Paronomasia

Recently I read a good (and very long) biography of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, Traitor to His Class: The Privileged Life and Radical Presidency of Franklin Delano Roosevelt, by H. W. Brands (New York: Doubleday, 2006). I’m a big fan of President Roosevelt and of Eleanor Roosevelt and over the years I’ve read a fair amount about them. I wouldn’t put this book at the top of the list, but it has its virtues. Brands concentrates on the political details of Roosevelt’s presidency, but his account is not very insightful about Roosevelt as a person, and Eleanor plays only a rather minor role in the story as he tells it. But that’s not what I want to talk about here.

I always try to keep my eyes and ears open for interesting and effective uses of language, and on page 357 of Brands’ book I came across the following:

“As the depression set in, destroying such prosperity as the Germans had managed to achieve under the reparations-and-debt regime, the Communists gained support among the German people. The Soviet Union, the Communists said, was surviving the depression quite well; its socialist political economy should serve as a model for Germany’s own. The millions in Germany’s soup lines found the argument appealing and leaned left. Germany’s business and propertied classes found the argument appalling and leaned right; having to choose, as they saw it, between the Nazis and the Communists, they sided with the former.”

Brands is a good writer but he is not a stylist, by and large, so this passage stands out. Here is an analysis of part of the passage:

The millions in Germany’s soup lines
found the argument
appealing
and leaned
left.
Germany’s business and propertied classes
found the argument
appalling
and leaned
right.

The phrases “found the argument appealing” and “found the argument appalling” are parallel, differing only with the words “appealing” and “appalling”, which differ only in their central vowels. The grammatical parallelism continues when we add the contrasting subjects: “the millions in Germany’s soup lines” and “Germany’s business and propertied classes”; and finally the parallel structure of the antithesis “leaned left” and “leaned right”. Thus the two sentences have the same structure of five terms in the same order—A B C D E—with a combination of identity and difference; with letters for the variable terms we have “X found the argument Y and leaned Z”.

In general, parallel structures with variable terms tend to emphasize differences. Compare a construction which disrupts the parallelism: “The millions in Germany’s soup lines found the argument appealing and leaned left. But this argument did not convince Germany’s business and propertied classes, which explains their right-wing sympathies”. The meaning is approximately the same, but the rhetorical effect is absent.

The core of the construction here is the pairing of “appealing” and “appalling”. This pairing of words repeats the rhetorical effect of the whole passage. These words, “appealing” and “appalling”, form a strong antithesis. The antithesis is emphasized by the similarity and variation of the sounds. I would suggest that the vowel sounds here match the meanings—the low vowel in “appalling” compared to the high vowel in “appealing”.

This pairing of “appealing” and “appalling” reminded me of some other pairings I’ve collected over the years. Here, for instance, is a passage from a mystery by Rex Stout, If Death Ever Slept (p. 159). Lois Jarrell wants to take responsibility for a murder, so she tells Archie Goodwin that she has thrown a gun into the river, but he knows she is lying and says to her, “Beyond remarking that they’ll check at those three shops, and that if you tried this mess on them they’d find out that you didn’t get your car from the garage that morning, there’s no point in listing the dozen or so holes. I should be sore at you for thinking I could be sap enough to play with you, but you meant well, and it’s a tough trick to be both noble and nimble.”

Here’s a passage from Richard Ellman’s Yeats: The Man and the Masks (p. 239), where Ellman is discussing Yeats’ book A Vision: “Work on this book occupied a great deal of Yeats’ time from 1917 to 1925, and sometimes Mrs. Yeats, fearing for his creative gifts, would refuse for extended periods to do any more automatic writing. But to Yeats the system increased steadily in importance; he was exalted and exulting as never before.”

Here’s a passage from Vladimir Nabokov’s autobiography, Speak, Memory (p. 62): “Legend and logic, a rare but strong partnership, seem to indicate [. . .] that the Rileev pistol duel with Pushkin, of which so little is known, took place in the Batovo park, between May 6 and 9 (Old Style), 1920.” The words “legend” and “logic” derive from the same IndoEuropean root, but the first has come to us through Latin and the second through Greek; they are such distant cousins that they surely don’t know each other. They express two very different ways of using language. See also “immortal” and “immature” on p. 20; “epitaphical” and “epigraphical” on p. 57; “noseless” and “noiseless” on p. 182; “writhed” and “rolled” on p. 216; “gouache” and “guano” on p. 216; “he bowed and “he beamed” on p. 219; “vitality” and “velocity” on p. 301. Nabokov clearly likes this figure, which contributes to his general interest in wordplay.

And here are some instances from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man: “listen to me, the bungling bugler of words” on p. 113; “his dream, conceived in the starkness and darkness of slavery” on p. 120; “why did they insist on confusing the class struggle with the ass struggle” on p. 418; “I was careful to keep the ideological and the biological carefully apart” on p. 419; and “I had neither itch nor etchings” on p. 516.

Brands pairs “appealing” and “appalling”; Stout pairs “noble” and “nimble”; Ellman pairs “exalted” and “exulting”; Nabokov pairs “legend” and “logic”; Ellison pairs “starkness” and “darkness”. Brands puts the paired words in separate but parallel constructions; Stout, Ellman, Nabokov, and Ellison put the paired words next to each other joined by a conjunction; in all instances the grammatical construction adds to the emphasis.

The rhetorical handbooks, both ancient and modern, generally call this figure either “paronomasia” or “adnominatio”. The best discussion of the figure I’ve found comes from R. Dean Anderson Jr., Glossary of Greek Rhetorical Terms, p. 93, with references there to various ancient authorities. He notes that the anonymous Rhetorica ad Herrenium (1^st century BC) gives three forms of the figure: first, the slight alteration of letters or vowel lengths; second, words less immediately similar; third, the same word in different cases. The third form is usually called polyptoton, which I would not consider as a kind of paronomasia. I will have more to say about polyptoton in a later post.

Some ancient rhetoricians consider paronomasia artificial, in a bad sense, and cold; it shows the writer’s effort and wit rather than emotion; thus it would have a place in epideictic oratory—the oratory of display—but not in serious oratory, the oratory of the law courts or political debate. I don’t agree. The figure could be effective in the peroration of a speech, when the speaker is urging the audience to take an action, and the passage from Brands’ biography of Roosevelt shows that the figure can be used to point a contrast. And the figure clearly can be effective in artistic prose, as we see in the passages from Nabokov and Ellison.

In my next post I will have more to say about paronomasia and figures related to it.