More on Paronomasia and its Relatives

Rhetorical terminology is a mess. Often there is more than one term to designate a particular figure, and often a single term is used to designate several different figures. In my previous post I discussed the figure paronomasia, the use of words similar in sound but different in meaning (as in Ralph Ellison’s “his dream, conceived in the starkness and darkness of slavery”). If you look up paronomasia in Lanham’s Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, you will find cross listings to adnominatio and skesis. Lanham’s definition of paronomasia is “punning; playing on the sounds and meanings of words”; and he notes that paronomasia is different from antanaclasis “in that the words punned on are similar but not identical in sound”. Lanham also notes that a few authorities count assonance, consonance, and alliteration as kinds of paronomasia, though he would not. And at the end of his note he directs his reader to the term prosonomasia, which turns out to mean “calling by a name or nickname”; Lanham notes that this term is “confused by some rhetoricians with paronomasia”. Are you still with me?

If we look up adnominatio in Lanham’s Handlist, we find the definition “two words of different meaning but similar sound brought together”. This definition makes adnominatio a close synonym of paronomasia. But then Lanham adds that adnominatio can also mean polyptoton, the use of a root in more than one form—for instance, “triumphant” and “triumphs” (page 113 of Invisible Man). I think that paronomasia (the use of similar words of different meanings) is quite unlike polyptoton (the use of the same root in different forms). He also notes that a distinction can be made between adnominatio “as mainly a play on sounds” and paronomasia “as a play on sense of words”, but he doesn’t give examples to illustrate the difference.

I’m hardly getting started with Lanham; we still need to look up skesis, ploce, epiploce, conexio, copulatio, diaphora, epanados, traducio, and antanaclasis. A different handbook, such as Lee Sonnino’s A Handbook to Sixteenth Century Rhetoric, gives a different story. Sonnino quotes definitions from various authorities and gives good examples. Under adnominatio, for instance, she gives definitions from Cicero, Quintilian, Susenbrotus, and Peacham, with examples from Fraunce, Peacham, and Hoskins. If you follow her cross-listings, your list will include paregmenon, alliteratio, allusio, and perhaps a few more. Then you might check Arthur Quinn’s Figures of Speech, R. Dean Anderson Jr.’s Glossary of Greek Rhetorical Terms, and Leonid Arbusow’s Colores Rhetorici—or you might not.

In the face of this terminological mess, I propose to describe a group of figures related to paronomasia and then pick terms that seem handy to designate them. I won’t attempt a complete account of all the possibly related figures, but I will give enough to give an idea of these rhetorical resources.

First in the group is the repetition of a word with no great change of meaning. A word can be repeated immediately, in the figure known as epizeuxis. This passage from Ralph Ellison’s Invisible Man comes from a speech about the death and funeral of the Founder of the college which the hero attends: “And the people came to sing the old songs and to express their unspeakable sorrow. Black, black, black! Black people in blacker mourning, the funeral crape hung upon their naked hearts; singing unashamedly their black folk’s songs of sorrow” (page 131).

This passage shows, in addition to the epizeuxis (“Black, black, black!”), repetition of a word within a short space: “Black people in blacker mourning . . . their black folk’s songs”). I will use the term ploce (pronounced “PLO-cay” or “PLO-chay”) for this kind of repetition of a word within a short space. Here are two more examples of ploce from Invisible Man: “I am not ashamed of my grandparents for having been slaves. I am only ashamed of myself for having at one time been ashamed” (p. 15). “Ah, those days of ceaseless travel, those youthful days, those springtime days; fertile, blossomy, sun-filled days of promise. Ah, yes, those indescribably glorious days” (124).

A repeated word may appear in more than one form. Thus in one of the examples quoted above Ellison uses the forms “black” and “blacker”. The repetition of a word in different forms is called polyptoton. Here are some further examples: “stronger/strength”:  “stronger than the strength of philanthropic dollars” (p. 112); “triumphant/triumph”: “blaring triumphant sounds empty of triumphs” (page 113); “achievements/unachieved”: “achievements yet unachieved” (page 113): “reminder/memory”: “each bird, each blade of grass was a reminder of some precious memory; and each memory a hammer stroke driving home the blunt spikes of their sorrow” (p. 130–31).

