| Polysyndeton (paulee-SIN-dih-tawn): Figure of addition and emphasis which intentionally employs a series of conjunctions (and, or, but, for, nor, so, yet) not normally found in successive words, phrases, or clauses; the deliberate and excessive use of conjunctions in successive words or clauses. |
|
|
|
|
| Examples | |
|
"In years gone by, there
were in every community men and women who spoke the language of duty
and morality and loyalty and
obligation."
-- William F. Buckley |
|
|
"And God
said, Let the earth bring forth the living creature after his kind,
cattle, and creeping thing, and beast of the
earth after his kind: and it was so. And God
made the beast of the earth after his kind, and cattle after
their kind, and every thing that creepeth upon the earth
after his kind: and God saw that it was good."
-- Genesis 1:24-25 (KJV) |
|
|
"They all tasted to me
like undersexed morons who had blundered or trickled into
the wrong beds in automatic response to sexy advertisements, or
to make themselves feel modern and emancipated, or to
reassure themselves about their virility or their
"normalcy," or even because they had nothing else
to do."
-- C.S. Lewis, The Screwtape Letters |
|
|
"It's [football] a way of
life, really, to those particular people who are a part of it. It's more
than a game, and regardless of what level it's played upon, it still
demands those attributes of courage and stamina and
coordinated efficiency and goes even beyond that for
[it] is a means -- it provides a mental and physical relaxation to
everybody that watches it, like yourself."
-- Vince Lombardi |
|
|
"We must change that
deleterious environment of the 80's, that environment which was
characterized by greed and hatred and
selfishness and mega-mergers and debt
overhang...."
-- Barbara Jordan, 1992 Democratic National Convention Keynote Address Note: Can you spot the conduplicatio? |
|
|
"As soon as he learned that
the Republican fiction writers, in Congress and out, had concocted a story
that I'd left him behind on the Lucian Islands and had sent a destroyer
back to find him at a cost to the taxpayers of two or three
or eight or twenty million dollars, his Scot
soul was furious." -- Franklin Delano Roosevelt (on his dog, Fala) |
|
|
"Oh, my piglets, we are
the origins of war -- not history's forces, nor the times,
nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor
causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor
kinds of government -- not any other thing. We are the killers." -- delivered by Katherine Hepburn (from the movie The Lion in Winter) |
|
|
© Copyright 2001-2009. |