The font in Christ’s Chapel
use of the descriptive word (‘pickled’) in anticipation of the act (‘pickling’) that wouldmake it applicable is prolepsis . We will see how these points play out, in our epigraph, in the discussion that follows.
Rhetoric (the art of persuasion)
Persuasion can run from a gentle nudge to vocal and physical duress, but the civilized ways of urging compliance with an order – argument, reason, entreaty – fall within a grand system devised by ancient Greek grammarians. We need to turn here only to the third part of classical rhetoric, which was concerned with style. The theory of style is divided into two parts, diction (word choice) and composition. Narrowing our focus further, we find that the most studied aspect of composition is the use of figures. And these are of two types, schemes and tropes . A scheme involves a deviation from the ordinary pattern or arrangement of words. Among the types of such deviation commonly noted, only ‘alliteration’ (repetition of consonants), ‘assonance’ (repetition of vowels), and ‘apposition’ (an outlier we can ignore) take their names from Latin. W. B. Stanford writes in The Sound of Greek that ‘the term alliteration has no exact equivalent in classical rhetoric. Probably the reason why the ancient critics did not isolate it was that they thought of euphony in terms of letter- groups rather than of letters in isolation’ (p. 84). I’ve brought up repetition schemes earlier, only to shrug them off as not conspicuous by their absence in our inscription. The special ‘agreeableness of sound’ that NIP/SON ANOMĒ MA M Ē MONAN OP/SIN is thought to exhibit will be described later. A trope involves a deviation from the ordinary and principal signification of a word. I find three in our sentence , but as the theory of these ‘graces of language’ is said to be ‘chaotic’, and since different authorities use different names for the same figure, my arithmetic won’t square with my analysis.
We have noted OP/SIN shifting its reference from eyesight to th e face (through the idea of one’s ‘look’). I would classify this as synecdoche , in which a part stands for a whole.
Zeugma is the Greek word for ‘yoke’. When the draft board came round for Odysseus, I think it was, to go off to the TrojanWar, he said, ‘OK, fellas, just let me get my spring planting in first.’ Then he hitched up a mule to an ox and ploughed zig-zaggy furrows all over the landscape. The recruiters concluded that he had a screw loose and left town without him. So, zeugma yokes a team, but as a rhetorical trope it applies to a clever mismatch – two dissimilar items paired. Not only does one member of the ANOM Ē MA-OP/SIN combination not fit idiomatically with the other – the first is intangible and abstract, the second (at least on one level) tangible and concrete – but the verb that governs them is understood differently in relation to each object it governs. That is the definition of syllepsis . As in ‘she went off in a huff and a limo’ – her departure was both emotional and physical. What’s more, syllepsis and zeugma collaborate reciprocally in the cover inscription (perhaps even to sow confusion) as one meaning of the verb shades into another, and one meaning of one of the nouns does likewise. These devices of composition elicit admiration. Artful when they display originality, they often remain so after they’ve become commonplace. They are helpful in clarifying communication by providing a different perspective.
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