a woman colour'd ill. 

To win me soon to hell, my female evil 

Tempteth my better angel from my side, 

And would corrupt my saint to be a devil, 

Wooing his purity with her foul pride. 

And whether that my angel be turn'd fiend 

Suspect I may, but not directly tell; 

But being both from me, both to each friend,

I guess one angel in another's hell: 

Yet this shall I ne'er know, but live in doubt,

Till my bad angel fire my good one out.

Notice the stereotype of the Apollonian man and the Dionysian woman. Shakespeare seems to suggest that they come from a single androgynous source.

Pun

Also known as paronomasia, a pun is a play on words. Because it is so full of homonyms and homophones, English is particularly rich in puns. Shakespeare uses hundreds, many of them vulgar, in his plays. For example, the word ‘nothing’ sometimes signifies a woman in the sense that she has no ‘thing’ between her legs. The fact that Shakespeare’s female characters were acted by boys makes it wittier still. Shakespeare’s comedy, ‘Much ado about Nothing’, puns on the word ‘knotting’, or copulation. Many of his puns are less direct, for example, when he introduces the word ‘ship’ he expects you to know the Latin, ‘navis’, which sounds like ‘knave’, which leads to ‘jack’, which leads to ‘arse’. Now, consider the significance of the word ‘board’ in the following exchange between Sir Toby Belch and Sir Andrew Aguecheek in ‘Twelfth Night’:

Sir Toby: Accost, Sir Andrew, accost.

Sir Andrew: What’s that?

Sir Toby: My niece’s chambermaid.

Sir Andrew: Good Mistress Accost, I desire better acquaintance.

Maria: My name is Mary, sir.

Sir Andrew: Good mistress Mary Accost -

Sir Toby [aside] You mistake, knight. ‘Accost’ is front her, board her, woo her, assail her.

Sir Andrew: By my troth, I would not undertake her in this company.

There are also sexual puns on the words ‘acquaintance’ (research the word ‘quaint’), ‘mistake’, and ‘undertake’.

Purple prose

This is a pejorative term for writing that is excessively ornate, bombastic, packed with describing words and figures of speech, which embarrass rather than impress the reader. Victorian literature is full of it. Nowadays we prefer a plain style. Here is an example of purple prose from the opening of Edward Bulwer-Lytton’s novel, ‘Paul Clifford’:

“It was a dark and stormy night; the rain fell in torrents, except at occasional intervals, when it was checked by a violent gust of wind which swept up the streets (for it is in London that our scene lies), rattling along the house-tops, and fiercely agitating the scanty flame of the lamps that struggled against the darkness.”

Quatrain

The four-line stanza is very common in English poetry, especially ballads and hymns. It is usually rhymed abcb or abab. In his long poem, ‘In Memoriam’, Tennyson altered this to abba. Here is a sample:

XXVII

I envy not in any moods

The captive void of noble rage,

The linnet born within the cage,

That never knew the summer woods:

I envy not the beast that takes

His license in the field of time,

Unfetter'd by the sense of crime,

To whom a conscience never wakes;

Nor, what may count itself as blest,

The heart that never plighted troth

But stagnates in the weeds of sloth;

Nor any want-begotten rest.

I hold it true, whate'er befall;

I feel it, when I sorrow most;

'Tis better to have loved and lost

Than never to have loved at all.

Realism

Squatting between naturalism and modernism (all these ‘isms’) realism is fiction that creates the illusion of real life, or verisimilitude. Since, in this postmodern world, we no longer know what ‘real life’ is or isn’t, when we are told that everything is a ‘social construct’, the term is almost impossible to define. Nevertheless it is frequently used in literary analysis, so let’s just settle for an example of realism in English literature. This is the beginning of ‘Middlemarch’ by George Eliot:

‘Miss Brooke had that kind of beauty which seems to be thrown into relief by poor dress. Her hand and wrist were so finely formed that she could wear sleeves not less bare of style than those in which the Blessed Virgin appeared to Italian painters; and her profile as well as her stature and bearing seemed to gain the more dignity from her plain garments, which by the side of provincial fashion gave her the impressiveness of a fine quotation from the Bible,--or from one of our elder poets,--in a paragraph of to-day's newspaper. She was usually spoken of as being remarkably clever, but with the addition that her sister Celia had more common-sense. Nevertheless, Celia wore scarcely more trimmings; and it was only to close observers that her dress differed from her sister's, and had a shade of coquetry in its arrangements; for Miss Brooke's plain dressing was due to mixed conditions, in most of which her sister shared.’

Reception theory

The understanding of a literary work, say Wordsworth’s ‘Prelude’, is very likely to change over history, and from one culture to another. Time unfixes meaning. Some of Wordsworth’s poetry was seen, at the time of the French Revolution, as subversive. Nowadays he tends to be seen as a reactionary old fart. His poetry is ‘received’ differently from generation to generation. Here is an extract from the ‘Prelude’:

‘Bliss was it in that dawn to be alive,

But to be young was very Heaven! O times,

In which the meagre, stale, forbidding ways

Of custom, law, and statute, took at once

The attraction of a country in romance!

When Reason seemed the most to assert her rights,

When most intent on making of herself

A prime enchantress–to assist the work

Which then was going forward in her name!’

‘That dawn’ refers to the French Revolution.

Received pronunciation

The accent most closely associated with Standard English, the so-called posh accent.

Redaction

Redactors are editors who give shape to inspired but unstructured writings. Without redactors there would be no Bible. They are mostly anonymous. The many writers who have tried to complete Dickens’ unfinished novel, ‘The Mystery of Edwin Drood’, may be called redactors. Dickens got as far as chapter 22 before he suffered a stroke and died. Here are his last paragraphs:

“And at that moment, outside the grated door of the Choir, having eluded the vigilance of Mr. Tope by shifty resources in which he is an adept, Deputy peeps, sharp-eyed, through the bars, and stares astounded from the threatener to the threatened.

The service comes to an end, and the servitors disperse to breakfast. Mr. Datchery accosts his last new acquaintance outside, when the Choir (as much in a hurry to get their bedgowns off, as they were but now to get them on) have scuffled away.

'Well, mistress. Good morning. You have seen him?'

'I'VE seen him, deary; I'VE seen him!'

'And you know him?'

'Know him! Better far than all the Reverend Parsons put together know him.'

Mrs. Tope's care has spread a very neat, clean breakfast ready for her lodger. Before sitting down to it, he opens his corner-cupboard door; takes his bit of chalk from its shelf; adds one thick line to the score, extending from the top of the cupboard door to the bottom; and then falls to with an appetite.”

Register

An important aspect of style in written and spoken texts is the degree of formality or informality. Linguists identify five types of register:-

Frozen: 'I declare this meeting open'

Formal: 'Thus, in accordance with our opinion that...'

Consultative: 'Would you mind helping me with this crate?'

Casual: 'Hey! check this out...'

Intimate: 'Oh, my darling...'

These are examples of spoken texts, but they also apply to written texts. They are known as stylistic variation, and they depend on context: genre, purpose, audience, and pattern, Out of a combination of these features emerges tone.

Regulatory function

According to Halliday, when children use language to affect the behaviour of others’

Reference and inference

The speaker makes a reference; the listener makes an inference - she deduces meaning from what the speaker has said. Listeners infer in order to discover the speaker’s intended (or unintended) meaning. They may interpret this meaning according to their own presuppositions. So if you already dislike a certain politician and he declares that some of his best friends are Jews (reference), you may infer that he is a hypocrite.

References are usually nouns and pronouns. Words for categories of things like animals, vegetables, and minerals, are called hypernyms, while words within those categories like dog, pumpkin, and granite, are called hyponyms.

Many references are figurative, idiomatic; so if a speaker says ‘I don’t trust the bench’, the listener infers that he doesn’t trust the judiciary.

Refrain

Variously known as a burden or a chorus, a refrain is a line (or lines) that is repeated at the end of a stanza in songs and lyric poems. Shakespeare prefers burden (or burthen) because of its punning potential. A burden is also a heavy load and, as in Chaucer’s ‘“Com hider, love, to me?” / This Somonour bar to hym a stif burdoun’, a staff. These become sexual innuendos in the naughty minds of poets. Here is Ariel’s song from ‘The Tempest’, with its refrains of ‘hark, hark!’, ‘bow-wow’, etc..:

‘Come unto these yellow sands,

And then take hands:

Curtsied when you have, and kiss'd

The wild waves whist,

Foot it featly here and there;

And, sweet sprites, the burthen bear.

Hark, hark!

Bow-wow.

The watch-dogs bark.

Bow-wow.

Hark, hark! I hear

The strain of strutting chanticleer

Cry, Cock-a-diddle-dow.

Full fathom five thy father lies;

Of his bones are coral made;

Those are pearls that were his eyes:

Nothing of him that doth fade,

But doth suffer a sea-change

Into something rich and strange. 

Sea-nymphs hourly ring his knell:

Ding-dong.

Hark! now I hear them—Ding-dong, bell.

Register 

The degree of formality or informality in a text, e.g. a business letter would have a more formal register than a friendly letter.

Reinforcement theory

Behaviourists like B.F. Skinner believed that a new born baby was a tabula rasa (clean slate). In other words, children are born with no information about language in their brains, and rely entirely on nurturing by parents and other caregivers to become speakers. Language, according to Skinner, is acquired by ‘operant conditioning’. This is a process whereby the child imitates the sounds she hears and is rewarded with praise when she gets it right. So language is learned through imitation and reinforcement. Skinner’s theory is supported by the fact that we learn to speak the language and adopt the accents of those around us.

Representational function

According to Halliday, using language to share or request information.

Restoration comedy

I don’t think English drama has ever fully recovered from the closing of the theatres in 1641 by the Puritans (see Malvolio in ‘Twelfth Night’). Certainly the period from the restoration of the monarchy in 1660 to around 1700 produced very little good comedy and almost no tragedy. The best thing about this period, in my opinion, was that, for the first time, it allowed female actors on the stage. Among these was Nell Gwynn, mistress of King Charles the Second.

While the plays of Shakespeare, Marlowe, and Jonson attracted audiences from all classes, the plays of Beaumont and Fletcher, George Etherege, and William Wycherley, with their sometimes cynical, sometimes vulgar, always spectacular scenes - precursors of the comedy of manners in which Oscar Wilde excelled - these plays attracted a narrow audience from the upper classes who delighted in plots about savvy aristocrats making fools of the upstart bourgeoisie.

Here is an extract from possibly the best of the Restoration comedies. It is ‘The Way of the World' by William Congreve (1670 - 1729):

ACT I.--SCENE I.

A Chocolate-house.

MIRABELL and FAINALL rising from cards. BETTY waiting.

MIRA. You are a fortunate man, Mr. Fainall.

FAIN. Have we done?

MIRA. What you please. I'll play on to entertain you.

FAIN. No, I'll give you your revenge another time, when you are not

so indifferent; you are thinking of something else now, and play too

negligently: the coldness of a losing gamester lessens the pleasure

of the winner. I'd no more play with a man that slighted his ill

fortune than I'd make love to a woman who undervalued the loss of

her reputation.

MIRA. You have a taste extremely delicate, and are for refining on

your pleasures.

FAIN. Prithee, why so reserved? Something has put you out of

humour.

MIRA. Not at all: I happen to be grave to-day, and you are gay;

that's all.

Revenge tragedy

The theme of revenge has always been popular and was especially so from the 1590s to the 1630s thanks largely to the popularity of Thomas Kyd’s play, ‘The Spanish Tragedy’. The morality of revenge creates a lot of dramatic tension on the stage because it pits the Old Testament ‘an eye for an eye’ against the New Testament ‘judge not that ye be not judged’. Some famous revenge tragedies of these times are Christopher Marlowe’s ‘The Jew of Malta’, John Webster’s ‘The Duchess of Malfi’, and Cyril Tourneur’s ‘The Revenger’s Tragedy’. Most famous of all, and the one most influenced by Thomas Kyd’s prototype, is Shakespeare’s ‘Hamlet’. Here is an extract from Kyd’s sensational play:

HOR. And, madame, Don Horatio will not slacke

Humbly to serue faire Bel-imperia.

But now, if your good liking stand thereto,

Ile craue your pardon to goe seeke the prince;

For so the duke, your father, gaue me charge.

Exit.

BEL. I, goe, Horatio; leaue me heere alone,

For solitude best fits my cheereles mood.—

Yet what auailes to waile Andreas death,

From whence Horatio proues my second loue?

Had he not loued Andrea as he did,

He could not sit in Bel-imperias thoughts.

But how can loue finde harbour in my brest,

Till I reuenge the death of my beloued?

Yes, second loue shall further my reuenge:

Ile loue Horatio, my Andreas freend,

The more to spight the prince that wrought his end;

And, where Don Balthazar, that slew my loue,

He shall, in rigour of my iust disdaine,

Reape long repentance for his murderous deed,—

For what wast els but murderous cowardise,

So many to oppresse one valiant knight,

Without respect of honour in the fight?

And heere he comes that murdred my delight.

Rhapsody

A rhapsode in Ancient Greece would recite parts of an epic poem. Nowadays it describes writing that is ecstatic, often loosely structured. Walt Whitman comes to mind as a rhapsodic poet. Here is an extract from his poem, ‘I Sing the Body Electric’:

‘The voice, articulation, language, whispering, shouting aloud,

Food, drink, pulse, digestion, sweat, sleep, walking, swimming,

Poise on the hips, leaping, reclining, embracing, arm-curving and tightening,

The continual changes of the flex of the mouth, and around the eyes,

The skin, the sun-burnt shade, freckles, hair,

The curious sympathy one feels, when feeling with the hand the naked meat of the body,

The circling rivers, the breath, and breathing it in and out, 

The beauty of the waist, and thence of the hips, and thence downward toward the knees,

The thin red jellies within you, or within me, the bones, and the marrow in the bones,

The exquisite realization of health;

O I say these are not the parts and poems of the Body only, but of the soul,

O I say now these are the soul!’

Rhetoric

In ancient times rhetoric, the art of persuasive discourse, was regarded as an important subject, and right up to the late nineteenth century it was a focus of western education. Today it is mostly regarded as a pejorative term used in the same breath as ‘propaganda’ and ‘fake news’. Winston Churchill was a master of rhetoric:

‘…we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender, and even if, which I do not for a moment believe, this Island or a large part of it were subjugated and starving, then our Empire beyond the seas, armed and guarded by the British Fleet, would carry on the struggle, until, in God’s good time, the New World, with all its power and might, steps forth to the rescue and the liberation of the old.’

