Anadiplosis and Anaphora

Yesterday, I was shuffling along the street with my iPod on shuffle. These two shuffles are, incidentally, related. Dragging your feet  became fidgeting which in turn became moving the cards around in a pack. Anyway, I was about to shuffle off this mortal coil when on came David Bowie's song Modern Love, and I was suddenly struck by the rhetorical arrangement of the chorus.

Anaphora is the technical term for starting a series of clauses with the same words. A classic example is Winston Churchill's speech:

...we shall fight in France,
we shall fight on the seas and oceans,
we shall fight with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, 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...

It's a simple and surefire winner of a rhetorical technique. Another simple trope is anadiplosis. This is where you use the last word or phrase of one clause as the first word or phrase of the next. Yoda once pointed out that:

Fear leads to anger. Anger leads to hate. Hate leads to suffering.

So what do you get if you cross Winston Churchill with Yoda? You get the chorus of David Bowie's Modern Love, which goes like this:

Never going fall for
Modern love, walks beside me,
Modern love, walks on by,
Modern love gets me to the church on time.
Church on time terrifies me
Church on time makes me party
Church on time puts my trust in God and man.
God and man, no confessions,
God and man, no religion,
God and man don't believe in
Modern love.

It's a great little chorus and, if you think about, is simply an exercise in anadiplosis and anaphora that comes full circle to the refrain of modern love.

And here is a beautiful cover version.

Elephantship and other Ships

Sometimes, the dictionary disappoints. You see the word elephantship and your mind races, your imagination buds and blooms, as you imagine a boat manned entirely by pachyderms. However, the OED defines elephantship as the personality of an elephant. It's the same ship that you find in lordship, hardship, friendship, and governorship, which is not a ship manned by the gubernatorial.

It's also the same ship that you find in worship, which is really worth-ship. There used to be a lot more of these words but they have slowly dwindled and vanished. I shall revive them, though, and set sail on a drunkship to gladship.

Hell yeah.

Homeopathy

As I passed a shop selling homeopathic remedies the other day, it occurred to me that I didn't really know what homeopathy meant. I mean, I have a vague notion that it probably involves shoving some St John's wort in your ears to balance your negative energies, but I wasn't really sure. But I did know that homeo means the same (as in homosexual) and that pathy means suffering, as in pathetic.

And, bingo, I was spot on. Homeopathy proper is the idea that like cures like. So a disease may be cured if you give somebody a medicine that would usually cause the same (homeo) symptoms. It was thought up by a chap called Samuel Hahnemannn (1755-1843) who noticed that a kind of Peruvian tree bark that appeared to cure malaria, when given to a healthy fellow, produced the symptoms of malaria.

For myself, I'm perfectly convinced by this theory and intend from now on to cure drunkenness by drinking, and undertake to remedy anybody's nosebleed by punching them in the face.

I have also discovered that for years I have been using allopathic doctors, that's what homeopathic chaps call the rest of the medical profession. Allopathy is other suffering and it's the same allo that you get in allegory or other-speaking.

The Inky Fool now offers medical insurance

Bibosity and Biberage

Bibosity is defined in the OED as capacity for drinking. It appears only to have been used once, in 1823, when a writer in Blackwood's Magazine referred to:

Vast ideas of stupendous bibosity.

A related word is a biberage, which is a drink given in place of a fee. So you get somebody to do you a favour and then buy them a pint. I know a lady who works for a large organisation. Usually she works for one department, but occasionally helps out at another. To keep things simple the second department pays her in champagne. I have seen bottles lined up all along her the front passage of her house. It's a beautiful sight, and all of these bottles are biberages.

The only way to commute

Discovering Disco

I sat in airport yesterday for an hour gongoozling a screen on which amazing facts were being put up for the edification of the delayed passengers. One of the amazing facts was that disco meant I learn in Latin. The idea, I think, was that this was amusing because it made a disco sound like a school.

The fact was technically true, but utterly misleading, in that there is no connection between the two words. However, buried at the bottom was a little gem of truth, because a disco is really a library.

The Italian for library is biblioteca, which means book collection. It therefore follows, as surely as night follows day, that the Italian for a record collection should be discoteca. It was the French who adapted this word into the more familiar discotheque, and it was the Americans who shortened it to disco. Then, because America is cool, disco got taken up by every country in the world. And so an Italian library became a universal nightclub.

It should also be noted that the Latin disco (learn) doesn't have anything to do with discover (dis-cover).

Booker Books

I am back and normal posting will be resumed tomorrow. Until then I can think of nothing better for you to do than to have a look at this bibliophagic blog on the current contestants for the Man Booker Prize.

The Inky Fool returns from holiday

One Hundred Words

I'm afraid that I'm on holy day beyond the realms of wifi. My Internet is limited to a friend's dongle. So before that runs out I shall give you a link to this list of the hundred most beautiful words in the English language. I can't say I agree with them all, but I do like chatoyant.