Mark Forsyth

I love how this often shows the boring way to write something next to the more memorable way. And the author uses a lot of the 'tricks'/'tools' in his exposition, just to show that you don't need to be Shakespeare or George Lucas to be able to write engagingly.

I'd like to be able to use this book in reverse. I'd like to be able to consider more carefully how authors work their magic in books that I consider well-written. I can see alliteration, because that's one of the elements of rhetoric we did learn in public school. But generally (as you know if you read my reviews), I'm reduced to declaiming "I don't know the author worked the magic, but this is so effortlessly graceful, so lucid and yet so beautiful...." Well, Forsyth's point is that it is *not* magic.

Many bookdarts. Too many for 'fair use?' Let's start typing them in and see....

Rhetoric... includes logic (or the kind of sloppy logic most people understand, called enthymemes)....

It was Moses' wife who said "stranger in a strange land" (a polyptoton).

"Quaquaversally" means "in every direction."

"Merism searches for wholes, and leaves holes" which is why lawyerese has lists but also says "including but not limited to."

Synaesthesia is also a figure of rhetoric, one used to create metaphors. What's interesting is that there are habits of which two sense are being related, for example visual impressions can be used to describe auditory stimuli, like a 'bright clang.' I'd love to see someone reverse the use of the senses in "the warm color of a painting" for example... 'blue with cold' doesn't quite cut it because it's drawn from the literal fact that if we're cold we do turn bluish. Can anyone improve on the line by Raymond Chandler, "She smelled the way the Taj Mahal looks by moonlight?" For that matter, can anyone describe an abstract noun, for example, 'victory,' by what it looks, sounds, or tastes like?

Anadiplosis is a neat trick, can even be used by non-fiction writers. Consider St. Paul's: "We glory in tribulations also, knowing that tribulations worketh patience, and patience, experience, and experience, hope, and hope maketh man not ashamed."

(Just took a peek at the author's "Inky Fool" blog and learned "Lind is Linden tree (or lime tree as we usually call it). " I'd been wondering how citrus grew in England.... A little further research reveals that it's also called basswood, which is a tree I've heard of in the US.)

Wherefore actually means why. Juliet is frustrated because she's discovered that the young man who stole her heart is from that rival family.

Tricolons are so effective that longer lists are remembered in truncated versions. Consider the original: "the life of man, solitary, poor, nasty, brutish and short" to the well-known truncation.

"[A]napaests and dactyls are the nursery rhyme feet."

Chiasmus: like a palindrome, but with larger units (adj. noun noun adj.) or (time activity activity time) such as 'By day the frolic and the dance by night.' Or even by vowel sounds, such as 'In Xanadu did Kubla Khan.'

Adynaton: insufficiently defined by Forsyth, but a terrific example includes the line 'break a hurricane to harness' and can be found in all its glory here: https://books.google.com/books?id=KOIXAQAAIAAJ&pg=PA224&lpg=PA224&dq... a hurricane to harness"&source=bl&ots=nBJFa1QM-j&sig=ACfU3U0y6xgHD1tzUSNuKWHPzOEqHSd7Vw&hl=en&sa=X&ved=2ahUKEwj20pacw7TiAhULbq0KHXEvCT0Q6AEwA3oECAcQAQ#v=onepage&q="break a hurricane to harness"&f=false (Exasperatingly, I had to look that up myself. Fortunately it wasn't difficult. Some of his other references are more elusive.)

No index or notes are major flaws that decrease the likelihood that I'll actually buy this... even though I do want it, as indicated above, to help me understand what tools my favorite writers use.… (more)

Too many of the words, imo, are jargon still in use by medical and other professionals (but I imagine that's my impression, and the actual count reveals only a few).

I do know that too many never were known, and are too long to have ever been in common use. I was hoping for more words simply archaic, and not truly 'lost.' And many of the lost words are synonyms for better words we have now.

That being said:

Scuddle - to run with a kind of affected haste or precipitation.
Fisk - to run about hastily and heedlessly.
(Do you want to accuse your colleague of scuddling, or would it be kinder to say she's just fisking?)

Guttle - to eat greedily, companion to 'guzzle.'

Nullibiquitous - existing nowhere, companion to 'ubiquitous.'

"What I tell you three times is true," is apparently from [b:The Hunting of the Snark|296866|The Hunting of the Snark|Lewis Carroll|https://images.gr-assets.com/books/1173486610s/296866.jpg|813571]... I should already know that but I don't, so I'll have to check.

(Pratchett fans, look up the Codex Gigas, a real-life big scary book.)… (more)

Sorry. I can only give it three stars because it was a lot of work to read and I don't think I'll remember anything from it tomorrow. Reading it was like binge-watching Jeopardy or something. And I did take frequent breaks, to try to absorb more.

I will say that I disagree with the reviewers who felt that the humor was too strained or heavy. I am sensitive to that, and often make a similar complaint about other books, but I found Forsyth deft. In fact, I do like his writing style and will try to read something else by him.

"Argon is Greek for lazy."

Tracing how the liquor 'kill-devil' became known as 'rum,' "It might even be something to do with ... rumbullion meaning uproar, or it could be dnuora yaw rehto."

Legend is "the beautiful elder sister of truth."… (more)