Rhetorical question

A question that has an answer built into it is popular with orators because it has the emotional effect of uniting them with their audience. It is also very effective in literature, for example, this extract from ‘The Merchant of Venice’ with multiple rhetorical questions:

‘I am a Jew. Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? Fed with the same food, hurt with the same weapons, subject to the same diseases, healed by the same means, warmed and cooled by the same winter and summer, as a Christian is? If you prick us, do we not bleed? if you tickle us, do we not laugh? if you poison us, do we not die? and if you wrong us, shall we not revenge? If we are like you in the rest, we will resemble you in that. If a Jew wrong a Christian, what is his humility? Revenge. If a Christian wrong a Jew, what should his sufferance be by Christian example? Why, revenge. The villainy you teach me, I will execute, and it shall go hard but I will better the instruction.’

Don’t confuse a rhetorical question with hypophora. This is when the speaker poses a question and then immediately answers it, as in this extract from a Winston Churchill speech:

‘You ask, what is our policy? I will say: It is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and with all the strength that God can give us.’

Rhyme

Words that sound the same make up the rhyming family. In poetry they usually occur at the end of lines in various patterns or schemes, which are pleasing to little children, rap artists, and old fashioned poets.

Prosody acknowledges a number of different rhyme forms, like assonance (‘sleep’, ‘dream’), alliteration ‘sleep soundly’, eye rhyme (love’, ‘prove’), feminine rhyme (‘seeming’, ‘dreaming’), masculine rhyme (‘seem’, ‘dream’), slant rhyme, (‘seem’, ‘same’), internal rhyme (‘We were the first that ever burst’), mosaic rhyme (‘sonnet’, ‘upon it’, homophone (‘rein’, ‘rain’). There are others!

Rhyme seems to be out of favour with the majority of contemporary poets, partly, I suspect because it’s so difficult to do well. University English departments tend to see it as reactionary, controlling, masculine. The great poet, John Milton, might have agreed with them. Here’s what he said about rhyme (rime) in his introduction to ‘Paradise Lost’:

‘The Measure is English Heroic Verse without Rime, as that of Homer in Greek, and Virgil in Latin; Rime being no necessary Adjunct or true Ornament of Poem or good Verse, in longer Works especially, but the Invention of a barbarous Age, to set off wretched matter and lame Meeter; grac't indeed since by the use of some famous modern Poets, carried away by Custom, but much to thir own vexation, hindrance, and constraint to express many things otherwise, and for the most part worse then else they would have exprest them.’

Rhyme: the issue

In the hallowed halls of academia, rhyme has become a pejorative term. It is reactionary because it offers closure; it is childish, trivial, masculine. It should be discarded by all but satirists, rappers, and Mother Goose.

When John Milton decided to write his great epic, 'Paradise lost' he rejected rhyme on the grounds that it was 'trivial', a 'jingling sound of like endings'. He was right. Imagine if this:

‘Of man’s first disobedience, and the fruit

Of that forbidden tree, whose mortal taste

Brought death into the world, and all our woe,

With loss of Eden, till one greater man

Restore us, and regain the blissful seat,

Sing heavenly muse, that on the secret top

Of Oreb, or of Sinai, didst inspire

That shepherd, who first taught the chosen seed…’

sounded like this:

‘Of man’s first disobedience and the juice

Of that forbidden apple, which let loose

Chaos in the world, and all our trouble,

With dear Eden bursting like a bubble;

Till one greater man restore us, regain

The blissful seat on the homecoming train

Sing, O muse, from the highest mountain top

Of the Beginning – a hell of a flop.’

But imagine if this didn’t rhyme:

‘The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew,

the furrow followed free;

We were the first to ever burst

Into that silent sea.’

Rhythm

What distinguishes poetry more than anything else from prose is the pattern of sounds created by stressed and unstressed syllables, known as metre. This is what gives a poem its beat. Unlike most popular music, where the beat is obtrusive, the rhythm of poetry is mostly unobtrusive. Look, for example, at the poem, ‘Break, Break, Break’ by Alfred Lord Tennyson:

Break, break, break,

On thy cold gray stones, O sea!

And I would that my tongue could utter

The thoughts that arise in me.

O, well for the fisherman’s boy,

That he shouts with his sister at play!

O, well for the sailor lad,

That he sings in his boat on the bay!

And the stately ships go on

To their haven under the hill;

But O for the touch of a vanished hand,

And the sound of a voice that is still!

Break, break, break,

At the foot of thy crags, O sea!

But the tender grace of a day that is dead

Will never come back to me.

Here the metre is rhythmically enhanced by the repetition of the title and the regular rhyme scheme. The dominant foot in these stanzas is the three-syllable anapaest: two unstressed and one stressed syllable. Here are examples, one from each stanza: ‘On thy cold’; ‘That he shouts’; ‘of a voice’; ‘At the foot’.

Romance

Actually, Romance fiction is very old and has its roots in the medieval stories of courtly love told by writers like Sir Thomas Malory. His ‘Le Morte d’Arthur’ was printed by William Caxton in 1484 and tells the stories of the Knights of the Round Table and the search for the Holy Grail.

Nowadays the romance novel is linked to a type of pulp fiction with, usually, triangular love affairs: two men and a woman or, less frequently, two women and a man. There is very little variation in the plots. It might be that Charlotte Bronte’s classic, ‘Jane Eyre’, is a prototype of the Mills and Boon genre. Rochester is dark and brooding while St John Rivers is fair and moralising. Jane ends up marrying the dark one but only after he’s been thoroughly emasculated. Cervantes parodied the Romance in ‘Don Quixote’, from where we get the adjective, ‘quixotic’, which means the foolish pursuit of an ideal. Here is an extract from that wonderful book:

‘“Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is nobel, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth."

"What giants?" Asked Sancho Panza.

"The ones you can see over there," answered his master, "with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long."

"Now look, your grace," said Sancho, "what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone."

"Obviously," replied Don Quijote, "you don't know much about adventures.”’

Romanticism

Sandwiched between the ‘Age of Reason’ (late 17th century onwards) and the age of realism (late 19th century onwards), the rich spread of Romanticism produced some of Europe’s greatest writers. In England it was heralded by William Wordsworth’s preface to the 1800 version of ‘Lyrical Ballads’, his collaboration with Samuel Taylor Coleridge. Wordsworth saw the poet as something akin to a prophet. He argued that we should trust our instincts, our intuition, rather than what his younger contemporary, John Keats, called ‘consecutive reasoning’. Wordsworth also argued for the return to poetry of ordinary speech. The influence of the German philosopher, Immanuel Kant, on the Romantic movement, was considerable. (His influence can still be felt in today’s burgeoning anti-science movements.) Rather than an innovation, Romanticism was a reaction against the Enlightenment, a rediscovery of William Shakespeare and the medieval troubadours. It is still with us and you can see its influence in the writings of D. H. Lawrence and W. B. Yeats, and in the younger generation’s fascination for the living dead. Here is my favourite Romantic poet describing the spirit of Romanticism in a letter to a friend:

‘ I am certain of nothing but of the holiness of the Heart's affections and the truth of Imagination - What the imagination seizes as Beauty must be truth - whether it existed before or not - for I have the same idea of all our passions as of love: they are all, in their sublime, creative of essential beauty.’

Romanticism reached the United States in the form of Transcendentalism, a theme of Henry James’ novel, ‘The Bostonians’. It seemed to be more popular with preachers than poets, and gave rise to North American Christian sects that are flourishing to this day, especially in the developing world.

Root

The primary form of a word, which carries the most meaning. e.g. the root of ‘impossibility’ is ‘possible’.

Rose: reconstructing the word (signifier) 

On the page (depending on the context) it’s a flower or the past tense of rise or the name of a girl. It’s also an anagram of ‘Eros’ and ‘sore’. To the ear it can be a little more: ‘rows’ (‘She rows the boat’; ‘They stand in rows’); ‘roes’ (‘These small European deer are called roes.’)

Next come the connotations, and these might be infinite. Here are a few: love, secular beauty, divine beauty, the heart, the soul, the chalice of life, redemption, regeneration, transience, fidelity, balance…. Each colour, remember, has a different connotation. On and on it goes (rhyme) – that is the nature of words (an anagram of ‘sword’).

Samizdat

Banned writings by dissidents, which are copied and secretly distributed, are called samizdat (Russian for self-publishing). It is associated mainly with countries which were under the totalitarian control of the Soviet Union. Here is an extract from the clandestine essay,’The Power of the Powerless’ (1979) by Vaclav Havel:

‘Ideology is a specious way of relating to the world. It offers human beings the illusion of an identity, of dignity, and of morality while making it easier for them to part with them. As the repository of something suprapersonal and objective, it enables people to deceive their conscience and conceal their true position and their inglorious modus vivendi, both from the world and from themselves. It is a very pragmatic but, at the same time, an apparently dignified way of legitimizing what is above, below, and on either side. It is directed toward people and toward God. It is a veil behind which human beings can hide their own fallen existence, their trivialization, and their adaptation to the status quo. It is an excuse that everyone can use, from the greengrocer, who conceals his fear of losing his job behind an alleged interest in the unification of the workers of the world, to the highest functionary, whose interest in staying in power can be cloaked in phrases about service to the working class. The primary excusatory function of ideology, therefore, is to provide people, both as victims and pillars of the post-totalitarian system, with the illusion that the system is in harmony with the human order and the order of the universe.’

Saga

The word is often prefaced with ‘family’ and indeed we think of sagas as long novels (or movie series) that tell the story, spanning generations, of a single family. An example would be ‘The Forsyte Saga’ by John Galsworthy, which was televised. However, from a more literary point of view, the saga is an ancient Nordic and Icelandic genre. It tells stories, part history, part legend, of the Viking voyages and the battles that ensued among warring families. Here is an extract from Egil’s Saga translated from the Icelandic by W. C. Green:

‘There was a man named Ulf, son of Bjalf, and Hallbera, daughter of Ulf the fearless; she was sister of Hallbjorn Half-giant in Hrafnista, and he the father of Kettle Hæing. Ulf was a man so tall and strong that none could match him, and in his youth he roved the seas as a freebooter. In fellowship with him was one Kari of Berdla, a man of renown for strength and daring; he was a Berserk. Ulf and he had one common purse, and were the dearest friends.

But when they gave up freebooting, Kari went to his estate at Berdla, being a man of great wealth. Three children had Kari, one son named Eyvind Lambi, another Aulvir Hnuf, and a daughter Salbjorg, who was a most beautiful woman of a noble spirit. Her did Ulf take to wife, and then he too went to his estates. Wealthy he was both in lands and chattels; he took baron's rank as his forefathers had done, and became a great man.’

Sapphics

Named after the legendary Greek poet, Sappho, who hailed from the island of Lesbos (whence comes the word, lesbian), sapphics belong to the genre of odes. Each stanza of a given poem is a sapphic made up of three eleven syllable and one five syllable lines. The metre is a complex mixture of trochees, spondees, and dactyls. Very few contemporary poets have attempted this form. Here is my single attempt:

Sapphics to Our Redeemer

Bless you always ever so jesus crispies;

bless you comrade violets, choklit-hitler,

daddy limp-wrists, jesuitical chiefly -

M for mugwumpum.

Fisting father, babamku-roora, dhura;

ponda, hondo, toyota 4 by 4 by

fortune favours zezuru leaders, bleeders -

O for adenoids,

tonsils, dentures, mouldering corpses. Bless you

daddy long-lived, long-playing, long dong silver,

ruddy diamonds, platinum, iron whore, gold-

glinting incisors.

Thrusting speeches loved by the masses melting:

two ears for one ear and two eyes for one eye;

western traders hokoyo homos, no bum-

bandits permitted.

Pum-pamberi land reform, love you uncle

pinch-cheeks, eyes like mulberries, pasi traitors,

masturbators, mapete! Bless you comrade

jongwe, s-saviour.

Satire

This is a mode of writing that is problematic in a multicultural world where there is little shared sense of what constitutes ethics. It flourished in Europe in the 17th and 18th centuries when there was such a touchstone - reason - with which to measure deviations from normal conduct.

In simple terms, satire is a form of irony which ridicules bad behaviour like hypocrisy and bigotry by seeming to praise it. In comedy you laugh with the characters; in satire you laugh at them. The most vicious form of satire, as practised by writers such as Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope, is called Juvenalian; the more good-natured form, as practised by writers such as Geoffrey Chaucer and Wole Soyinka, is known as Horatian. Here is an extract from Soyinka’s ‘The Trials of Brother Jero’, which satirises false prophets who enrich themselves in the name of God:

'Jero: Ah. That is the only way. But er…I wonder really what the will of god would be in this matter. After all, Christ himself was not averse to using the whip when occasion demanded it.

Chume (eagerly.): No. He did not hesitate.

Jero: In that case, since, brother Chume, your wife seems such a wicked, wilful sinner, I think…

Chume: Yes, Holy One…?

Jero: You must take her home tonight…

Chume: Yes…

Jero: And beat her.’

Scatology

The study of excrement refers to those writers, usually satirists, who express their disgust for certain human behaviour through imagery related to the nether regions. It is humour at its coarsest, and recalls writers such as Francois Rabelais and Jonathan Swift. Here is a short extract from Swift’s misogynistic poem, ‘The lady’s Dressing Room’:

'Thus finishing his grand survey,

The swain disgusted slunk away,

Repeating in his amorous fits,

"Oh! Celia, Celia, Celia shits!"'

Lines 115-118

Scriptible

According to the French critic, Roland Barthes, there are literary texts that either demand an active engagement by the reader, that need to be interpreted, or that the reader can passively enjoy. The former are ‘writerly’ or scriptible, while the latter are ‘readerly’ or lisible. So James Joyce’s novel, ‘Ulysses’, would be scriptible while Agatha Christie’s ‘Murder on the Orient Express’ would be lisible. Here are snippets from the novels:

‘Think you're escaping and run into yourself. Longest way round is the shortest way home.’

‘You know, there is something about a tangle of strangers pressed together for days with nothing in common but the need to go from one place to another and never see each other again.’

Self-reflexive

Linked to metafiction, this term applies to self-conscious narrators, who reflect upon themselves and their craft in the course of the text they are creating. It is quite common in contemporary literature but it goes back at least as far as Laurence Sterne’s quirky novel, ‘Tristram Shandy’ (1760). Here is a brief extract:

‘I have undertaken, you see, to write not only my life, but my opinions also; hoping and expecting that your knowledge of my character, and of what kind of a mortal I am, by the one, would give you a better relish for the other: As you proceed further with me, the slight acquaintance which is now beginning betwixt us, will grow into familiarity; and that, unless one of us is in fault, will terminate in friendship.’

