by

Richard Nordquist

Updated June 09, 2019

Anaphora is a rhetorical term for the repetition of a word or phrase at the beginning of successive
clauses. By building toward a climax, anaphora can create a strong emotional effect. Consequently, this
figure of speech is often found in polemical writings and passionate oratory, perhaps most famously in
Dr. Martin Luther King's "I Have a Dream" speech. Classical scholar George A. Kennedy compares
anaphora to "a series of hammer blows in which the repetition of the word both connects and reinforces
the successive thoughts" ("New Testament Interpretation Through Rhetorical Criticism", 1984).

Examples and Observations

"We learned to 'diagram' sentences with the solemn precision of scientists articulating chemical
equations. We learned to read by reading aloud, and we learned to spell by spelling aloud."(Joyce Carol
Oates, "District School #7: Niagara County, New York." "Faith of a Writer: Life, Craft, Art". HarperCollins,
2003)

"I needed a drink, I needed a lot of life insurance, I needed a vacation, I needed a home in the country.
What I had was a coat, a hat, and a gun."

(Raymond Chandler, "Farewell, My Lovely", 1940)

"It rained on his lousy tombstone, and it rained on the grass on his stomach. It rained all over the
place."(Holden Caulfield in J.D. Salinger's "The Catcher in the Rye", 1951)

"Anaphora will repeat an opening phrase or word;

Anaphora will pour it into a mould (absurd)!

Anaphora will cast each subsequent opening;

Anaphora will last until it's tiring."(John Hollander, "Rhyme's Reason: A Guide to English Verse". Yale
University Press, 1989)

"Here comes the shadow not looking where it is going,

And the whole night will fall; it is time.

Here comes the little wind which the hour

Drags with it everywhere like an empty wagon through leaves.

Here comes my ignorance shuffling after them

Asking them what they are doing."

(W.S. Merwin, "Sire." "The Second Four Books of Poems". Copper Canyon Press, 1993)

"Sir Walter Raleigh. Good food. Good cheer. Good times."(slogan of the Sir Walter Raleigh Inn
Restaurant, Maryland)

"We saw the bruised children of these fathers clump onto our school bus, we saw the abandoned
children huddle in the pews at church, we saw the stunned and battered mothers begging for help at our
doors."

(Scott Russell Sanders, "Under the Influence," 1989)

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."(Rick Blaine in "Casablanca")

"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the seas and oceans, we shall fight
with growing confidence and growing strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost
may be, we shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall fight in the fields
and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never surrender."

(Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons, June 4, 1940)

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"Let both sides explore what problems unite us instead of belaboring those problems which divide us.
Let both sides, for the first time, formulate serious and precise proposals for the inspection and control
of arms, and bring the absolute power to destroy other nations under the absolute control of all nations.

"Let both sides seek to invoke the wonders of science instead of its terrors. Together let us explore the
stars, conquer the deserts, eradicate disease, tap the ocean depths, and encourage the arts and
commerce.

"Let both sides unite to heed, in all corners of the earth, the command of Isaiah — to 'undo the heavy
burdens, and to let the oppressed go free.'"

(President John Kennedy, Inaugural Address, January 20, 1961)

"But one hundred years later, the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later, the life of the Negro is
still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years
later, the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity. One
hundred years later, the Negro is still languishing in the corners of American society and finds himself an
exile in his own land. And so we've come here today to dramatize a shameful condition."

(Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "I Have a Dream," 1963)

"It's the hope of slaves sitting around a fire singing freedom songs; the hope of immigrants setting out
for distant shores; the hope of a young naval lieutenant bravely patrolling the Mekong Delta; the hope of
a millworker's son who dares to defy the odds; the hope of a skinny kid with a funny name who believes
that America has a place for him, too."(Barack Obama, "The Audacity of Hope," July 27, 2004)

"In school, I am a luckless goosegirl, friendless and forlorn. In P.S. 71 I carry, weighty as a cloak, the
ineradicable knowledge of my scandal — I am cross-eyed, dumb, an imbecile in arithmetic; in P.S. 71 I am
publicly shamed in Assembly because I am caught not singing Christmas carols; in P.S. 71 I am repeatedly
accused of deicide. But in the Park View Pharmacy, in the winter dusk, branches blackening in the park
across the road, I am driving in rapture through the Violet Fairy Book and the Yellow Fairy Book,
insubstantial chariots snatched from the box in the mud."