Epizeuxis and ploce designate repetitions within a short range, but repetitions can also occur over long ranges. Sometimes a word will be used over and over throughout a text; we can call this kind of repetition palilogia. A good example is the word “heart” in Ford Madox Ford’s novel The Good Soldier; I find this word 59 times in 187 pages of the Penguin edition, about once every three pages. A word repeated this often is likely to be a keyword. (I will have more to say about “heart” in The Good Soldier in a moment.) So far as I know, there is no instance of this kind of palilogia in Invisible Man, but there is another kind, not specifically noted in the traditional rhetoric texts, which I call ring palilogia. The word “invisible” (and its forms, including “visible”) occurs of course in the title, and then quite a lot at the beginning of the novel: four times on page 3, five times on page 5, twice each on pages 6, 7, and 8. Then this word mostly disappears from the text—I find just one instance on page 94—until at the very end we find it three times on page 559, once (italicized) on page 573, and twice on page 581, the very last page of the novel. Thus the word appears in two clumps; each of these clumps counts as ploce, but then the repetition in a ring at the beginning and ending count as ring palilogia.

In another kind of palilogia two or three words are repeated. Here’s a very impressive example from Invisible Man. Here the (unnamed) hero of the novel is delivering a eulogy for his friend and rival, Tod Clifton, who has been killed by a policeman: “Here are the facts. He was standing and he fell. He fell and he kneeled. He kneeled and he bled. He bled and he died. He fell in a heap like any man and his blood spilled out like any blood; red as any blood, wet as any blood and reflecting the sky and the buildings and birds and trees, or your face if you’d looked into its dulling mirror—and it dried in the sun as blood dries. That’s all. They spilled his blood and he bled. They cut him down and he died; the blood flowed on the walk in a pool, gleamed a while, and, after a while, became dull then dusty, then dried. That’s the story and that’s how it ended” (456). This passage also includes gradatio (standing/fell; fell/kneeled; kneeled/bled; bled/died) and polyptoton (bled, blood).

Antanaclasis is the repetition of a word with more than one meaning. In more technical terms, a single signifier is used with two different significations. Here’s an example from Joan Didion’s The White Album (page 19), where she’s describing the confusion of her life in the later sixties: “I knew where the sheets and towels were kept but I did not always know who was sleeping in every bed. I had the keys but not the key.” In this passage the word “key” is used in two different meanings: first the physical keys that lock and unlock physical doors, and second the metaphorical key that makes sense of things. The word “heart” in The Good Soldier sometimes is used literally, as the organ in the body, and sometimes metaphorically.

Next comes paronomasia, the use of two words similar in sound but different in meaning. In the best examples the two words are almost the same, but not quite, as in the passage from Brands’ biography of Roosevelt, Traitor to his Class, where the two words are “appalling” and “appealing”. Here are a few more examples culled from my recent reading: Ursula Le Guin’s novel City of Illusions: “The ground was everywhere dark, but in places misted slightly with green where the first tiny double-leaved shoots of the hardiest grasses were opening; and above and below the ground was a constant burrowing and scurrying of little beasts, rabbits, badgers, coneys, mice, feral cats, moles, stripe-eyed arcturies, antelopes, yellow yappers, the pests and pets of fallen civilizations” (235). This sentence has not only the paronomasia of “burrowing” and “scurrying” and “pests” and “pets” but also a good congeries. A little later one of the characters says, “She has given me hope, and help; we are companions” (262). And a little later another character says, “You are welcome here, Falk. We have long awaited you, long guided and guarded you” (269). Today I started to read Mary Barton, by the Victorian novelist Elizabeth Gaskell, and I came across this passage in Gaskell’s preface: “I had always felt a deep sympathy with the careworn men, who looked as if doomed to struggle through their lives in strange alternations between work and want”. In this last example the similarity is only the initial letters of “work” and “want”, but a little rewriting—“strange alternations between employment and privation”—shows the effect of this alliteration.

Until I started to write these posts on paronomasia, I had never paid much attention to the figure; I wasn’t even clear on the terminology, and my collection of examples was small. I often find, however, that when I start to think about a particular figure I suddenly start to find examples, as I have just recently found these examples from Le Guin and Gaskell. Terminology is not what’s centrally important—what really matters, I would say, is sensitivity to the way language is used—but having a name for a figure seems to create a kind of attention and a sort of mental space to store examples. Now that I’ve written about paronomasia I won’t be surprised to come across more examples.