Semantic field

A group of words in a text, which are related to the subject e.g. in a recipe for bread-baking, words like yeast, dough, knead, rise, rest, would constitute a semantic field. It’s called a semantic cluster if they occur in a single sentence. 

Semantics

A word, to put it very simply, used by philosophers and linguists for the meaning of words, in themselves, and how they connect with other words - in a sentence, in a paragraph, in a complete text, and in a context.

Semantic bleaching

If I say 'God is awful', I am likely to offend, even shock, a lot of people. That is because the word 'awful' has been bleached over time. It used to mean 'filled with awe'; now it means something like ‘nasty'.

Semantic pejoration of words associated with women

Many words associated with women, which were once ameliorative, now have pejorative connotations. This begs the question: were women once held in more respect than they are today?

Take the word, 'madam', for example: it literally means 'my lady', and it was originally a term of respect for women of authority. Today one of its dominant connotations is of a brothel keeper. Once a 'housewife', now a 'hussy'; once a 'courtesan', now a 'whore'. I could go on.

Semantic widening and narrowing

There are many reasons for language change: technology, geography, society, globalization… and in the process, some words grow while others wither. Look how computers widened the meaning of the word ‘mouse; look how gender studies widened the meaning of the word ‘subaltern’. Conversely look at what’s happened to the word ‘nice’. Today it’s one of those lazy words, vaguely meaning ‘pleasant’; but once it had at least seven different meanings: ‘agreeable’, ‘awkward’, ‘subtle’, ‘fastidious’, ‘scrupulous’, ‘stupid’.

Sensibility

The meaning of this complex word has shifted since its 18th century application to humankind’s basically compassionate nature, which, as Jane Austen satirized it in her novels, frequently degenerated from a sensitivity to suffering and beauty into sentimentalism.

When T.S. Eliot accused poets like Tennyson and Browning of a ‘dissociation of sensibility’, unfairly in my opinion, he meant that they were unable to integrate, in their poems, thoughts with feelings, unlike the metaphysical poet, John Donne, who felt his thought ‘as immediately as the odour of a rose’.

Nowadays, when we talk of a writer’s sensibility, we are referring to the way she or he combines an emotional and an intellectual response to an experience. It’s less of a moral issue.

Here is that travesty of sensibility, Mr Woodhouse, in conversation with his daughter Emma. You can find it in Chapter One of Jane Austen’s novel:

‘Matrimony, as the origin of change, was always disagreeable; and he was by no means yet reconciled to his own daughter's marrying, nor could ever speak of her but with compassion, though it had been entirely a match of affection, when he was now obliged to part with Miss Taylor too; and from his habits of gentle selfishness, and of being never able to suppose that other people could feel differently from himself, he was very much disposed to think Miss Taylor had done as sad a thing for herself as for them, and would have been a great deal happier if she had spent all the rest of her life at Hartfield. Emma smiled and chatted as cheerfully as she could, to keep him from such thoughts; but when tea came, it was impossible for him not to say exactly as he had said at dinner,

“Poor Miss Taylor!—I wish she were here again. What a pity it is that Mr. Weston ever thought of her!”

“I cannot agree with you, papa; you know I cannot. Mr. Weston is such a good-humoured, pleasant, excellent man, that he thoroughly deserves a good wife;—and you would not have had Miss Taylor live with us for ever, and bear all my odd humours, when she might have a house of her own?”

“A house of her own!—But where is the advantage of a house of her own? This is three times as large.—And you have never any odd humours, my dear.”

“How often we shall be going to see them, and they coming to see us!—We shall be always meeting! We must begin; we must go and pay our wedding visit very soon.”

“My dear, how am I to get so far? Randalls is such a distance. I could not walk half so far.”

“No, papa, nobody thought of your walking. We must go in the carriage, to be sure.”

“The carriage! But James will not like to put the horses to for such a little way;—and where are the poor horses to be while we are paying our visit?”

Sententious

From the Latin term for a maxim or a wise saying, it now carries a mainly pejorative sense. A sententious person is a false moralizer like any number of Dickens’ grotesques. Here is Mr Bounderby in ‘Hard Times’, a wealthy factory owner, a self-made man:

‘I was to pull through it, I suppose, Mrs. Gradgrind. Whether I was to do it or not, ma’am, I did it. I pulled through it, though nobody threw me out a rope. Vagabond, errand-boy, vagabond, labourer, porter, clerk, chief manager, small partner, Josiah Bounderby of Coketown. Those are the antecedents, and the culmination. Josiah Bounderby of Coketown learnt his letters from the outsides of the shops, Mrs. Gradgrind, and was first able to tell the time upon a dial-plate, from studying the steeple clock of St. Giles’s Church, London, under the direction of a drunken cripple, who was a convicted thief, and an incorrigible vagrant. Tell Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, of your district schools and your model schools, and your training schools, and your whole kettle-of-fish of schools; and Josiah Bounderby of Coketown, tells you plainly, all right, all correct—he hadn’t such advantages—but let us have hard-headed, solid-fisted people—the education that made him won’t do for everybody, he knows well—such and such his education was, however, and you may force him to swallow boiling fat, but you shall never force him to suppress the facts of his life.’

Possibly even more sententious is Mr Pecksniff from ‘Martin Chuzzlewit’. Indeed ‘Pecksniffian’ has come to mean a hypocrite who pretends to have high moral principles.

Sesquipedalian

This witty word, which literally means ‘a foot and a half long’, is its own definition: a long word. It is usually pejorative to describe a writer as sesquipedalian. It suggests they are long-winded. (I use the plural ‘they’ to avoid accusations of gender bias).

We get the word from the Latin Poet, Horace [65-8 BCE (the politically correct version of BC)], when he states, in ‘Ars Poetica’, ‘Proicit ampullas et sesquipedalia verba’, or ‘He tosses aside his paint-pots and his words a foot and a half long’.

Who can remember the sesquipedalian word from the musical, Mary Poppins?

Sibilance

A cluster of hissing sounds associated with the letter S (which looks a bit like a snake). Listen to the sibilance in this extract from D. H. Lawrence’s famous poem:

‘A snake came to my water-trough

On a hot, hot day, and I in pyjamas for the heat,

To drink there.

In the deep, strange-scented shade of the great dark carob-tree

I came down the steps with my pitcher

And must wait, must stand and wait, for there he was at the trough before me.

He reached down from a fissure in the earth-wall in the gloom

And trailed his yellow-brown slackness soft-bellied down, over the edge of the stone trough

And rested his throat upon the stone bottom,

And where the water had dripped from the tap, in a small clearness,

He sipped with his straight mouth,

Softly drank through his straight gums, into his slack long body,

Silently.’

Signified

What Shakespeare evoked in the form of poetry: ‘What’s in a name: a rose by any other name would smell as sweet’ [Romeo]; ‘...words are grown so false, I am loath to prove reason with them’ [Feste]: Ferdinand de Saussure, hundreds of years later, evoked in linguistics. He called words ‘signs’ to which he attributed a ‘signifier’ and a ‘signified’. The word itself, those squiggly shapes on the page, is the ‘signifier’, while the meaning (or meanings) derived from the word, is the ‘signified’. So the signifier, ‘nice’, is signified, according to the Concise Oxford Dictionary, in the following ways:

pleasant, agreeable, satisfactory

(of a person) kind, good-natured

(ironical) bad or awkward: ‘a nice mess you’ve made’

a) fine or subtle: ‘a nice distinction’ b) requiring careful thought or attention: ‘a nice problem’

fastidious; delicately sensitive

punctilious, scrupulous: ‘were not too nice about their methods’

satisfactory or adequate in terms of the quality described: ‘nice and warm’

Nice one!

Simile

A kind of metaphor where two things are explicitly compared using ‘like’ or ‘as’, for example: '. . . and snow lay here and there in patches in the hollow of the banks, like a lady’s gloves forgotten.' — Lorna Doone: 'A Romance of Exmoor', by R. D. Blackmore; ‘I wandered lonely as a cloud’ - from ‘Daffodils’ by William Wordsworth.

An extended simile becomes an analogy or an epic simile, as in this example from Homer’s ‘Odyssey’:

'Her mind in torment, wheeling like some lion at bay, dreading the gangs of hunters closing their cunning ring around him for the finish.'

Similes lose their power when they become fixed expressions like ‘as fit as a fiddle’.

Sixth sense

To see, to hear, to smell, to taste, to feel - these are the five senses we are all familiar with. They seem to be individually distinct. But are they? We can't be sure. It is this titillating uncertainty that leads us to the sixth (or eidetic) sense, which I like to call the sense of the unknown.

Slave narratives

Some of the most important forms of abolitionist literature were these autobiographies by North American slaves, who had escaped or been freed. A famous example is the ‘Narrative of the Life of Frederick Douglass’ [1845]. Fictional accounts of this theme by white writers like Harriet Beecher Stowe and Mark Twain are condemned by many academics as being patronizing and racist. Here is an extract from ‘Incidents in the Life of a Slave Girl’ by Harriet Jacobs [1861]:

‘It was a grand opportunity for the low whites, who had no negroes of their own to scourge. They exulted in such a chance to exercise a little brief authority, and show their subservience to the slaveholders; not reflecting that the power which trampled on the colored people also kept themselves in poverty, ignorance, and moral degradation. Those who never witnessed such scenes can hardly believe what I know was inflicted at this time on innocent men, women, and children, against whom there was not the slightest ground for suspicion. Colored people and slaves who lived in remote parts of the town suffered in an especial manner. In some cases the searchers scattered powder and shot among their clothes, and then sent other parties to find them, and bring them forward as proof that they were plotting insurrection. Every where men, women, and children were whipped till the blood stood in puddles at their feet. Some received five hundred lashes; others were tied hands and feet, and tortured with a bucking paddle, which blisters the skin terribly. The dwellings of the colored people, unless they happened to be protected by some influential white person, who was nigh at hand, were robbed of clothing and every thing else the marauders thought worth carrying away. All day long these unfeeling wretches went round, like a troop of demons, terrifying and tormenting the helpless. At night, they formed themselves into patrol bands, and went wherever they chose among the colored people, acting out their brutal will. Many women hid themselves in woods and swamps, to keep out of their way. If any of the husbands or fathers told of these outrages, they were tied up to the public whipping post, and cruelly scourged for telling lies about white men. The consternation was universal. No two people that had the slightest tinge of color in their faces dared to be seen talking together.’

Slogan

A memorable statement used by advertisers and politicians e.g. ‘Just do it’ [Nike]; ‘Yes we can’ [Obama]

Sociolect

The way people in a different social group talk. Words like ‘yeah’, ‘so’, and ‘like’ can form part of a teenage sociolect.

Socialist realism

Developed under Stalin in the Soviet Union, socialist realism was a reaction to the modernism of the ‘decadent’ west. Its roots were in 19th-century realism, and its model was a novel by Maxim Gorky called ‘The Mother’ [1907]. This form idealised the values of communism, more dramatically in the visual arts than in literature. Here is a fragment from Gorky’s novel:

‘Whenever a thought was clear to the mother, she would find confirmation of the idea by drawing upon some of her rude, coarse experiences. She now felt as on that day when her father said to her roughly:

"What are you making a wry face about? A fool has been found who wants to marry you. Marry him! All girls must get husbands; all women must bear children, and all children become a burden to their parents!"

After these words she saw before her an unavoidable path running for some inexplicable reason through a dark, dreary waste. Thus it was at the present moment. In anticipation of a new approaching misfortune, she uttered speechless words, addressing some imaginary person.

This lightened her mute pain, which reverberated in her heart like a tight chord.

The next day, early in the morning, very soon after Pavel and Andrey had left, Korsunova knocked at the door alarmingly, and called out hastily:

"Isay is killed! Come, quick!"

The mother trembled; the name of the assassin flashed through her mind.

"Who did it?" she asked curtly….’

Socratic

The more you know, the less you know is the intended (or unintended) outcome of the Socratic method of conversation. This paradoxical condition is sometimes called aporia (puzzlement). It should not dissuade but encourage you to continue your search for the elusive/illusive truth. This method of question-and-answer as a way of seeking that truth, is a creation of Socrates’ pupil, Plato. Here is an extract from a dialogue between Socrates and Meno:

Soc. How fortunate I am, Meno! When I ask you for one virtue, you present me with a swarm of them, which are in your keeping. Suppose that I carry on the figure of the swarm, and ask of you, What is the nature of the bee? and you answer that there are many kinds of bees, and I reply: But do bees differ as bees, because there are many and different kinds of them; or are they not rather to be distinguished by some other quality, as for example beauty, size, or shape? How would you answer me?

Men. I should answer that bees do not differ from one another, as bees.

Soc. And if I went on to say: That is what I desire to know, Meno; tell me what is the quality in which they do not differ, but are all alike;-would you be able to answer?

Men. I should.

Soc. And so of the virtues, however many and different they may be, they have all a common nature which makes them virtues; and on this he who would answer the question, "What is virtue?" would do well to have his eye fixed: Do you understand?

Men. I am beginning to understand; but I do not as yet take hold of the question as I could wish.

Soc. When you say, Meno, that there is one virtue of a man, another of a woman, another of a child, and so on, does this apply only to virtue, or would you say the same of health, and size, and strength? Or is the nature of health always the same, whether in man or woman?

Men. I should say that health is the same, both in man and woman.

Soc. And is not this true of size and strength? If a woman is strong, she will be strong by reason of the same form and of the same strength subsisting in her which there is in the man. I mean to say that strength, as strength, whether of man or woman, is the same. Is there any difference?

Men. I think not.

Soc. And will not virtue, as virtue, be the same, whether in a child or in a grown-up person, in a woman or in a man?

Men. I cannot help feeling, Socrates, that this case is different from the others.

Soc. But why? Were you not saying that the virtue of a man was to order a state, and the virtue of a woman was to order a house?