(Cynthia Ozick, "A Drugstore in Winter." "Art and Ardor", 1983)

"Whatever failures I have known, whatever errors I have committed, whatever follies I have witnessed in
public and private life, have been the consequences of action without thought."(attributed to Bernard
Baruch)

"Brylcreem, a little dab'll do ya,

Brylcreem, you'll look so debonair!

Brylcreem, the gals'll all pursue ya!

They'll love to get their fingers in your hair."(Advertising jingle, 1950s)

"I want her to live. I want her to breathe. I want her to aerobicize."("Weird Science", 1985)

"I'm not afraid to die. I'm not afraid to live. I'm not afraid to fail. I'm not afraid to succeed. I'm not afraid
to fall in love. I'm not afraid to be alone. I'm just afraid I might have to stop talking about myself for five
minutes."

(Kinky Friedman, "When the Cat's Away", 1988)

"In God's name, you people are the real thing. We are the illusion!

"So turn off your television sets. Turn them off now! Turn them off right now! Turn them off and leave
them off. Turn them off right in the middle of this sentence I'm speaking to you now.

"Turn them off!"

(Peter Finch as television anchorman Howard Beale in "Network", 1976)

Anaphora in Dr. King's "Letter From a Birmingham Jail"

"But when you have seen vicious mobs lynch your mothers and fathers at will and drown your sisters and
brothers at whim; when you have seen hate-filled policemen curse, kick, brutalize and even kill your
black brothers and sisters with impunity; when you see the vast majority of your twenty million Negro
brothers smothering in an airtight cage of poverty in the midst of an affluent society; when you suddenly
find your tongue twisted and your speech stammering as you seek to explain to your six-year-old
daughter why she can't go to the public amusement park that has just been advertised on television, and
see tears welling up in her little eyes when she is told that Funtown is closed to colored children, and see
the depressing cloud of inferiority begin to form in her little mental sky, and see her begin to distort her
little personality by unconsciously developing a bitterness toward white people; when you have to
concoct an answer for a five-year-old son asking in agonizing pathos: 'Daddy, why do white people treat
colored people so mean?'; when you take a cross-country drive and find it necessary to sleep night after
night in the uncomfortable corners of your automobile because no motel will accept you; when you are
humiliated day in and day out by nagging signs reading 'white' and 'colored'; when your first name
becomes 'nigger' and your middle name becomes 'boy' (however old you are) and your last name
becomes 'John,' and when your wife and mother are never given the respected title 'Mrs.'; when you are
harried by day and haunted by night by the fact that you are a Negro, living constantly at tiptoe stance
never quite knowing what to expect next, and plagued with inner fears and outer resentments; when
you are forever fighting a degenerating sense of 'nobodiness'; then you will understand why we find it
difficult to wait."

(Dr. Martin Luther King, Jr., "Letter From a Birmingham Jail," April 16, 1963.

"I Have a Dream: Writings and Speeches That Changed the World", ed. by James M. Washington.
HarperCollins, 1992)

Anaphora in President Franklin Roosevelt's Second Inaugural Address

"But here is the challenge to our democracy: In this nation, I see tens of millions of its citizens — a
substantial part of its whole population — who at this very moment are denied the greater part of what
the very lowest standards of today call the necessities of life.

I see millions of families trying to live on incomes so meager that the pall of family disaster hangs over
them day by day.
I see millions whose daily lives in city and on farm continue under conditions labeled indecent by a so-
called polite society half a century ago.

I see millions denied education, recreation, and the opportunity to better their lot and the lot of their
children.

I see millions lacking the means to buy the products of farm and factory and by their poverty denying
work and productiveness to many other millions.

I see one-third of a nation ill-housed, ill-clad, ill-nourished.

But it is not in despair that I paint you that picture. I paint it for you in hope — because the nation,
seeing and understanding the injustice in it, proposes to paint it out."

(Franklin D.

Roosevelt, Second Inaugural Address, January 20, 1937)

The Lighter Side of Anaphora

"I don't like you sucking around, bothering our citizens, Lebowski. I don't like your jerk-off name. I don't
like your jerk-off face. I don't like your jerk-off behavior, and I don't like you, jerk-off."

(Policeman in "The Big Lebowski", 1998)

Richard Nordquist

Updated July 19, 2018

Metonymy is a figure of speech (or trope) in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with
which it's closely associated (such as "crown" for "royalty").

