Diacope Rhetoric

Diacope is a  rhetorical term for the repetition of a word or phrase broken up by one or more intervening words. Plural diacopae or diacopes. Adjective: diacopic. As Mark Forsyth has observed, Diacope, diacope ... it works. Nobody would have cared if Hamlet had asked, Whether or not to be? or To be or not? or To be or to die? No. The most famous line in English literature is famous not for the content but for the wording. To be or not to be (The Elements of Eloquence, 2013). Etymology:  From the Greek, a cutting in two. Examples of Diacope Scott Farkus staring out at us with his yellow eyes. He had yellow eyes! So help me, God! Yellow eyes!(Ralphie Parker, A Christmas Story, 1983)I hate to be poor, and we are degradingly poor, offensively poor, miserably poor, beastly poor.(Bella Wilfer in chapter four of Our Mutual Friend by Charles Dickens)It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesnt know; and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything.(Joyce Cary, Art Reality, 1958)It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didnt give enough.(Quentin Crisp, Manners From Heaven, 1984)Life is not lost by dying! Life is lostMinute by minute, day by dragging day,In all the thousand, small, uncaring ways.(Stephen Vincent Benà ©t, A Child Is Born, 1942)Their entire lives had been spent in the deification of the unessential, in the reduction of puttering to a science. They had puttered their lives away and were still puttering, only, as they grew older, with a greater intensity, and from the first their lives had been extremely happy.(Charles Macomb Flandrau, Little Pictures of People. Prejudices, 1913)There is a land of the living and a land of the dead and the bridge is love, the only survival, the only meaning.(Thornton Wilder, The Bridge of San Luis Rey, 1927)All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion.(Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1877)I am neat, scrupulously neat, in regard to the things I care about; but a book, as a book, is not one of those things.(Max Beerbohm, Whistlers Writing. The Pall Mall Magazine, 1904)He wore prim vested suits with neckties blocked primly against the collar buttons of his primly starched white shirts. He had a primly pointed jaw, a primly straight nose, and a prim manner of speaking that was so correct, so gentlemanly, that he se emed a comic antique.(Russell Baker, Growing Up, 1982)Put out the light, and then put out the light.(Othello in William Shakespeares Othello, the Moor of Venice, Act Five, scene 2)And now, my beauties, something with poison in it, I think. With poison in it, but attractive to the eye and soothing to the smell.(The Wicked Witch of the West, The Wizard of Oz, 1939)Of course, in an age of madness, to expect to be untouched by madness is a form of madness. But the pursuit of sanity can be a form of madness, too.(Saul Bellow, Henderson the Rain King. Viking, 1959)Youre not fully clean until youre Zestfully clean.(advertising slogan for Zest soap)I knew it. Born in a hotel room--and goddamn it--died in a hotel room.(last words of playwright Eugene ONeill)Tourettes teaches you what people will ignore and forget, teaches you to see the reality-knitting mechanism people employ to tuck away the intolerable, the incongruous, the disruptive--it teaches you this because youre the one lobbing the intolerable, incongruous, and disruptive their way.(Jonathan Lethem, Motherless Brooklyn. Doubleday, 1999)[British Prime Minister] Blair sounded like a man who had spent the morning riffling through handbooks of classical rhetoric: This indulgence has to stop. Because it is dangerous. It is dangerous if such regimes disbelieve us. Dangerous if they think they can use weakness, our hesitation, even the natural urges of our democracy towards peace, against us. Dangerous because one day they will mistake our innate revulsion against war for permanent incapacity.(Anthony Lane, The Prime Minister. The New Yorker, March 31, 2003) Diacope in Shakespeares  Antony and Cleopatra Cleopatra: O sun,Burn the great sphere thou movest in! darkling standThe varying shore o the world. O Antony,Antony, Antony! Help, Charmian, help, Iras, help;Help, friends below; lets draw him hither.Antony: Peace!Not Caesars valour hath oerthrown Antony,But Antonys hath triumphd on itself.Cleopatra: So it should be, that none but AntonyShould conquer Antony; but woe tis so!Antony: I am dying, Egypt, dying; onlyI here importune death awhile, untilOf many thousand kisses the poor lastI lay upon thy lips.(William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act Four, scene 15)Throughout the text [of Antony and Cleopatra] we find not rational and syllogistic logic, but persuasive figures that indicate tension, friction and explosion. . . . The play is filled with exclamations of vehemence and hyperbole, made more emphatic by the undercurrent of the colloquial. For example the iteration of thou at 4.2.11, the device ploce, works to construct conversational ease; at the same time the repetition of words with one or more in between, or diacope, although similar to ploce, has a very insistent and desperate effect, as in Cleopatras help at 4.15.13-14.(Sylvia Adamson, et al., Reading Shakespeares Dramatic Language: A Guide. Thomson Learning, 2001) Types of Diacope Diacope comes in a number of forms. The simplest is the vocative diacope: Live, baby, live. Yeah, baby, yeah. I am dying, Egypt, dying. Game over, man, game over. Zeds dead, baby, Zeds dead. All you do is chuck in somebodys name or their title and repeat. The effect is to put in a bit of emphasis, a certain finality, on the second word. . . .The other main form of diacope is the elaboration, where you chuck in an adjective. From sea to shining sea. Sunday bloody Sunday. O Captain! My Captain! Human, all too human. From harmony, from heavenly harmony . . . . or Beauty, real beauty, ends where intellectual expression begins. This form gives you a feeling both of precision (were not talking about fake beauty) and crescendo (its not merely a sea, its a shining sea).(Mark Forsyth, The Elements of Eloquence: How to Turn the Perfect English Phrase. Icon Books, 2013) The Lighter Side of Diacope Someone ate the baby,Its rather sad to say.Someone ate the babySo she wont be out to play.Well never hear her whiny cryOr have to feel if she is dry.Well never hear her asking, Why?Someone ate the baby.(Shel Silverstein, Dreadful. Where the Sidewalk Ends. Harper Row, 1974)Im gonna cut out now with this unusual song Im dedicating to an unusual person who makes me feel kind of unusual.(Christian Slater as Mark Hunter in Pump Up the Volume, 1990)I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because theyd never expect it.(Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts) Pronunciation: di AK oh pee Also Known As: semi-reduplication