Soliloquy

This is a stage convention, before the advent of recording gadgets, where a character expresses his thoughts aloud. Because no one, apart from the audience, can hear him (it’s usually a male), what he says is what he really feels. Hamlet is an exception because he is a self-deceiver. Poems that are dramatic monologues, like Robert Browning’s ‘My Last Duchess’, can also be called soliloquies. Here is the beginning of a Hamlet soliloquy:

‘To be, or not to be, that is the question:

Whether 'tis nobler in the mind to suffer

The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,

Or to take arms against a sea of troubles

And by opposing end them. To die—to sleep,

No more; and by a sleep to say we end

The heart-ache and the thousand natural shocks

That flesh is heir to: 'tis a consummation

Devoutly to be wish'd. To die, to sleep;

To sleep, perchance to dream—ay, there's the rub:’

And here is Mark Twain’s parody of it in ‘Huckleberry Finn’:

‘To be, or not to be; that is the bare bodkin

That makes calamity of so long life;

For who would fardels bear, till Birnam Wood do come to Dunsinane,

But that the fear of something after death

Murders the innocent sleep,

Great nature's second course,

And makes us rather sling the arrows of outrageous fortune

Than fly to others that we know not of.

There's the respect must give us pause:

Wake Duncan with thy knocking! I would thou couldst;’

The ‘Duke’, a notorious con man, is mixing Hamlet up with Macbeth!

Sonnet

This compact, 14 line form originated in Italy more than 500 years ago. Its theme was unrequited love. When it spread to England it began to accommodate other themes like religion, politics, and mortality. The Italian sonnet, named after its inventor, Petrarch, is made up of an octave (rhyming abbaabba)) and a sestet (rhyming cdecde or cdccdc). English is more difficult to rhyme than Italian so the Shakespearean sonnet uses a simpler scheme (ababcdcdefefgg). In the former, the volta (or ‘turn’) occurs at the beginning of the sestet, while in the latter, it occurs in the final couplet. The English form is written in iambic pentameters. There are a number of variations on this form, for example, G. M. Hopkins’ 12 line (or curtal) sonnets. Here is a Shakespearean sonnet written by John Keats:

Bright star, would I were stedfast as thou art— 

Not in lone splendour hung aloft the night 

And watching, with eternal lids apart, 

Like nature's patient, sleepless Eremite, 

The moving waters at their priestlike task 

Of pure ablution round earth's human shores, 

Or gazing on the new soft-fallen mask 

Of snow upon the mountains and the moors— 

No—yet still stedfast, still unchangeable, 

Pillow'd upon my fair love's ripening breast, 

To feel for ever its soft fall and swell, 

Awake for ever in a sweet unrest, 

Still, still to hear her tender-taken breath, 

And so live ever—or else swoon to death.

Speech act theory

Complicating the obvious sums up, for me, many of the PhD dissertations in the humanities. In this case a certain type of sentence spoken or written in a certain kind of mood to a certain kind of audience is abstracted into words like ‘locutionary’, ‘illocutionary’, and - wait for it - ‘perlocutionary’. These terms were coined by the philosopher, J. L. Austin.

Let’s take a simple sentence in the subjunctive mood: ‘Bright star, would I were steadfast as thou art.’ This is neither a true nor a false statement; it is a wish. Its effect on an audience might be sympathy, might be scorn, might be bemusement. In terms of speech act theory, the actual utterance of the sentence is a locutionary act, its intended significance is an illocutionary act, and its effect on the audience is a perlocutionary act.

True or false utterances are called ‘constative’, while utterances which suggest hope or desire or anxiety, are called ‘performatives’. So the opening of Keats’ sonnet is performative. As Horatio tells Hamlet: ‘These are but wild and whirling words, my Lord’.

To reiterate: what is said by the speaker is called 'locution'; what is meant, on the other hand, is called 'illocution', and what the speech act triggers in the listener is called 'perlocution'.

Direct speech acts (a minor function of language), occur when locution and illocution coincide, where there is no implicature (remember Grice?). For example when a priest proclaims: 'I hereby pronounce you man and wife'.

Indirect speech acts, like hedges, occur when locution and illocution differ from one another, and Grice's maxims are either flouted or violated. Here the linguist (A Level student) needs to be pragmatic, and ask the question why? Context is all.

Look at this example, which plays with the noun, 'sir', in the context of a secondary school for boys:

If the locution is 'Hi, Sir', the illocution might be a friendly greeting, and the perlocutionary effect might be that that the student is being too familiar.

If the locution is 'Good morning, Sir', the illocution might be a respectful greeting, and the perlocutionary effect might be that the student is prefect material.

If the locution is 'Well, if it isn't Sir!' the illocution might be a mocking greeting, and the perlocutionary effect might be that the student is a cheeky so and so.

Spenserian stanza

Invented by Edmund Spenser for his very long allegorical poem, ‘The Faerie Queene’ (1590-6), this form has been used by such poets as Byron, Keats, and Tennyson. It is made up of eight lines of iambic pentameter and one, the last, of an alexandrine, which is slightly longer. The rhyme scheme is ababbcbcc. Here are two stanzas from Canto 1 of ‘The Faerie Queene’:

Gentle Knight was pricking on the plaine,

Y cladd in mightie armes and siluer shielde,

Wherein old dints of deepe wounds did remaine,

The cruell markes of many' a bloudy fielde;

Yet armes till that time did he neuer wield:

His angry steede did chide his foming bitt,

As much disdayning to the curbe to yield:

Full iolly knight he seemd, and faire did sitt,

As one for knightly giusts and fierce encounters fitt.

But on his brest a bloudie Crosse he bore,

The deare remembrance of his dying Lord,

For whose sweete sake that glorious badge he wore,

And dead as liuing euer him ador'd:

Vpon his shield the like was also scor'd,

For soueraine hope, which in his helpe he had:

Right faithfull true he was in deede and word,

But of his cheere did seeme too solemne sad;

Yet nothing did he dread, but euer was ydrad.

English spelling hadn’t yet been standardised!

Spondee

The beat of a poem is measured in metrical units (or feet). The spondee is an uncommon foot and is made up of two stressed syllables, for example ‘death wish’. In a poem it stands out as an emphatic moment. The spondee in these opening lines from Shakespeare’s sonnet 18 is… can you hear it?:

‘Shall I compare thee to a summer’s day?

Thou art more lovely and more temperate.

Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May,

And summer’s lease hath all too short a date.’

Spoonerism

Named after Revd W. A. Spooner because he made them inadvertently, spoonerisms are phrases in which the opening consonants of two words are swapped. One such example attributed to the Oxford Don, who was also an Anglican priest, is ‘You have hissed your mystery lectures’.

Most spoonerisms these days are deliberate, most are amusing, and some are very rude, for example, there was a feminist theatre group in the 70s, who called themselves ‘The Cunning Stunts’. I recall a schoolboy joke: what’s the difference between a goat and a fish? The fish mucks about in the fountains. Can you make an amusing spoonerism out of the title of Dickens’ novel, ‘A Tale of Two Cities’?

Standard English

The dialect most widely accepted as the norm for the nation. It can have pejorative connotations of snobbishness.

Sprung rhythm

The English poet and Jesuit priest, Gerard Manley Hopkins, used this term to describe a metre that concentrated on stressed syllables, calling unstressed syllables outrides. In this he was influenced by nursery rhymes and medieval alliterative poetry. This is how Hopkins might have scanned ‘Ding Dong Bell’:

‘Ding dong bell [three stresses]

pussy’s in the well. [two stresses]

Who put her in? [three stresses]

Little Johnny Thin. [three stresses]

Who pulled her out? [three stresses]

Little Johnny Stout.’ [three stresses]

Because of his experiments with sprung rhythm, Hopkins can be regarded as one of the originators of free verse. Compare the following extract from Tennyson with its sound-stressed rhythm with the extract from Hopkins with its sense-stressed rhythm:

‘I come from haunts of coot and hern,

I make a sudden sally

And sparkle out among the fern,

To bicker down a valley.’ [‘The Brook’]

‘A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth

Turns and twindles over the broth

Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,

It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.’ [‘Inversnaid’]

Stanza

What the paragraph is to prose, the stanza is to poetry. Don’t call them verses. Poems that are divided into regular stanzas are called stanzaic; poems that are without stanzas, like most sonnets, are called stichic. The quatrain (four lines) is the most common stanza in English poetry. Here is a sample from Coleridge’s great ballad, ‘The Rime of the Ancient Mariner:

‘The fair breeze blew, the white foam flew, 

The furrow followed free; 

We were the first that ever burst 

Into that silent sea.

Down dropt the breeze, the sails dropt down, 

'Twas sad as sad could be; 

And we did speak only to break 

The silence of the sea!

All in a hot and copper sky, 

The bloody Sun, at noon, 

Right up above the mast did stand, 

No bigger than the Moon.’

Stichomythia

In Drama, emotions are heightened when characters confront each other by balancing or contrasting their lines. It’s a form of parallelism, a verbal duel, and is common in ancient Greek plays. Here are examples from two of Shakespeare’s plays:

Here Hamlet is confronted by his mother, the queen, about the play-within-a-play, which Hamlet rigged to expose his murderous uncle-father.

QUEEN: Hamlet, thou hast thy father much offended.

HAMLET: Mother, you have my father much offended.

QUEEN: Come, come, you answer with an idle tongue.

HAMLET: Go, go, you question with a wicked tongue.

In "The Merchant of Venice", Shylock and Bassanio generate tension using stichomythia.

SHYLOCK: I am not bound to please thee with my answers.

BASSANIO: Do all men kill the things they do not love?

SHYLOCK: Hates any man the thing he would not kill?

BASSANIO: Every offence is not a hate at first.

SHYLOCK: What, wouldst thou have a serpent sting thee twice?

Stock character

Ebenezer Scrooge in Charles Dickens’ ‘A Christmas Carol’ is a stock character, a stereotypical miser. Stock characters are immediately recognized for what they are by readers and audience. That is because they recur from generation to generation. E. M. Forster called them ‘flat’ characters because they are fixed - they seldom change. They occur mostly in the genres of comedy and fairy tale. Other examples of stock characters are the villain in pantomimes, the wicked stepmother in fairy tales, the flirt (or soubrette) in opera. Here is a well known scene from Dickens’ beloved Christmas story:

“A merry Christmas, uncle! God save you!” cried a cheerful voice. It was the voice of Scrooge’s nephew, who came upon him so quickly that this was the first intimation he had of his approach.

“Bah!” said Scrooge, “Humbug!”

He had so heated himself with rapid walking in the fog and frost, this nephew of Scrooge’s, that he was all in a glow; his face was ruddy and handsome; his eyes sparkled, and his breath smoked again.

“Christmas a humbug, uncle!” said Scrooge’s nephew. “You don’t mean that, I am sure?”

“I do,” said Scrooge. “Merry Christmas! What right have you to be merry? What reason have you to be merry? You’re poor enough.”

“Come, then,” returned the nephew gaily. “What right have you to be dismal? What reason have you to be morose? You’re rich enough.”

Scrooge having no better answer ready on the spur of the moment, said, “Bah!” again; and followed it up with “Humbug.”

Story

‘Little Red Riding Hood’ is a story. The different ways it is re-read by academics coming from different ideologies are narratives. In literature, the narrative would be part of what makes up a story. Other features would be plot, characterization, and tone. In the social sciences, however, narrative is a buzzword for diversity politics.

Stream of Consciousness

Something the Modernists, James Joyce, Virginia Woolf, and William Faulkner had in common was the extensive use of interior monologue in their novels. This device, also known as stream of consciousness, takes the reader into a character’s mind. On the stage, this is achieved by the use of soliloquies. Here are two examples, the first from ‘As I Lay Dying’ by William Faulkner, which uses conventional punctuation, and the second from ‘Ulysses’ by James Joyce, which is unpunctuated and therefore more realistically evocative of a character’s thoughts:

‘She cried hard, maybe because she had to cry so quiet; maybe because she felt the same way about tears she did about deceit, hating herself for doing it, hating him because she had to. And then I knew that I knew. I knew that as plain on that day as I knew about Dewey Dell on that day.’

‘a quarter after what an unearthly hour I suppose theyre just getting up in China now combing out their pigtails for the day well soon have the nuns ringing the angelus theyve nobody coming in to spoil their sleep except an odd priest or two for his night office the alarmlock next door at cockshout clattering the brains out of itself let me see if I can doze off 1 2 3 4 5 what kind of flowers are those they invented like the stars the wallpaper in Lombard street was much nicer the apron he gave me was like that something only I only wore it twice better lower this lamp and try again so that I can get up early’

This is how Virginia Woolf justified the stream of consciousness device:

'Life is not a series of gig lamps symmetrically arranged; life is a luminous halo, a semi-transparent envelope surrounding us from the beginning of consciousness to the end.'

The term was coined by the psychologist, William James, who wrote : ‘A river or stream is the metaphor by which it (consciousness) is most naturally described. In talking of it hereafter, let us call it the stream of thought, of consciousness, or of subjective life.’

Stress

In classical times the rhythm of a poem was measured by long and short vowel sounds; so ‘log’ would be short, while ‘long’ would be - yes - long. This is called quantitative verse. It works quite well with the romance languages like Italian, but not with the more Germanic English.

English poetry is more comfortable with stressed and unstressed syllables, especially the rising stresses (iambs and anapaests). This is called qualitative verse.

Let’s look at a line from ‘Macbeth’: ‘Good things of day begin to droop and drowse’. If we measure it quantitatively we find five long syllables (or vowel sounds): ‘things’, ‘day’, ‘droop’, 'and' and ‘drowse’; and five short syllables: ‘good’, ‘of’, ‘be-’, ‘-gin’, and ‘to’, ’. If we measure it qualitatively we find five unstressed and five stressed syllables - pure iambic pentameter? Not quite: both the first two syllables are stressed - a spondee. Notice how the stresses are enhanced by the ‘d’ alliteration. Prosody, however, is not an exact science!

Structuralism

An elaborate and not very successful attempt to turn literary criticism into a science. Structuralism is, however, fun to play. We define a word by what it isn’t. So a cow is a cow because it isn’t a snake, or a mango, or a turkey. Yes, it’s a mammal but not a human, or a mouse, or a dolphin. Yes, it’s an ungulate but not a pig, or a camel, or a hippopotamus. Yes it has been domesticated but it’s not a dog, or a cat, or a budgie.

Structuralism is especially interested in the binaries which infest language like ‘good and evil’, ‘black and white’, ‘male and female’. These would be necessary opposites, the one defining the other. They are also fraught with political undertones, which the - wait for it - poststructuralists are quick to point out.