Metonymy is also the rhetorical strategy of describing something indirectly by referring to things around
it, as in describing someone's clothing to characterize the individual. Adjective: metonymic.
A variant of metonymy is synecdoche.

Etymology: From the Greek, "change of name"

Examples and Observations

"In a corner, a cluster of lab coats made lunch plans."

(Karen Green, Bough Down. Siglio, 2013)

"Many standard items of vocabulary are metonymic. A red-letter day is important, like the feast days
marked in red on church calendars. . . . On the level of slang, a redneck is a stereotypical member of the
white rural working class in the Southern U.S., originally a reference to necks sunburned from working in
the fields."

(Connie Eble, "Metonymy." The Oxford Companion to the English Language, 1992)

"In Stockholm, Sweden, where Obama was traveling on Wednesday, the White House praised the vote
and said that it would continue to seek support for a 'military response'"

(David Espo, "Obama Wins Backing From Senate Panel on Syria Strike." Associated Press, September 5,
2013)

"Whitehall prepares for a hung parliament."

(The Guardian, January 1, 2009)

"Fear gives wings."

(Romanian proverb)

"He used the events to show the Silicon Valley crowd that he was just like them--and that he understood
their financial needs better than the suits on Wall Street."

(Businessweek, 2003)

"I stopped at a bar and had a couple of double Scotches. They didn't do me any good. All they did was
make me think of Silver Wig, and I never saw her again."

(Raymond Chandler, The Big Sleep)

Using Part of an Expression for the Whole

"One of the favorite American metonymic processes is the one in which a part of a longer expression is
used to stand for the whole expression. Here are some examples of the 'part of an expression for the
whole expression' metonymy in American English:

Danish for Danish pastry

shocks for shock absorbers

wallets for wallet-sized photos

Ridgemont High for Ridgemont High School

the States for the United States

(Zoltán Kövecses, American English: An Introduction. Broadview, 2000)

The Real World and the Metonymic World

"[I]n the case of metonymy, . . . one object stands for another. For example, understanding the sentence"

The ham sandwich left a big tip.

Involves identifying the ham sandwich with the thing he or she ate and setting up a domain in which the
ham sandwich refers to the person. This domain is separate from the 'real' world, in which the phrase
'ham sandwich refers to a ham sandwich. The distinction between the real world and the metonymic
world can be seen in the sentence:

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The waitress spoke to the complaining ham sandwich and then she took it away.

This sentence does not make sense; it uses the phrase 'ham sandwich' to refer both to the person (in the
metonymic world) and a ham sandwich (in the real world)."

(Arthur B. Markman, Knowledge Representation. Lawrence Erlbaum, 1999)

Going to Bed

"The following trivial metonymic [utterance] may serve as an illustration of an idealized cognitive model:

(1) Let's go to bed now.

Going to bed is typically understood metonymically in the sense of 'going to sleep.' This metonymic
target forms part of an idealized script in our culture: when I want to sleep, I first go to bed before I lie
down and fall asleep. Our knowledge of this sequence of acts is exploited in metonymy: in referring to
the initial act we evoke the whole sequence of acts, in particular the central act of sleeping."

(Günter Radden, "The Ubiquity of Metonymy." Cognitive and Discourse Approaches to Metaphor and
Metonymy, ed. by José Luis Otal Campo, Ignasi Navarro

Ferrando, and Begoña Bellés Fortuño. Universitat Jaume, 2005)

Metonymy in Cigarette Advertising

"Metonymy is common in cigarette advertising in countries where legislation prohibits depictions of the
cigarettes themselves or of people using them. "

(Daniel Chandler, Semiotics. Routledge, 2007)

"Metonymic ads often feature a specific product attribute: Benson & Hedges the gold cigarette box, Silk
Cut the use of purple, Marlboro the use of red . . .."

(Sean Brierley, The Advertising Handbook. Routledge, 1995)

"As a form of association, metonymy is particularly powerful in making arguments. It not only links two
disparate signs but makes an implicit argument about their similarities. . . . One of the most famous
cigarette slogans was developed by Sigmund Freud's nephew, Edward Bernays who, in creating the
phrase 'You've come a long way, baby!' hoped to 'expunge the hussy label from women who smoked
publicly' by referring to cigarettes as 'torches of freedom.' This was one of the early examples of an
advertising slogan that relied on social context to be imbued with meaning. As with most good
metonyms, this image was linked with a cultural referent that aided in the persuasion."

