Book Review: Figures of Speech by Martin Cothran

by Martin Cothran

Many years ago I received a box in the mail from the Book of the Month Club. I was a member at the time, although I'm trying to think now why I was, since today I would never trust strangers to select my books for me. They would send you their selection every month and usually put some other goody in the box.

The free goody that month was a slim little book called Figures of Speech by Arthur Quinn. A blurb on the back described Quinn as a professor of rhetoric at the University of California, Berkeley. I remember opening it up and starting to read, a grin taking over my face. It was a sheer delight.

If you have ever studied rhetoric, you might know that the Greeks came up with a categorization of the different ways you can turn a phrase. They gave each one an impressive-sounding Greek name. There is the zeugma, an expression in which a word is left out of one or two parallel clauses ("Out of Zion shall go forth the law, and the word of the Lord from Jerusalem," Isaiah 2:3), and the anastrophe, in which the order of words is reversed ("Are you good men and true?," Much Ado About Nothing), and the asyndeton, in which customary conjunctions are missing ("…that government of the people, by the people, for the people, shall not perish from the earth," The Gettysburg Address).

And if you're wondering why I used "and" too many times in the last paragraph, it was to demonstrate a polysyndeton, in which there are too many conjunctions.

Figures of speech are, in effect, creative ways to break the rules of spelling and grammar, as well as ways to simply defy expectation. One of the things we find out in reading great literature is that many of the great writers, particularly poets, used figures of speech all the time—which is one reason why Figures of Speech is so packed with the quotations of great writers. This book has manifold virtues, the first being the quotations themselves. If there were no accompanying explanations at all, the quotations alone would make it worth reading. A good third of the quotations come from two sources—the King James Bible and Shakespeare. In fact, as the author himself points out, ultimately the quotations engulf the names: "The names in the end will fade before the richness of the examples, of language itself." And so it is (that's a hyperbaton).

Quinn also gives us a taxonomy of the figures: He organizes them into an understandable and memorable structure. The whole book is basically divided between figures of addition, of subtraction, of substitution, and of rearrangement, herding the riot of diverse turns of phrase into their distinctive categories so that we may observe them more carefully.

The book is devilishly clever; when explaining each figure he somehow manages to employ that same figure in doing so. Part of the fun of reading this book is catching him doing it.