Structuralism likes to call itself a science of signs (semiology), and is strongly influenced by linguistics, especially the theories of Ferdinand de Saussure [1857 - 1913]. Our everyday speech (or parole) is produced within a confining structure of language (or langue). The words we use are structured according to signifiers and signified. The word ‘rose’ for example, three squiggles and a perfect circle, is a signifier. What it signifies is vast though contained within the overall language structure (if it can’t be measured it isn’t a science!). It’s an anagram of ‘eros’ and ‘sore’; it’s a symbol of love, the chalice of life, the wheel of life, the blessed virgin…; it’s the past tense of ‘rise’; it’s a colour, a person’s name, a pun on ‘rows’.... The signifiers, in my opinion, are inexhaustible.

“What speaks to the soul, escapes our measurements.” 

― Alexander von Humboldt

Sturm und Drang

A precursor to Romanticism, which produced some of England’s greatest poets, Sturm und Drang (Storm and Stress) was a movement led by the great German poet, Goethe, which championed passionate individualism against the rationalism of science (Newton) and philosophy (Kant). Its model was Goethe’s story of unrequited love followed by suicide, ‘The Sorrows of Young Werther’. Here is an extract from Byron’s ‘Childe Harold’s Pilgrimage’, which was strongly influenced by Goethe’s sentimental novel:

[From Canto IV.]

THERE is a pleasure in the pathless woods,

There is a rapture on the lonely shore,

There is society, where none intrudes,

By the deep Sea, and music in its roar:

I love not Man the less, but Nature more,

From these our interviews, in which I steal

From all I may be, or have been before,

To mingle with the Universe, and feel

What I can ne’er express, yet cannot all conceal.

Roll on, thou deep and dark blue Ocean—roll!

Ten thousand fleets sweep over thee in vain;

Man marks the earth with ruin—his control

Stops with the shore; upon the watery plain

The wrecks are all thy deed, nor doth remain

A shadow of man’s ravage, save his own,

When, in a moment, like a drop of rain,

He sinks into thy depths with bubbling groan,

Without a grave, unknell’d, uncoffin’d, and unknown.

Style

With the introduction of Advanced Level English language, which is rooted in linguistics, this has become a bothersome term for teachers. In literature it has a reasonably straightforward application; it is synonymous with form: HOW is the text written, as opposed to content, WHAT is written. You can describe the style of a Hemingway story in one word: paratactic; or the style of a Henry James novel in one word: hypotactic. One text is laconic, the other is prolix.

In the language syllabus, form and content are replaced with style and language. A typical question is, ‘Comment on the language and style of the passage’. No one seems clear on the difference between language and style, because ‘language’ is not quite the same as ‘content’, and style seems to have expanded way beyond a single word determinant. So, with the help of colleagues and online teacher support, I have come up with this description, which would constitute the introduction to the textual analysis.

Look for seven aspects of style: 1. What is the purpose(s) of the text? 2. What is its likely audience? 3. What is its tone(s)? 4. What is its register(s). 5. What is its genre? 6. What is its pattern (person, tense, syntax) ? 7. What is its context? The ‘language’ part of the question now becomes features like repetition, figures of speech, lexical fields, jargon, fixed expressions etc..These need to be identified, quoted, and commented upon as dialectically related to the style that has been established in the introduction.

Walt Whitman, who invented a style of poetry more suited to the North American ear, said this about the subject:

‘The critics are always after the style: style, style, style, damn it style, till your stomach is turned: everything must go for style. Nearly everybody who takes up Leaves of Grass stops with the style, as if that was all there is to it. Nearly everybody—every fellow almost without exception—founders on that rock—goes down hopelessly—a victim of rules, canons, cultures.’

Sublime, the

For a philosophical discussion of this term, go to Edmund Burke and Immanuel Kant; for its role in literature, go no further than William Wordsworth: the "mind [tries] to grasp at something towards which it can make approaches but which it is incapable of attaining". And this is how he puts it in his wonderful poem, "Lines Composed a Few Miles above Tintern Abbey":

‘Of aspect more sublime; that blessed mood,

In which the burden of the mystery

In which the heavy and weary weight

Of all this unintelligible world,

Is lightened.’

His fellow poet, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, used the analogy of a circle to explain the sublime. The shape itself is beautiful but not sublime; it enters that ineffable zone when it becomes a symbol of, say, eternity. In nature he found sublimity in objects like the sea and the desert, which were ‘boundless’.

Other poets, like Keats and Shakespeare, saw the sublime as a merging of beauty and dread (or love and death). Cleopatra’s lament for Antony is one of the sublimest moments in English literature:

CLEOPATRA

Noblest of men, woo't die?

Hast thou no care of me? shall I abide

In this dull world, which in thy absence is

No better than a sty? O, see, my women,

[MARK ANTONY dies]

The crown o' the earth doth melt. My lord!

O, wither'd is the garland of the war,

The soldier's pole is fall'n: young boys and girls

Are level now with men; the odds is gone

And there is nothing left remarkable

Beneath the visiting moon.

Subplot

One of the most famous subplots in English literature can be found in Shakespeare’s play, ‘King Lear’. It is the parallel story of Gloucester and his two sons, Edgar (good) and Edmund (evil). We are reminded by this example that subplots nearly always have a significant relationship to main plots, dramatically and, more important, thematically. The story of Gloucester and his sons is a simplification (a more didactic rendering) of the story of Lear and his daughters.

Conventionally, the characters in the subplot are of a lower social order than their main plot counterparts. This is evident in Shakespeare’s dark comedy, ‘Twelfth Night’. Shakespeare’s great theme (Dostoyevsky’s too) is the conflict of order and chaos, not so much between heaven and hell as within individual consciousness. This can be seen in compex characters like Feste and Lear. Most subplot characters are simple, stereotypical. Malvolio represents order taken to an extreme, while Sir Toby represents chaos taken to an extreme. In this way the subplot becomes didactic: it reveals to the audience the theme. Here is a celebrated exchange between the two extremes:

MALVOLIO

Sir Toby, I must be round with you. My lady bade me

tell you, that, though she harbours you as her

kinsman, she's nothing allied to your disorders. If

you can separate yourself and your misdemeanors, you

are welcome to the house; if not, an it would please

you to take leave of her, she is very willing to bid

you farewell.

SIR TOBY BELCH

'Farewell, dear heart, since I must needs be gone.'

MARIA

Nay, good Sir Toby.

Clown

'His eyes do show his days are almost done.'

MALVOLIO

Is't even so?

SIR TOBY BELCH

'But I will never die.'

Clown

Sir Toby, there you lie.

MALVOLIO

This is much credit to you.

SIR TOBY BELCH

'Shall I bid him go?'

Clown

'What an if you do?'

SIR TOBY BELCH

'Shall I bid him go, and spare not?'

Clown

'O no, no, no, no, you dare not.'

SIR TOBY BELCH

Out o' tune, sir: ye lie. Art any more than a

steward? Dost thou think, because thou art

virtuous, there shall be no more cakes and ale?

Clown

Yes, by Saint Anne, and ginger shall be hot i' the

mouth too.

SIR TOBY BELCH

Thou'rt i' the right. Go, sir, rub your chain with

crumbs. A stoup of wine, Maria!

MALVOLIO

Mistress Mary, if you prized my lady's favour at any

thing more than contempt, you would not give means

for this uncivil rule: she shall know of it, by this hand.

Exit

Submerged Metaphor

The word, 'livid' is a submerged metaphor, where one of the terms being compared is implied. 'Livid', literally, is a bluish, bruise-like colour, and it means to be very angry. So the connotation has become the denotation. Such is the slippery nature of language.

Subtext

If the text is ‘Would you like to come in for a drink?’, the subtext might be ‘Let’s have sex’. The parables of Jesus and, indeed, all allegories have subtexts or implied meanings. The subtext of George Orwell’s ‘Animal Farm’ is that democracy soon capitulates to totalitarianism, either in its political or its economic form. The Soviet Union saw communism as a subtext of Shakespeare’s ‘Coriolanus’, while the Reich saw it as a subtext for fascism. The real subtext of Shakespeare’s plays is the via media, the middle way - not as a compromise but as a golden mean. In the words of Portia’s maid, Nerissa:

‘I see, they are as sick that surfeit with too much, as they that starve with nothing; it is no mean happiness therefore to be seated in the mean.’

Superstrate language

The language in a multilingual community that has the greatest power and prestige, for example the language of colonizers. In Zimbabwe English lingers on as the superstrate language while Shona and iSindebele remain substrate languages. 

Surrealism

In 1917 the French writer, Guillaume Apollinaire, coined a word to describe a practice as old as humankind: ritualistic ways of expressing subconsciousness, more fixed than dreams. We tend to associate surrealism with the visual arts, thanks to painters like Salvador Dali, but we can find it in Theatre of the Absurd and in the songs of Robert Zimmerman. We can find it abundantly in the Book of Revelation. Here is a sample:

'And out of the throne proceeded lightnings and thunderings and voices: and there were seven lamps of fire burning before the throne, which are the seven Spirits of God.

[6] And before the throne there was a sea of glass like unto crystal: and in the midst of the throne, and round about the throne, were four beasts full of eyes before and behind.

[7] And the first beast was like a lion, and the second beast like a calf, and the third beast had a face as a man, and the fourth beast was like a flying eagle.

[8] And the four beasts had each of them six wings about him; and they were full of eyes within: and they rest not day and night, saying, Holy, holy, holy, Lord God Almighty, which was, and is, and is to come.’

Syllabic verse

Instead of measuring lines of poetry in stresses (or accents) syllabic verse, as the name suggests, measures lines in syllables. This is not so common in English poetry. Most of my poems are accentual-syllabic, which means I measure both the stresses and the syllables. This was common practice in the 18th century with poets like Alexander Pope, for example:

“Yet graceful ease, and sweetness void of pride,

Might hide her faults, if belles had faults to hide:

If to her share some female errors fall,

Look on her face, and you'll forget 'em all.”

Here is a famous, purely syllabic poem by Thom Gunn

“Considering the Snail

The snail pushes through a green

night, for the grass is heavy

with water and meets over

the bright path he makes, where rain

has darkened the earth’s dark. He

moves in a wood of desire,

pale antlers barely stirring

as he hunts. I cannot tell

what power is at work, drenched there

with purpose, knowing nothing.

What is a snail’s fury? All

I think is that if later

I parted the blades above

the tunnel and saw the thin

trail of broken white across

litter, I would never have

imagined the slow passion

to that deliberate progress.

Syllepsis

A form of ellipsis, more commonly known as zeugma, where one verb is used, often ungrammatically, for two subjects. In this example from the Bible, the verb ‘rend’ is applied metaphorically to ‘heart’ and literally to ‘garments’: ‘And rend your heart, and not your garments’.

Charles Dickens makes frequent use of syllepsis in his novels. Here is an example from ‘The Pickwick Papers’: ‘Miss Bolo rose from the table considerably agitated, and went straight home in a flood of tears, and a sedan chair.’

Can you find the syllepsis in this extract from ‘The Rape of the Lock’ by Alexander Pope?:

‘Close by those meads, for ever crown'd with flow'rs, 

Where Thames with pride surveys his rising tow'rs, 

There stands a structure of majestic frame, 

Which from the neighb'ring Hampton takes its name. 

Here Britain's statesmen oft the fall foredoom 

Of foreign tyrants and of nymphs at home; 

Here thou, great Anna! whom three realms obey, 

Dost sometimes counsel take—and sometimes tea.’

Syllogism

There are three parts to this form of logic: a major premise, a minor premise, and a conclusion. It is a form of deductive reasoning where you move from the general to the particular. It is the opposite of inductive reasoning (the scientific method) where you move from the particular to the general. Here is a famous example: ‘All men are mortal, Socrates is a man, therefore Socrates is mortal’. If your major premise in untrue, you will commit a logical fallacy, for example, ‘All Italians love tomatoes, Enrico is an Italian, therefore Enrico loves tomatoes’.

Here is Feste, in Shakespeare’s ‘Twelfth Night’, using a syllogism to bamboozle Olivia:

“Clown: Good Madonna, why mournest thou?

Olivia: Good Fool, for my brother's death.

Clown:I think his soul is in hell, Madonna.

Olivia:I know his soul is in heaven, Fool.

Clown: The more fool, Madonna, to mourn for your brother's soul being in heaven.”

Symbol

In literature a symbol is an image, like a tower, that represents an idea, like strength. In linguistics any lexical word is a symbol (or sign) that represents a thought (the signified). Some symbols, like fire, are archetypal,which means they are universally shared, consciously and unconsciously, and they originate way back in time.

Unlike a metaphor, where the two two items being compared undergo an eidetic transformation, a symbol remains fixed while what it symbolises is eidetically enhanced. Consider the North American flag: to most North Americans it symbolises various degrees of patriotism; but the same flag might symbolise something very different for, say, Iranians.

Psychologists say we dream in symbols, which is probably why we feel a need to interpret them.

Poetry abounds in symbolism, much of it subconscious. The four seasons are frequently used to symbolise birth, adulthood, middle age (‘the ripeness is all’), and old age leading to death. In the following sonnet the ruined statue symbolises vanity or hubris:

Ozymandias 

by Percy Bysshe Shelley

I met a traveller from an antique land

Who said: Two vast and trunkless legs of stone

Stand in the desert. Near them, on the sand,

Half sunk, a shattered visage lies, whose frown,

And wrinkled lip, and sneer of cold command,

Tell that its sculptor well those passions read

Which yet survive, stamped on these lifeless things,

The hand that mocked them, and the heart that fed;

And on the pedestal these words appear:

"My name is Ozymandias, king of kings:

Look on my works, ye Mighty, and despair!"

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, boundless and bare

The lone and level sands stretch far away.”

Symbolists

A powerful influence on the modernist English poets were the French symbolists, who flourished in the late nineteenth century. Among them were Paul Verlaine, Arthur Rimbaud and Stephane Mallarme. They in turn were influenced by earlier poets like Charles Baudelaire and Edgar Allan Poe.

They reacted against the realism and technical precision of Victorian literature; they placed greater emphasis on sound than sense. As Verlaine said:

'Music before all else,

and for that choose the irregular,

which is vaguer and melts better into the air.'

Some of the greatest poets writing in English, early in the last century, were profoundly influenced by the symbolists, among them W. B. Yeats and T.S. Eliot. Here is a sample, Eliot’s ‘La Figlia Che Piange’, which means ‘the weeping girl’:

‘Stand on the highest pavement of the stair— 

Lean on a garden urn— 

Weave, weave the sunlight in your hair— 

Clasp your flowers to you with a pained surprise— 

Fling them to the ground and turn 

With a fugitive resentment in your eyes: 

But weave, weave the sunlight in your hair.