(Jonathan W. Rose, Making "Pictures in Our Heads": Government Advertising in Canada. Greenwood,
2000)

The Difference Between Metaphor and Metonymy

"Metaphor creates the relation between its objects, while metonymy presupposes that relation."

(Hugh Bredin, "Metonymy." Poetics Today, 1984)

"Metonymy and metaphor also have fundamentally different functions. Metonymy is about referring: a
method of naming or identifying something by mentioning something else which is a component part or
symbolically linked. In contrast, a metaphor is about understanding and interpretation: it is a means to
understand or explain one phenomenon by describing it in terms of another."

(Murray Knowles and Rosamund Moon, Introducing Metaphor. Routledge, 2006)

"If metaphor works by transposing qualities from one plane of reality to another, metonymy works by
associating meanings within the same plane. . . . The representation of reality inevitably involves a
metonym: we choose a part of 'reality' to stand for the whole. The urban settings of television crime
serials are metonyms—a photographed street is not meant to stand for the street itself, but as a
metonym of a particular type of city life--inner-city squalor, suburban respectability, or city-centre
sophistication."

(John Fiske, Introduction to Communication Studies, 2nd ed. Routledge, 1992)

The Difference Between Metonymy and Synecdoche

"Metonymy resembles and is sometimes confused with the trope of synecdoche. While likewise based
on a principle of contiguity, synecdoche occurs when a part is used to represent a whole or a whole to
represent a part, as when workers are referred to as 'hands' or when a national football team is signified
by reference to the nation to which it belongs: 'England beat Sweden.' As way of example, the saying
that 'The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world' illustrates the difference between metonymy and
synecdoche.

Here, 'the hand' is a synecdochic representation of the mother of whom it is a part, while 'the cradle'
represents a child by close association."

(Nina Norgaard, Beatrix Busse, and Rocío Montoro, Key Terms in Stylistics. Continuum, 2010)

Semantic Metonymy

"An oft-cited example of metonymy is the noun tongue, which designates not only a human organ but
also a human capacity in which the organ plays a conspicuous part. Another noted example is the change
of orange from the name of a fruit to the color of that fruit. Since orange refers to all instances of the
color, this change also includes generalization. A third example

(Bolinger, 1971)
is the verb want, which once meant 'lack' and changed to the contiguous sense of 'desire.' In these
examples, both senses still survive.

"Such examples are established; where several meanings survive, we have semantic metonymy: the
meanings are related and also independent of each other. Orange is a polysemic word, it's two distinct
and nondependent meanings metonymically related."

(Charles Ruhl, On Monosemy: A Study in Linguistic Semantics. SUNY Press, 1989)

Discourse-Pragmatic Functions of Metonymy

"One of the most important discourse-pragmatic functions of metonymy is to enhance cohesion and
coherence of the utterance. It is something that is already at the very heart of metonymy as a conceptual
operation where one content stands for another but both are actively activated at least to some degree.
In other words, metonymy is an efficient way of saying two things for the price of one, i.e. two concepts
are activated while only one is explicitly mentioned

(cf. Radden & Kövecses 1999:19)

. This necessarily enhances the cohesion of an utterance because two topical concepts are referred to by
means of one label, and there is consequently, at least nominally, less shifting or switching between
these two topics."

(Mario Brdar and Rita Brdar-Szabó, "The (Non-)Metonymic Uses of Place Names in English, German,
Hungarian, and Croatian." Metonymy and Metaphor in Grammar, ed. by Klaus-Uwe Panther, Linda L.
Thornburg, and Antonio Barcelona. John Benjamins, 2009)

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Paradox

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Definition and Examples of Paradox in English Grammar

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visual paradox

A visual paradox.

Michael Phillips/Getty Images

by

Richard Nordquist

Updated May 31, 2019

A paradox is a figure of speech in which a statement appears to contradict itself. Adjective: paradoxical.

In everyday communication, notes H.F. Platt, paradox "is mostly used for expressing astonishment or
disbelief at something unusual or unexpected" (Encyclopedia of Rhetoric, 2001).

A compressed paradox (one that's expressed in just a few words) is called an oxymoron.

Etymology: From the Greek, "incredible, contrary to opinion or expectation."

