The palindromeis anold tradition: the first thing that man ever said was, probably, “Madam, I’m Adam.” And it has caused terrible distress to even the greatest literary minds.
Now, that may be the correct translation, but the Hebrew doesn’t say thigh, it says yarek, which means, approximately, soft bits.
To remember that I used to like avocados with a touch of walnut oil only adds to my shame. Even.
Stern people dislike rhetoric, and unfortunately it’s usually stern people who are in charge: solemn fools who believe that truth is more important than beauty.
But facts obscure the truth, which is that writing prose doesn’t make you a prose writer any more than philosophizing makes you a philosopher or fooling around makes you a fool.
But to return to the story: in 1776 the Americans were revolting. The British Navy sailed to New York, but so revolting were the Americans that the Brits decided to stay in the channel and blockade the harbour.
The beauty of merism is that it’s absolutely unnecessary. It’s words for words’ sake: a gushing torrent of invention filled with noun and noun and signifying nothing. Why a rhetorical figure that gabs on and on for no good reason should be central to the rite of marriage is beyond me.
You’re either better or you’re worse, you’re either richer or you’re poorer, you’re either sick or you’re healthy. There are no other options. If you need some words there you could say ‘in any circumstances’. But really, you don’t need to say anything at all. ‘Till death us do part’ kind of has it sewn up.
The Three Musketeers had a cry of ‘All for one and one for all’. The symmetry makes it memorable but also reflects the reciprocity. It is that great human symmetry: the deal.
There are two important trees in the Garden of Eden: the Tree of Knowledge and the Tree of Life. We chose the wrong one. The fruit of the Tree of Life would have given us immortality. The fruit of the Tree of Knowledge informed us that we were nude, which, as knowledge goes, is pretty low down the list of amazing facts.
So just to recap, polyptoton is a favorite of Jesus, Shakespeare, and John Lennon.
The Latin for standing in front of things is pro-stitutio. It.
If the soup had been as warm as the wine, and the wine as old as the fish, and the fish as young as the maid, and the maid as willing as the hostess, it would have been a very good meal.
Medieval lovers used to fond each other, and if they did this too often, they began to fondle. Fondling is a dangerous business, as sooner or later it leads to snugging, an archaic word that meant to lie down together in order to keep warm. Repeated incidences of snugging will result in snuggling, and pregnancy. Whether.
A dutiful son has to remember not to slouch or swear or, in Hamlet’s case, murder the old bat.
It is much harder than you might think to show people your bottom.
Thomas More observed in 1533 that “of newe booke makers there are now moe then ynough.” Luckily for the book trade, More was beheaded a couple of years later.
Tolstoy, Stendhal and Cervantes, these men follow me around. They stand in dark corners and eye me disapprovingly from beneath supercilious eyebrows. And all because I’ve never got round to reading their blasted, thousand-page, three-ton, five-generation, state-of-a-nation thingummywhatsits. I don’t care. Or rather, sometimes I do, and at other times I remember that I’m a tortoise-slow reader and that there’s a pub just around the corner.
Anyway, they invented civilization and it’s been downhill ever since.
Basically, Plato thought that if you can trust a fellow when he’s drunk, you can trust him anywhere.
The sins of a society are revealed in its pieties.