So I would have had him leave, 

So I would have had her stand and grieve, 

So he would have left 

As the soul leaves the body torn and bruised, 

As the mind deserts the body it has used. 

I should find 

Some way incomparably light and deft, 

Some way we both should understand, 

Simple and faithless as a smile and shake of the hand.

She turned away, but with the autumn weather 

Compelled my imagination many days, 

Many days and many hours: 

Her hair over her arms and her arms full of flowers.

And I wonder how they should have been together! 

I should have lost a gesture and a pose. 

Sometimes these cogitations still amaze 

The troubled midnight and the noon’s repose.

Synaesthesia

If, for example, you describe scents or colours in terms of sound, talking about the base, middle, and top notes of a certain fragrance, or the loudness of a certain colour, you are indulging in (or suffering if it’s a neurological condition) a kind of metaphor known as synaesthesia. There are other combinations like smelling colours, feeling tastes, and hearing sights. Can you find examples of synaesthesia in this extract from ‘Ode to a Nightingale’ by John Keats?:

‘O, for a draught of vintage! that hath been 

Cool’d a long age in the deep-delved earth, 

Tasting of Flora and the country green, 

Dance, and Provencal song, and sunburnt mirth! 

O for a beaker full of the warm South,

Full of the true, the blushful Hippocrene, 

With beaded bubbles winking at the brim, 

And purple-stained mouth; 

That I might drink, and leave the world unseen, 

And with thee fade away into the forest dim.’

Syndetic and asyndetic listing

If the items on your list are separated by conjunctions, they are syndetic, for example, 'There are dogs and cats and budgies and snakes and rabbits at the pet shop.' If the items are without conjunctions, they are asyndetic, for example, 'There are dogs, cats, budgies, snakes, rabbits at the pet shop. Syndetic listing makes it seem that there are a lot more items; asyndetic listing speeds up the pace.

Synecdoche

There is much unresolved debate concerning this figure of speech and related tropes like metonymy and antonomasia; so I shall go my own way. Be warned. Metonymies, like idioms and similes, are weak metaphors, more common in prose than in poetry. Synecdoches, on the other hand, are strong metaphors where the part ‘becomes’ the whole and the whole ‘becomes’ the part. My favourite is William Blake’s ‘to see a world in a grain of sand’. In its context*, this line is a fragment of fragments; out of context it is a complete minimalist poem, an epiphany.

When, in Act 4, Scene 3, an increasingly desperate Macbeth tells his servant to ‘Take thy face hence’, he is employing a synecdoche. You will appreciate its power if you hear it in a broader context:

ENTER A SERVANT

The devil damn thee black, thou cream-faced loon!

Where got’st thou that goose look?

SERVANT

There is ten thousand—

MACBETH

Geese, villain?

SERVANT

Soldiers, sir.

MACBETH

Go, prick thy face and over-red thy fear,

Thou lily-livered boy. What soldiers, patch?

Death of thy soul! Those linen cheeks of thine

Are counselors to fear. What soldiers, whey-face?

SERVANT

The English force, so please you.

MACBETH

Take thy face hence.

EXIT SERVANT

Here, the face is the part that ‘becomes’ the whole, the terrified servant.

Here is Blake’s line, quoted above, in a broader context. It is followed by three other synecdoches, all epiphanies in themselves:

(Fragments from "Auguries of Innocence"*

To see a World in a Grain of Sand

And a Heaven in a Wild Flower,

Hold Infinity in the palm of your hand 

And Eternity in an hour.

A Robin Redbreast in a Cage

Puts all Heaven in a Rage.

A dove house fill’d with doves and pigeons

Shudders Hell thro’ all its regions.

A Dog starv’d at his Master’s Gate

Predicts the ruin of the State.

A Horse misus’d upon the Road

Calls to Heaven for Human blood.

Each outcry of the hunted Hare

A fiber from the Brain does tear.

Syntagmatic and paradigmatic

The linguist, Ferdinand de Saussure, theorized that language has a vertical as well as a horizontal structure, a bit like counterpoint and melody in music. A sentence has a horizontal shape; it is longitudinal; but each word in the sentence can be replaced by synonyms, one on top of the other, which are vertical in shape - latitudinal.

Take this sentence: 'He killed the crow.' It is syntagmatic, horizontal. It runs along in a line from left to right. Now, put the synonym, 'She', above 'He', the synonym, 'slaughtered' above 'killed', the synonym 'a' above 'the', the synonym, 'bird' above ''crow'; and above these synonyms put 'They', ''butchered', 'an', 'eagle'; and above (or below) these synonyms put ''We', 'terminated', 'some', 'penguins' -you can go on doing this for a long time - and you have a vertical line that runs from up to down. It is paradigmatic, latitudinal.

Syntax

The way words are ordered in a sentence

Synthesis

When you analyze something you take it apart; when you synthesize something you put it together. Sometimes you analyze in order to synthesize. In the first four acts of ‘Hamlet’ the eponymous protagonist spends his time analyzing: ‘to be or not to be’. In the final act (with a little help from the New Testament) he synthesizes:

‘We defy augury. There’s a special providence in the fall of a sparrow. If it be now, ’tis not to come. If it be not to come, it will be now. If it be not now, yet it will come—the readiness is all. Since no man of aught he leaves knows, what is ’t to leave betimes? Let be.’

A metaphor is a synthesis of what I. A. Richards called the tenor and the vehicle, for example, ‘The ship ploughed through the waves’. Here the subject, the ship, is the tenor, while the figurative ‘plough’ is the vehicle.

In philosophy the synthesis is the result of a dialectical process between thesis and antithesis: for Hegel, God, for Marx, Communism.

Tag

A tag is a statement (declarative utterance) that turns into a question, for example, ‘It’s going to get hotter, don’t you think?’ It is a politeness strategy to encourage conversation. It is cooperative unless the tone of the question is bullying, for example, ‘He deserves to die, doesn’t he?’ Here the speaker expects confirmation of his view. I use the pronoun, ‘his’ because, according to the academic, Deborah Tannen, there are gender differences in the way people converse. Women tend to be more polite and cooperative than men. This is no longer the case in many Western societies where feminism is correcting the imbalance.

Tautology

In logic, tautology is associated with the conjunction, 'or', for example, 'the lake is deep or not shallow'. In style it is a fault, for example, 'mix the ingredients together'. In rhetoric it can be an effective form of repetition, for example, Antonio's description of Shylock in 'The Merchant of Venice':

'The devil can cite Scripture for his purpose.

An evil soul producing holy witness

Is like a villain with a smiling cheek,

A goodly apple rotten at the heart.

Oh, what a goodly outside falsehood hath!’

Telegraphic stage

Between the ages of 18 and 36 months children go beyond the holophrastic stage to this stage, where they communicate using two or three word utterances, e.g. ‘Mummy cross’, ‘Me want juice’.

Terza rima

A tercet (or triplet) is a unit of three rhyming verse lines. The sestet of an Italian sonnet is made up of two tercets, and the stanzas of villanelles are tercets. The great Italian poet, Dante Alighieri, used this form to invent the terza rima for his ‘Divine Comedy’, from where we take our non-Biblical conception of hell. Dante created an interlocking rhyme scheme. Here is a sample translated by Clive James:

From The Divine Comedy, Book One: Hell

At the mid-point of the path through life, I found

Myself lost in a wood so dark, the way

Ahead was blotted out. The keening sound

I still make shows how hard it is to say

How harsh and bitter that place felt to me—

Merely to think of it renews the fear—

So bad that death by only a degree

Could possibly be worse. As you shall hear,

It led to good things too, eventually,

But there and then I saw no sign of those,

And can’t say even now how I had come

To be there, stunned and following my nose

Away from the straight path. And then, still numb

From pressure on the heart, still in a daze,

I stumbled on the threshold of a hill

Where trees no longer grew. Lifting my gaze,

I saw its shoulders edged with overspill

From our sure guide, the sun, whose soothing rays

At least a little melted what that night

Of dread had done to harden my heart’s lake—

And like someone who crawls, half dead with fright,

Tetralogy

One of the greatest tetralogies in modern literature, at least in my opinion, is John Updike’s ‘Rabbit Quartet’. I also enjoyed Lawrence Durrell’s ‘Alexandria Quartet’. Four connected novels or plays make up a tetralogy. You can divide Shakespeare’s English history plays into two tetralogies. Here is a quote by Updike followed by a brief extract from the first novel in his tetralogy, ‘Rabbit, Run’:

'My subject is the American Protestant small-town middle class. I like middles. It is in middles that extremes clash, where ambiguity restlessly rules.'

‘Boys are playing basketball around a telephone pole with a backboard bolted to it. Legs, shouts. The scrape and snap of Keds* on loose alley pebbles seems to catapult their voices high into the moist March air blue above the wires. Rabbit Angstrom, coming up the alley in a business suit, stops and watches, though he's twenty-six and six three. So tall, he seems an unlikely rabbit, but the breadth of white face, the pallor of his blue irises, and a nervous flutter under his brief nose as he stabs a cigarette into his mouth partially explain the nickname, which was given to him when he too was a boy. He stands there thinking, the kids keep coming, they keep crowding you up.’

*Keds are what we call tackies

Texture

In literary criticism there is a distinction between what can be paraphrased or measured and what can’t. For example in Hopkins’ line, ‘I am soft sift in an hour-glass’, we can measure the number of characters (31 including spaces); we can measure the number of words (7); we can measure, but with less certainty, the rhythm (unstressed, unstressed, stressed , stressed, unstressed, unstressed, stressed, stressed); we can measure, with even less certainty, the meaning by paraphrasing it: ‘I am aware of my mortality’. We can identify features like consonance combined with metaphor and alliteration (‘soft sift’), and so on. But what we can’t measure is the overall effect of the line on the listener. It is ineffable - and that is what some critics think they mean by ‘texture’.

Theatre of the absurd

Martin Esslin, who coined this phrase, used it to describe the plays of Samuel Beckett among other dramatists, who saw life as meaningless, pointless and, therefore, ridiculous. It is a position that is inclined to produce hollow laughter, which, as the poet, Byron reminds us, is not that distant from heavy tears: ‘And if I laugh at any mortal thing,/ ‘Tis that I may not weep’.

The prototype of the absurd is Shakespeare’s great tragicomedy, ‘Hamlet’. In philosophy, Albert Camus confronted absurdism in his tale, ‘The Myth of Sisyphus’, about a man who is condemned to roll a huge boulder up a hill only for it to roll down again. This process is repeated ad infinitum. Both Hamlet and Sisyphus seem to come to terms with this dilemma by suggesting that the experience is the meaning. Nietzsche would seem to agree with them when he exhorts us to love our destiny: amor fati.

Here is a short extract from Samuel Beckett’s absurdist play, ‘Waiting for Godot’:

VLADIMIR:

There's man all over for you, blaming on his boots the faults of his feet. (He takes off his hat again, peers inside it, feels about inside it, knocks on the crown, blows into it, puts it on again.) This is getting alarming. (Silence. Vladimir deep in thought, Estragon pulling at his toes.) One of the thieves was saved. (Pause.) It's a reasonable percentage. (Pause.) Gogo.

ESTRAGON:

What?

VLADIMIR:

Suppose we repented.

ESTRAGON:

Repented what?

VLADIMIR:

Oh . . . (He reflects.) We wouldn't have to go into the details.

ESTRAGON:

Our being born?

Vladimir breaks into a hearty laugh which he immediately stifles, his hand pressed to his pubis, his face contorted.

VLADIMIR:

One daren't even laugh any more.

ESTRAGON:

Dreadful privation.

VLADIMIR:

Merely smile. (He smiles suddenly from ear to ear, keeps smiling, ceases as suddenly.) It's not the same thing. Nothing to be done. (Pause.) Gogo.

Third person narration

Fiction is written from different points of view: first person, third person and, rare in fiction, second person. In third person narration the reliable author is outside the text, which gives her godlike control over her characters. She is sometimes known as an omniscient narrator. Her characters are referred to as ‘he’, ‘she’, ‘them’ etc.. So-called postmodern writers frequently play games with point of view, so that readers aren’t sure which voice to trust. These are called unreliable narrators. The following sentence from Dambudzo Marechera’s novella, ‘The House of Hunger’ is written in the first person (the clue is the pronoun, ‘we’):

‘Satiated with the great purposelessness of it, we gently belched nerve gases into the next generation.’

To put it into the second person, change ‘we’ to ‘you’. To put it in the third person, change ‘we’ to ‘they’.

Threnody

A lament for the dead. Other synonyms are dirge and elegy. Here is the beginning of Rupert Brooke’s threnody, ‘The Funeral of youth’:

‘The Day that Youth had died,

There came to his grave-side, 

In decent mourning, from the country’s ends, 

Those scatter’d friends 

Who had lived the boon companions of his prime,

And laughed with him and sung with him and wasted, 

In feast and wine and many-crown’d carouse, 

The days and nights and dawnings of the time 

When Youth kept open house, 

Nor left untasted

Aught of his high emprise and ventures dear, 

No quest of his unshar’d— 

All these, with loitering feet and sad head bar’d, 

Followed their old friend’s bier.’

Tone

The feeling that is implied rather than stated in a text or an utterance. Often linked to irony.

Topic sentence

It usually occurs at the beginning of a paragraph, and it determines the content of that paragraph. Very important for cohesion.

Topic shift

When a speaker moves from topic to another during a conversation. Often a strategy to encourage turn-taking.

Transactional

Speech or writing with a purpose to get things done, not simple chatting.

Tragedy

If the downfall of a central character in a play or a novel generates an exquisite sense of loss in the audience/reader, it may be regarded as tragic. There are tragic heroes like Chinua Achebe’s Okonkwo, and tragic victims like Arthur Miller’s Willy Loman.

The most persistent definition of tragedy in literature has been Aristotle’s:

‘Tragedy, then, is an imitation of an action that is serious, complete, and of a certain magnitude; in language embellished with each kind of artistic ornament, the several kinds being found in separate parts of the play; in the form of action, not of narrative; through pity and fear effecting the proper purgation of these emotions.’

The key words here are ‘pity’ and ‘fear’. If at the end of ‘Othello’, for example, those contradictory words merge into a cathartic sense of loss for the audience, they will have experienced a tragedy. If, on the other hand, the feelings of pity and fear remain separated, the audience will more likely have experienced something ambivalent, something closer to tragicomedy. Here is the death of Shakespeare’s Coriolanus:

Coriolanus. Cut me to pieces, Volsces; men and lads, 

Stain all your edges on me. Boy! false hound! 

