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Books

What's notable about 'a lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife'? 

You'll learn about litotes, synecdoches, zeugmas, isocolons and the right way to order your adjectives in Mark Forsyth's The Elements of Eloquence

30 November 2013

9:00 AM

30 November 2013

9:00 AM

The Elements of Eloquence Mark Forsyth

Icon Books, pp.208, £12.99, ISBN: 9781848316218

In the reminiscences of Bertie Wooster we find this:

As I sat in the bathtub, soaping a meditative foot and singing, if I remember correctly, ‘Pale Hands I Loved Beside the Shalimar’, it would be deceiving my public to say that I was feeling boomps-a-daisy.

The sentence is quoted for its use of ‘meditative foot’, in the Winter 1973 issue of the learned journal Linguistic Inquiry, by Robert A.

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