We forget sometimes that we have to know what we want before we can know what to do, that we have to see the big picture before we can make a considered judgment about how to proceed. In matters of education this means taking the time to understand the theory of a subject, and in the study of language and literature, it means learning the ways by which we can configure our sentences and paragraphs. What is called a formal education is one that is concerned to understand just these theoretical configurations—the forms, or patterns, which shape the specific elements of a subject into the meaningful whole we see.
The patterns of words into which we can shape sentences are traditionally called figures of speech. These figures, or configurations, can be thought of as linguistic designs by which we direct our readers’ attention into and then through the ideas we are presenting for their consideration. Arthur Quinn, author of a both learned and practical manual for writers called Figures of Speech: Sixty Ways to Turn a Phrase, says in his preface that the phrase figures of speech “is misleading in its static, passive form. It should be the ‘figurings of speech’—or, better yet, simply ‘figuring speech.’” “We are confronted, inescapably,” he concludes, with the intoxicating possibility that we can make language do for us almost anything we want.” Whereupon there follows definitions and illustrations of figures with such lusty names as anastrophe, anadiplosis, and polyptoton.
As it happens, the English novelist Elizabeth Taylor (not the actress) wrote a short story entitled “A Red-Letter Day,” where in a paragraph about halfway through there appears this one sentence happily illustrating, in the brief scope of twenty words, these same three figures of speech. Mrs. Lancaster, the headmaster’s wife, is greeting parents on Visting Day at an English public (that is, private) school:
As smooth as minnows were Mrs. Lancaster’s phrases of welcome; she had soothed so many mothers, mothered so many boys.
When a writer chooses to invert the standard English word order of subject then predicate, as Taylor does here in the first clause of this sentence, the unexpectedly reversed word order is a figure called anastrophe, the purpose of which is to awaken the reader’s attention (which was no doubt expecting the regularly ordered Mrs. Lancaster’s phrases of welcome were as smooth as minnows) with a sudden little verbal pinch. And had the author reordered the elements to the point of disorder, for example, Mrs. Lancaster’s phrases of welcome as smooth as minnows were, she would have been employing (unsuccessfully) another figure of speech called hyperbaton, sometimes defined as “the violent displacement of words across a line. In citing a successful hyperbaton, Quinn quotes the poet W. H. Auden: About suffering they were never wrong, / The old masters. Such configurations require, as Taylor astutely displays in her sentence, a subtle sense of when enough is enough.
The remainder of this one sentence, from the semicolon to the period, combines both anadiplosis, and polyptoton. When the last word of one clause (mothers) is used again in some form to begin the next clause (mothered), the figure is called anadiplosis, which in the original Greek of the term means nothing more mysterious than to double up again. And when that same word makes an appearance in different grammatical forms as it does here (mothers as noun versus mothered as verb), the configuration is called polyptoton, Greek, again, for many falls, meaning many occurrences, or grammatical inflections. (Students of Latin or Greek or German will recognize the term case, which in those and other highly inflected languages means the change a word undergoes in spelling to indicate a change in grammatical function. Case derives from the Latin casus, a fall, which is what is pictured to happen when a word falls, or changes itself, through its many grammatical forms.)
Every subject has its own set of specialized terminology like this (called its argot), the purpose of which is to direct our attention when we are learning to a uniform general notion, so that we can recognize the diverse particular instances of that notion when we come upon them. What we might call a vertical arrangement to thinking typifies formal learning, and when we think that way, we can move our mind in both directions, from first learning the notion and then seeing it exemplified in the particular, or from observing a particular instance and then tracing it back up to its general source. What we should not do is move only horizontally, from particular to particular, never trying to find the larger, explanatory idea under which each instance has its existence. To think scientifically about something first means to think about generalities, all-embracing ideas which account for the specifics flowing from them. Formal thought, and formal education, follows the traditional axiom that “there is no science of singulars.” Science, then, means more than a knowledge of discrete facts.
And the worth of this way of learning might be of good consequence to us at the moment, because merely collecting facts in an ever-speeding world of events does not automatically produce a system, which is an organized body of facts. To organize facts, we need more than practicality: we need reason, purpose, intelligible end. Such things satisfyingly answer the human need for meaning, which usefulness alone, no matter its flamboyance, cannot.
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