If you have writ your annals true, 'tis there, 

That, like an eagle in a dove-cote, I 

Flutter'd your Volscians in Corioli: 

Alone I did it. Boy!

Tullus Aufidius. Why, noble lords, 

Will you be put in mind of his blind fortune, 

Which was your shame, by this unholy braggart, 

'Fore your own eyes and ears?

All Conspirators. Let him die for't.

All The People. 'Tear him to pieces.' 'Do it presently.' 'He kill'd 

my son.' 'My daughter.' 'He killed my cousin 

Marcus.' 'He killed my father.'

Second Lord. Peace, ho! no outrage: peace! 

The man is noble and his fame folds-in 

This orb o' the earth. His last offences to us 

Shall have judicious hearing. Stand, Aufidius, 

And trouble not the peace.

Coriolanus. O that I had him, 

With six Aufidiuses, or more, his tribe, 

To use my lawful sword!

Tullus Aufidius. Insolent villain!

All Conspirators. Kill, kill, kill, kill, kill him! 

[The Conspirators draw, and kill CORIOLANUS:] 

AUFIDIUS stands on his body]

Tragic flaw

Aristotle called this hamartia, a Greek concept of error. It’s the excessive weakness (or strength) in a protagonist, which contributes to his or her (in English literature they’re mostly males) downfall. Two other contributing factors might be fate and the machinations of other characters.

Some tragic flaws are hubris or overweening pride (think of Coriolanus); ambition (think of Macbeth); trust (think of Othello and King Lear); procrastination (think of Hamlet). Here are some of Macbeth’s thoughts early on in the play:

[Aside] The Prince of Cumberland! that is a step

On which I must fall down, or else o'erleap,

For in my way it lies. Stars, hide your fires;

Let not light see my black and deep desires:

The eye wink at the hand; yet let that be,

Which the eye fears, when it is done, to see.

The rhyming couplets instead of the usual blank verse, indicate to the audience that Macbeth is already in the thrall of the incantatory witches, symbols of chaos.

Tragic irony

This is a form of dramatic irony, when the audience is aware, before the protagonist, that the latter is doomed. For example, in Shakespeare’s play, ‘Romeo and Juliet’, the prologue right at the beginning of the play informs the audience that the young lovers will perish:

Two households, both alike in dignity,

In fair Verona, where we lay our scene,

From ancient grudge break to new mutiny,

Where civil blood makes civil hands unclean.

From forth the fatal loins of these two foes

A pair of star-cross'd lovers take their life;

Whose misadventured piteous overthrows

Do with their death bury their parents' strife.

The fearful passage of their death-mark'd love,

And the continuance of their parents' rage,

Which, but their children's end, nought could remove,

Is now the two hours' traffic of our stage;

The which if you with patient ears attend,

What here shall miss, our toil shall strive to mend.

One effect of this kind of irony is to flatter the audience into feeling superior to the protagonists, who have no idea how things will turn out. It also instills in the audience a dramatic sense of helplessness as they watch the inexorable process.

A more subtle example of tragic irony occurs in Shakespeare’s ‘Coriolanus’ where not only the audience but the protagonist himself are aware of what his mother, Volumnia, is unaware, that when she bullies him into saving Rome rather than destroying it: ‘There’s no man in the world / More bound to’s mother’, she unwittingly condemns him to death. His pathetic reply says it all: ‘O mother, mother! / What have you done?’

Tragicomedy

Shakespeare was regarded by his French contemporaries as a barbarian because he didn’t stick to the rules of drama as laid down by Aristotle in the ‘Poetics’. Shakespeare knew, long before Jung and Derrida (but not before the pre-Socratics with their concordia discors mantra) that comedy and tragedy are two sides of the same coin: heads, Apollonian; tails, Dionysian.

Shakespeare knows, more than any other poet/dramatist how precariously the heroic teeters on the brink of the ludicrous. That is why we sometimes giggle when, at the end, we listen to Lear’s dying words addressed to his dead daughter, Cordelia:

‘And my poor fool is hanged.—No, no, no life?

Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,

And thou no breath at all? Oh, thou'lt come no more,

Never, never, never, never, never.—

Pray you, undo this button. Thank you, sir.

Do you see this? Look on her. Look, her lips.

Look there, look there. O, O, O, O.

(dies)’

Shakespeare’s tragedies have comic undercurrents while his comedies have tragic undercurrents. They might as well be called tragicomedies. Via the wicked, foolish Polonius, in that supreme tragicomedy, ‘Hamlet’, Shakespeare mocks those who insist on categorizing plays:

‘The best actors in the world, either for tragedy,

comedy, history, pastoral, pastoral-comical,

historical-pastoral, tragical-historical, tragical-

comical-historical-pastoral, scene individable, or

poem unlimited: Seneca cannot be too heavy, nor

Plautus too light. For the law of writ and the

liberty, these are the only men.’

Transcendentalism

An offshoot of European Romanticism, Transcendentalism (satirized by Henry James in his novel, ‘The Bostonians’), found fertile soil in protestant North America. Its chief guru was Ralph Waldo Emerson, a Neoplatonist, who believed that intuition preceded the senses as well as the reason, and gave certain inspired individuals the capacity to transcend the material world - experience heaven on earth, so to speak. This is being overly simplistic but where Romanticism morphed into the poetry of Byron, the music of Beethoven, and the art of Goya, Transcendentalism morphed into religious movements like Mormonism, Jehovah's Witnesses, and Seventh Day Adventists - all born of North American soil. Here are some well-known Emerson sayings:

‘Do not go where the path may lead, go instead where there is no path and leave a trail.’

‘To be yourself in a world that is constantly trying to make you something else is the greatest accomplishment.’

‘What lies behind us and what lies before us are tiny matters compared to what lies within us.’

‘Adopt the pace of nature: her secret is patience.’

Transcription

A written record of spoken language using a transcription key instead of conventional punctuation.

Transferred epithet

Also known as hypallage, a transferred epithet transfers a description (adjective) from subject to object, for example: ‘She lay upon her pensive bed’. Here the epithet, ‘pensive’, is transferred from its subject, ‘she’, to the object, ‘bed’. Many transferred epithets are personifications.

T. S. Eliot coined the phrase, ‘objective correlative’ to describe how, in literature, the world out there, the objective world, relates (correlates) to the world in here, the subjective world. So, if a character is happy, birds sing; if a character is sad, no bird sings. A personified transferred epithet reverses this. You could call it a subjective correlative. Can you find the transferred epithet in this opening stanza in Thomas Gray’s ‘Elegy Written in a Country Churchyard’?:

'The curfew tolls the knell of parting day, 

The lowing herd wind slowly o'er the lea, 

The plowman homeward plods his weary way, 

And leaves the world to darkness and to me.'

Travesty

One of the most famous travesties in literature is ‘Don Quixote’ by the Spanish writer, Cervantes. It ridicules the dignified culture of chivalry. So travesty is a form of parody which undermines serious issues, while burlesque is a form of parody which does the opposite. Here is an extract from the story of the knight from La Mancha, whose name has fixed itself (quixotic, quixotically, quixotism, quixotry) in the English language. This extract is the source of the idiom, tilting at windmills, which means attacking imaginary enemies.

‘Destiny guides our fortunes more favorably than we could have expected. Look there, Sancho Panza, my friend, and see those thirty or so wild giants, with whom I intend to do battle and kill each and all of them, so with their stolen booty we can begin to enrich ourselves. This is nobel, righteous warfare, for it is wonderfully useful to God to have such an evil race wiped from the face of the earth."

"What giants?" Asked Sancho Panza.

"The ones you can see over there," answered his master, "with the huge arms, some of which are very nearly two leagues long."

"Now look, your grace," said Sancho, "what you see over there aren't giants, but windmills, and what seems to be arms are just their sails, that go around in the wind and turn the millstone.’

Triolet

Similar to a rondeau because its ending comes round to its beginning, a triolet is an eight-line poem with a fixed form, rhyming abaaabab. The first line is repeated twice and the second line is repeated once. Here is a rather cruel example by the granddaughter of Charles Darwin:

To a Fat Lady Seen from the Train

Frances Cornford (1886-1960)

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,

Missing so much and so much?

O fat white woman whom nobody loves,

Why do you walk through the fields in gloves,

When the grass is soft as the breast of doves

And shivering sweet to the touch?

O why do you walk through the fields in gloves,

Missing so much and so much?

Trope

A buzzword growing more promiscuous by the day, trope is a general term for figures of speech that have, through over-usage, lost their metaphorical power. Examples are motifs, similes, personifications, metonymies, synecdoches, puns, and hyperboles. It is also applied to literary themes like the conflict between good and evil or the love triangle. The trope in this extract from a speech by Martin Luther King Jr, is ‘I have a dream’:

‘I say to you today, my friends, so even though we face the difficulties of today and tomorrow, I still have a dream. It is a dream deeply rooted in the American dream.

I have a dream that one day this nation will rise up and live out the true meaning of its creed: "We hold these truths to be self-evident; that all men are created equal."

I have a dream that one day on the red hills of Georgia the sons of former slaves and the sons of former slave owners will be able to sit down together at the table of brotherhood.

I have a dream that one day even the state of Mississippi, a state sweltering with the heat of injustice, sweltering with the heat of oppression, will be transformed into an oasis of freedom and justice.

I have a dream that my four little children will one day live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day down in Alabama, with its vicious racists, with its governor having his lips dripping with the words of interposition and nullification, that one day right down in Alabama little black boys and black girls will be able to join hands with little white boys and white girls as sisters and brothers.

I have a dream today.

I have a dream that one day every valley shall be exalted, every hill and mountain shall be made low, the rough places will be made plain, and the crooked places will be made straight, and the glory of the Lord shall be revealed, and all flesh shall see it together.’

Troubadour

Troubadours were wandering poets usually of Knightly rank. The word is probably derived from ‘trope’. The mythologist, Joseph Campbell, claimed that romantic love in the West was created by the troubadours of medieval Provence (Southern France spilling into Italy and Spain). Their lyrics on the theme of courtly love strongly influenced European literature. Here is an extract from Campbell’s conversation with the journalist, Bill Moyers:

‘JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Let’s talk about love, fine.

BILL MOYERS: But it’s such a vast subject, that if, in mythology, that if I had come to you and said, “Let’s talk about love, but where should we begin?” — what would your answer have been?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: I think my answer would have been the troubadours in the 12th century, let’s begin there.

BILL MOYERS: Why the troubadours?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, because they’re the first ones in the West that really considered love in the sense that we think of it now, as a person-to-person relationship.

BILL MOYERS: You’re talking about romantic love?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Yes. It’s the seizure that comes in recognizing as where your soul’s counterpart in the other person, and that’s what the troubadours stood for, and that has become the ideal in our lives today.

BILL MOYERS: What had it been before that?

JOSEPH CAMPBELL: Well, the idea of love as Eros, the god who excites you to sexual desire, this is not the person-to-person thing, of the falling in love in the way the troubadours understood it.

Turn

The Italian term is volta. It describes the often abrupt change in mood or point of view, which takes place between the octave (first eight lines) and the sestet (last six lines) of a Petrarchan sonnet, and between the first twelve lines (three quatrains) and the last two lines (couplet) of a Shakespearean sonnet. Tropes used to be called turns. Here is one of my hybrid sonnets with a clear turn at the beginning of the sestet, and another at the beginning of the couplet:

Wind Behaving Badly

The clouds descend, the firmament grows grey,

a churning wind, bone-cold, assaults the trees,

blowing petals and little girls away

before relaxing to a shirtless breeze.

Again it rises, flapping doeks and scarves, 

banging casements, matrons,widows, wives... 

whistling through cracks, keyholes, while it carves

that look in daddy’s eyes. Run for your lives.

The clouds ascend, the firmament blows blue,

the rising wind lifts skirts and lashes hair -

what’s true is false, my child, what’s false is true -

the white sheets shaking, raking underwear.

Behaving-badly-winds will not subside

till you, my dears, commit tyrannicide.

Turn-taking

The way conversation takes place.

Typography

You will notice that most poems have no right-hand margins, that stanzas have spaces between them, that, especially in earlier times, lines (verses) began with capital letters. This is typography - the way words are arranged on the page. Pattern and concrete poetry take this a stage further, as you can see in this example:

‘Easter Wings’ 

by George Herbert

Lord, who createdst man in wealth and store,

Though foolishly he lost the same,

Decaying more and more,

Till he became

Most poore:

With thee

O let me rise

As larks, harmoniously,

And sing this day thy victories:

Then shall the fall further the flight in me.

My tender age in sorrow did beginne:

And still with sicknesses and shame.

Thou didst so punish sinne,

That I became

Most thinne.

With thee

Let me combine,

And feel thy victorie:

For, if I imp my wing on thine,

Affliction shall advance the flight in me.

Typology

Let’s go to the Bible to understand this term. What happens in the Old Testament is a ‘type’ of what happens in the New Testament. For example, the words in Habakkuk, ‘Behold, his soul which is lifted up is not upright in him: but the just shall live by his faith’ [2:4] is a ‘type’ of Paul’s words, ‘The just shall live by faith’ [Romans 1:17]. In this way the New Testament confirms the prophecies of the Old Testament, and vice versa. What occurs in the New Testament, that has been foreshadowed in the Old Testament, is known as an antitype: baptism is the antitype of Noah’s flood.

It could be argued that the Zimbabwean author, Yvonne Vera, used a typological method in her novels. She was a feminist and an expert in African literature. She may have constructed her texts with feminist academia in mind. Her female characters are portrayed as victims of, and fighters against, hegemonic patriarchy. These characters may be seen as antitypes of the subaltern. So what happens in feminist literary criticism becomes a ‘type’ of what happens in Vera’s novels, This extract from a dissertation by feminist academic, Sofia Lucy Kostelac, will give you a flavour of typological interaction in literature:

‘Following Spivak’s claim that subalternity is effaced in hegemonic discourse, I focus on the ways in which Vera’s inventive prose works to bring the figure of the subaltern back into signification. In order to elucidate how this dynamic operates in both novels, I employ Julia Kristeva’s psycholinguistic theory of ‘poetic language’. I argue that Kristeva’s understanding of literary practice as a transgressive modality, which is able to unsettle the silencing mechanisms of dominant monologic discourse, critically illuminates the subversive value of Vera’s fictional style for marginalised subaltern narratives.’