Pronunciation: PAR-a-dox

Also Known As: paradoxa (Greek)

Examples

"Some of the biggest failures I ever had were successes." (attributed to American actress and singer Pearl
Bailey)
"The swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot." (Henry David Thoreau, Walden, 1854)

"If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness." (Alexander Smith, "On the Writing of
Essays." Dreamthorp, 1854)

"I have found the paradox, that if you love until it hurts, there can be no more hurt, only more love."
(attributed to Mother Teresa)

"War is peace."

"Freedom is slavery."

"Ignorance is strength."

(George Orwell, 1984)

“Paradoxically though it may seem . . ., it is none the less true that life imitates art far more than art
imitates life.” (Oscar Wilde)

"Language . . . has created the word loneliness to express the pain of being alone. And it has created the
word solitude to express the glory of being alone." (Paul Tillich, The Eternal Now, 1963)

"Some day you will be old enough to start reading fairy tales again." (C.S. Lewis to his godchild, Lucy
Barfield, to whom he dedicated The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe)

Pun

When it rains, it pours."(slogan of Morton Salt since 1911)

"When it pours, it reigns."

(slogan of Michelin tires)

Kings worry about a receding heir line.

"What food these morsels be!"(slogan of Heinz pickles, 1938)

"American Home has an edifice complex."

(slogan of American Home magazine)

"Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight"(Dylan Thomas, "Do not go gentle into that good
night")

"Look deep into our ryes."(slogan of Wigler's Bakery)

"Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and quoted."(Fred Allen)

"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."(Groucho Marx)

"I saw a documentary on how ships are kept together. Riveting!"

(Canadian comedian Stewart Francis, quoted by Mark Brown in "Edinburgh Fringe's 10 Funniest Jokes
Revealed." The Guardian, August 20, 2012)

.”

This poem became one of the most popular nursery rhymes told to little children – often in the form of
song. In this nursery rhyme, a child speaks to a star (an inanimate object). Hence, this is a classic example
of apostrophe.

Example #3: Frankenstein (By Mary Shelly)

Look at how Mary Shelly uses apostrophe in her novel Frankenstein:

“Oh! Stars and clouds and winds, ye are all about to mock me; if ye really pity me, crush sensation and
memory; let me become as naught; but if not, depart, depart, and leave me in darkness.”

Talking to stars, clouds, and winds is apostrophe.

Example #4: Death Be Not Proud (By John Donne)

“Death be not proud, though some have called thee

Mighty and dreadful, for, thou art not so,

For, those, whom thou think’st, thou dost overthrow,

Die not, poor death, nor yet canst thou kill me.”

Here, Donne speaks to death, an abstract idea, as if it were a person capable of comprehending his
feelings.

Example #5: The Sun Rising (By John Donne)

John Donne once more uses apostrophe in his poem The Sun Rising:

“Busy old fool, unruly Sun,

Why dost thou thus,

Through windows, and through curtains, call on

us?

Must to thy motions lovers’ seasons run?

Saucy pedantic wretch …”

The poet addresses the sun in an informal and colloquial way, as if it were a real human being. He asks
the Sun in a rude way why the Sun appeared and spoiled the good time he was having with his beloved.

Example #5: A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man (By James Joyce)

James Joyce uses apostrophe in his novel A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man:

“Welcome, O life! I go to encounter for the millionth time the reality of experience and to forge in the
smithy of my soul the uncreated conscience of my race.”

Being able to talk to something abstract – like life itself – is possible only in literature.
Example #6: To a Stranger Born in Some Distant Country Hundreds of Years from Now (By Billy Collins)

In this excerpt, the poet uses conventional apostrophe starting with “O”:

“O stranger of the future!

O inconceivable being!

Whatever the shape of your house,

However you scoot from place to place,

No matter how strange and colorless the clothes you may wear,

I bet nobody likes a wet dog either.

I bet everyone in your pub,

Even the children, pushes her away.”

The speaker is talking to an imaginary character, the “stranger.”

Example #7: Sire (By W. S. Merwin)

Another apostrophe example comes from the poem Sire, written by W. S. Merwin:

“Forerunner, I would like to say, silent pilot,

Little dry death, future,

Your indirections are as strange to me

As my own. I know so little that anything

You might tell me would be a revelation.”

Synecdoche
This is flesh I’m talking about here. Flesh that needs to be loved. Feet that need to rest and to dance;
backs that need support; shoulders that need arms, strong arms I’m telling you.

(Beloved by Toni Morrison)