Ubi sunt

This Latin phrase means ‘where are…’, a question unanswered by the medieval French poet Francois Villon in his famous line translated as ‘But where are the snows of yesteryear?’ It’s a phrase that’s used to denote themes like the transience of life and the inevitability of death: the themes of countless poems. It is related to another more positive genre with a Latin title: Carpe diem, which means ‘seize the day’, make the best of your short life. Here are two stanzas from an ubi sunt poem by W. B. Henley, called ‘Ballade of Dead Actors’:

Where are the passions they essayed,

And where the tears they made to flow?

Where the wild humours they portrayed

For laughing worlds to see and know?

Othello's wrath and Juliet's woe?

Sir Peter's whims and Timon's gall?

And Millamant and Romeo?

Into the night go one and all.

Where are the braveries, fresh or frayed?

The plumes, the armours -- friend and foe?

The cloth of gold, the rare brocade,

The mantles glittering to and fro?

The pomp, the pride, the royal show?

The cries of war and festival?

The youth, the grace, the charm, the glow?

Into the night go one and all.

Unities, the

Based partly on Aristotle’s ‘Poetics’, the three unities of drama were of action, time, and place. They were insisted upon by French critics of the 16th century - that a play should have a unified action i.e. no subplot distractions, that it should represent events of the same time duration as the play itself, and that it should take place within a single setting. Shakespeare broke all these rules. A French playwright, who stuck to them, was Jean Racine. This is what he said about his favourite genre:

‘A tragedy need not have blood and death; it's enough that it all be filled with that majestic sadness that is the pleasure of tragedy.’

University wits

These included English poets and playwrights of the late 1500s, gathered around the universities of Oxford and Cambridge, who included Christopher Marlowe whose pounding blank-verse paved the way for a poet-playwright called William Shakespeare, who did not go beyond high school. Here is an extract from Marlowe’s most famous play, ‘Dr Faustus’:

FAUSTUS: Ah, Faustus,

Now hast thou but one bare hour to live,

And then thou must be damn’d perpetually!

Stand still, you ever-moving spheres of heaven,

That time may cease, and midnight never come;

Fair Nature’s eye, rise, rise again, and make

Perpetual day; or let this hour be but

A year, a month, a week, a natural day,

That Faustus may repent and save his soul!

O lente, lente currite, noctis equi!

The stars move still, time runs, the clock will strike,

The devil will come, and Faustus must be damn’d.

Unreliable narrator

We go to novels to find this form of irony. ‘Huckleberry Finn’ is a well known example. The author, Mark Twain, whose real name was Samuel Clemens, tells the story through the eyes of an ignorant, literal-minded fourteen year-old with little understanding of the events that unfold. Here is the opening paragraph:

‘YOU don't know about me without you have read a book by the name of The Adventures of Tom Sawyer; but that ain't no matter. That book was made by Mr. Mark Twain, and he told the truth, mainly. There was things which he stretched, but mainly he told the truth. That is nothing. I never seen anybody but lied one time or another, without it was Aunt Polly, or the widow, or maybe Mary. Aunt Polly - Tom's Aunt Polly, she is - and Mary, and the Widow Douglas is all told about in that book, which is mostly a true book, with some stretchers, as I said before.’

The irony lies in the fact that Huck turns out to be reliable after all.

Ut pictura poesis (as painting is, so is poetry)

The Roman poet, Horace, coined this phrase, and its influence has been felt through the ages. As they both seem to imitate nature as a way of exploring deeper meaning, poetry and painting are sometimes known as sister arts. Look no further than ‘Inversnaid’ by Gerard Manley Hopkins:

This darksome burn, horseback brown,

His rollrock highroad roaring down,

In coop and in comb the fleece of his foam

Flutes and low to the lake falls home.

A windpuff-bonnet of fáwn-fróth

Turns and twindles over the broth

Of a pool so pitchblack, féll-frówning,

It rounds and rounds Despair to drowning.

Degged with dew, dappled with dew

Are the groins of the braes that the brook treads through,

Wiry heathpacks, flitches of fern,

And the beadbonny ash that sits over the burn.

What would the world be, once bereft

Of wet and of wildness? Let them be left,

O let them be left, wildness and wet;

Long live the weeds and the wilderness yet.

Utopia

Coined by Sir Thomas More, and based on the Greek words, ‘eutopos’ (‘good place’) and ‘outopos’ (no place’), utopian fiction imagines an ideal human society, a kind of ‘big rock candy mountain’, a heaven on earth. Communism was supposed to lead to such a society. Apart from More’s Latin work, ‘Utopia’, some well known fictions in this genre are ‘News from Nowhere’ by William Morris, ‘Brave New World’ by Aldous Huxley, and ‘Erewhon’ by Samuel Butler. The first is visionary, the second is science fiction, and the third is satire - testimony to the flexibility of the genre. Here is an extract from Samuel Butler’s novel:

'Herein lies our danger. For many seem inclined to acquiesce in so dishonourable a future. They say that although man should become to the machines what then horse and dog are to us, yet that he will continue to exist, and will probably be better off in a state of domestication under the beneficent rule of the machines than in his present wild condition. We treat our domestic animals with much kindness. We give them whatever we believe to be the best for them; and there can be no doubt that our use of meat has increased their happiness rather than detracted from it. In like manner there is reason to hope that the machines will use us kindly, for their existence will be in a great measure dependent upon ours; they will rule us with a rod of iron, but they will not eat us; they will not only require our services in the reproduction and education of their young, but also in waiting upon them as servants; in gathering food for them, and feeding them; in restoring them to health when they are sick; and in either burying their dead or working up their deceased members into new forms of mechanical existence.’

Utterance

spoken language.

Underextension

When a toddler uses a word to mean only a specific thing, so ‘dog’ means only the family pet.

Vatic

This is an adjective, which describes visionary poets like William Blake. A great vatic poem of the 20th century is William Butler Yeats’s ‘The Second Coming’. Here is an extract:

‘The darkness drops again; but now I know

That twenty centuries of stony sleep

Were vexed to nightmare by a rocking cradle,

And what rough beast, its hour come round at last,

Slouches towards Bethlehem to be born?’

Vehicle

‘All the world’s a stage’, says Jacques in Shakespeare’s ‘As You Like It’. Like all metaphors, it makes an implied (or overt if it’s a simile), comparison of two ‘things’, which will result in a third ‘thing’. The two ‘things’ here are ‘world’ and ‘stage’; the third ‘thing’ is the sensation this comparison produces. The critic, I. A. Richards, called the first and second ‘things’ tenor and vehicle. In Jacque’s quote the world is the tenor, the subject, and the stage is the vehicle, the metaphorical term. This example is a special kind of metaphor called a synecdoche where whole becomes part and part becomes whole. Jacques could have said it the other way round. Shakespeare did by calling his theatre (stage) the Globe (world). Here is Jacque’s memorable speech in full:

All the world’s a stage,

And all the men and women merely players;

They have their exits and their entrances,

And one man in his time plays many parts,

His acts being seven ages. At first, the infant,

Mewling and puking in the nurse’s arms.

Then the whining schoolboy, with his satchel

And shining morning face, creeping like snail

Unwillingly to school. And then the lover,

Sighing like furnace, with a woeful ballad

Made to his mistress’ eyebrow. Then a soldier,

Full of strange oaths and bearded like the pard,

Jealous in honor, sudden and quick in quarrel,

Seeking the bubble reputation

Even in the cannon’s mouth. And then the justice,

In fair round belly with good capon lined,

With eyes severe and beard of formal cut,

Full of wise saws and modern instances;

And so he plays his part. The sixth age shifts

Into the lean and slippered pantaloon,

With spectacles on nose and pouch on side;

His youthful hose, well saved, a world too wide

For his shrunk shank, and his big manly voice,

Turning again toward childish treble, pipes

And whistles in his sound. Last scene of all,

That ends this strange eventful history,

Is second childishness and mere oblivion,

Sans teeth, sans eyes, sans taste, sans everything.

Verbal Hygiene

Any intentional attempts to change a language, be they from fascists or communists, can be called verbal hygiene, a term coined by the linguist, Deborah Cameron.

Political correctness is a prevalent form of verbal hygiene. Its purpose is to minimize offence against certain identity groups like race, gender, and age. So, the word, 'fireman', for example, ought to be changed to something gender-neutral like 'firefighter'. A problem arises with non-gendered words which contain gendered syllables like 'men' in 'menstruation' and 'boy' in 'flamboyant'. In this way it becomes easy for reactionaries to mock a worthy cause.

Verisimilitude

When a literary work seems true to life, it has verisimilitude. Synonyms are ‘realism’ and ‘naturalism’. It has its origins in mimesis (the imitation of nature). As Hamlet puts it:

‘Suit the action to the word, the word to the action, with this special observance that you o'erstep not the modesty of nature. For anything so overdone is from the purpose of playing, whose end, both at the first and now, was and is to hold, as ’twere, the mirror up to nature, to show virtue her own feature, scorn her own image, and the very age and body of the time his form and pressure.’

Vice, the

In mediaeval morality plays, stock characters like Virtue and Vice worked for God and the devil. In those days Vice was a serious character but, over the years, he has been down-or-up-graded to a comic character. In Shakespeare’s hands this dichotomy merges into a complex character like Iago:

‘Were I the Moor I would not be Iago.

In following him I follow but myself;

Heaven is my judge, not I for love and duty,

But seeming so for my peculiar end.

For when my outward action doth demonstrate

The native act and figure of my heart

In compliment extern, ’tis not long after

But I will wear my heart upon my sleeve

For daws to peck at. I am not what I am.’ (I.i.57–65)

Villanelle

A poem with a fixed form, which originated in medieval France, villanelles are still challenging contemporary poets. You need two strong lines (or verses), which are repeated through five three-line stanzas and a final four-line stanza. There are only two rhymes. One villanelle which has received world-wide popularity is this gem by the Welsh poet, Dylan Thomas:

Do not go gentle into that good night,

Old age should burn and rave at close of day; 

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Though wise men at their end know dark is right,

Because their words had forked no lightning they

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Good men, the last wave by, crying how bright

Their frail deeds might have danced in a green bay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Wild men who caught and sang the sun in flight,

And learn, too late, they grieved it on its way,

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight

Blind eyes could blaze like meteors and be gay,

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

And you, my father, there on that sad height,

Curse, bless, me now with your fierce tears, I pray.

Do not go gentle into that good night.

Rage, rage against the dying of the light.

Virtuous errors

If an adult says, 'I runned away', she is uneducated, but if a two-year old says it, she is making a virtuous error. She has an innate understanding of tense, what Chomsky calls a Language Acquisition Device. She would not have picked it up from her presumably educated caregivers, according to the theories of behaviourists like Skinner.

Voice

In literature, ‘voice’ is a vague term for an author’s style: a compound of purpose, audience, tone, register, pattern, genre, and context. A good writer, like a good wine, you could say, has a distinctive ‘voice’. A mediocre writer could be any other mediocre writer. Here is a sample of a writer with a ‘voice’:

“But with this woman it is as if there is no interior, only a surface across which I hunt back and forth seeking entry. Is this how her torturers felt hunting their secret, whatever they thought it was? For the first time I feel a dry pity for them: how natural a mistake to believe that you can burn or tear or hack your way into the secret body of the other! The girl lies in my bed, but there is no good reason why it should be a bed. I behave in some ways like a lover—I undress her, I bathe her, I stroke her, I sleep beside her—but I might equally well tie her to a chair and beat her, it would be no less intimate.” 

― J. M. Coetzee, Waiting for the Barbarians

Vorticism

Don’t mess with words that have the -ism suffix. Vorticism is one of modernism’s many outgrowths. It emerged in England in 1914, around the beginning of the First World War. Its champion was the painter and writer, Wyndham Lewis, and it was given some credence by the influential poet/critic, Ezra Pound. Its intent, like most avant-garde movements, was to shake-up the establishment. It celebrated the dynamism of the machine, and deplored all forms of sentimentality. It didn’t last long because machines, it turned out, had something to do with the horror of war. Here is Lewis’s explanation of the term:

"You think at once of a whirlpool. At the heart of the whirlpool is a great silent place where all the energy is concentrated; and there at the point of concentration is the Vorticist.”

Weltschmerz (World-ache)

This German word describes the melancholic mood of much Romantic poetry. Physicians in mediaeval times would have attributed it to an excess of black bile (one of the four humours). You can detect it in the character of Antonio in Shakespeare’s ‘The Merchant of Venice’, who opens the play with his lament: ‘In sooth I know not why I am so sad’. Here is a stanza from Keats’ ode 'On Melancholy':

'She dwells with Beauty—Beauty that must die;

And Joy, whose hand is ever at his lips

Bidding adieu; and aching Pleasure nigh,

Turning to poison while the bee-mouth sips:

Ay, in the very temple of Delight

Veil'd Melancholy has her sovran shrine,

Though seen of none save him whose strenuous tongue

Can burst Joy's grape against his palate fine;

His soul shall taste the sadness of her might,

And be among her cloudy trophies hung.'

Wit

Cleverness with words comes to mind; but in literature, wit has more complicated applications ranging from irony (the metaphysicals), through elegance (the neo classicists), to mere fancy (the romantics). All these are connected by the ability to perceive and to invent metaphor. Here is an example of wit from ‘To His Coy Mistress’ by Andrew Marvell:

‘But at my back I always hear

Time’s wingèd chariot hurrying near;

And yonder all before us lie

Deserts of vast eternity.

Thy beauty shall no more be found,

Nor, in thy marble vault, shall sound

My echoing song: then worms shall try

That long preserved virginity,

And your quaint honour turn to dust,

And into ashes all my lust:

The grave’s a fine and private place,

But none, I think, do there embrace.’

Zeugma

Also known as syllepsis, this figure of speech yokes two different nouns with one verb, often for bathetic effect. Here are two examples from ‘The Rape of the Lock’ by Alexander Pope:

“Here Thou, great Anna! whom three Realms obey,

Dost sometimes Counsel take – and sometimes Tea.”

“Whether the nymph shall break Diana’s law,

Or some frail China-jar receive a flaw,

Or stain her honour, or her new brocade.”

In the first example, the verb is ‘take’ while the two incongruous nouns are ‘counsel’ and ‘tea’. In the second example, a double zeugma, the verb is ‘break’, the first pair of nouns are ‘Diana’s law’ and ‘China-jar’, while the second pair are ‘honour’ and ‘brocade’.