Writing Help 129 | - ☆ Freelance Writer
Apr 04, 2013 | #1
Using Advanced Rhetorical Devices to Surprise and Delight
Although the names of the devices in this series seem to get more and more bizarre to the mind of the English speaker (and more daunting to pronounce as a result), their actual definitions and functions thankfully do not grow proportionately complex. We find that in the case of antonomasia, we have a device that, like so many others on the list, describes a linguistic phenomenon that we have all heard and used many times, but simply did not have a term to describe. One of the most fascinating aspects of the study of rhetoric to my mind is the gradual discovery that every way you can think of saying something, every common arrangement of words to produce a given effect, has a name, and has been defined, even though most people are not aware of this. Knowing the names of such things allows you to use, identify, and examine them far more efficiently. Some students have asked me why all of these terms are even necessary, when we could just use "simple English" to describe them. My response is that it is far more efficient and focused to use rhetorical terms. After all, imagine writing a paper contrasting the uses of pleonasm to the use of ellipsis in a short story. Your title could be "Pleonasm versus Ellipsis in Short Story X" if you use the rhetorical terms, or it could be "The Use of Redundant Words in Proximity for Clarification or Emphasis versus the Act of Omitting Grammatically Necessary Words (Usually in Parallel Constructions) to Concentrate Meaning in Short Story X" if you choose not to use the terms. In this field as in many others, technical terminology serves as a kind of shorthand, providing convenient tags which memory can retrieve quickly, thereby gaining efficient access to the various contents associated with those terms.
Turning now to the title term before I am knocked completely off-track, we can define antonomasia as that device you have heard thousands of times, whereby a word or phrase is substituted for a proper name. Technically, I suppose this might include all of the unfortunate names that people call each other in anger every day (like idiot, pig, half-wit, and the whole family of even more offensive examples), but in literary usage it describes a term which is consistently substituted in the place of a given proper name. One excellent example (or more properly, several examples) is the host of names given to Jesus of Nazareth. He is known as The Lamb of God, The Prince of Peace, The Redeemer, The Savior, The Son of God, The Right Hand of the Father, and many others. In every case, we can see his proper name is being replaced with a descriptive phrase, and this is the core of antonomasia. Other well known examples include, fittingly enough, all of the names people have given the devil, like The Prince of Darkness, The Tempter, Old Nick, and the rest. Elvis Presley is known simply as The King, Babe Ruth The Sultan of Swat, Bob Cole The Voice of the Maple Leafs, and Lord Voldemort He Who Must Not Be Named.
Antonomasia is sometimes also applied to the opposite of the naming substitution described above, where a proper name is substituted in place of a more general descriptive label. For example, I can refer to someone as an Einstein, which indicates that he (or she, even though the genders do not fit in this case) is a very intelligent person. Shifts in popular culture lead to many shifts in this kind of naming, as new characters emerge and enter the popular consciousness. For a time, it was possible to refer to an obnoxious male teen as a Stiffler after the American Pie movies, and currently, calling someone Bill Gates means he or she has an excessive amount of money.
Antonomasia
Although the names of the devices in this series seem to get more and more bizarre to the mind of the English speaker (and more daunting to pronounce as a result), their actual definitions and functions thankfully do not grow proportionately complex. We find that in the case of antonomasia, we have a device that, like so many others on the list, describes a linguistic phenomenon that we have all heard and used many times, but simply did not have a term to describe. One of the most fascinating aspects of the study of rhetoric to my mind is the gradual discovery that every way you can think of saying something, every common arrangement of words to produce a given effect, has a name, and has been defined, even though most people are not aware of this. Knowing the names of such things allows you to use, identify, and examine them far more efficiently. Some students have asked me why all of these terms are even necessary, when we could just use "simple English" to describe them. My response is that it is far more efficient and focused to use rhetorical terms. After all, imagine writing a paper contrasting the uses of pleonasm to the use of ellipsis in a short story. Your title could be "Pleonasm versus Ellipsis in Short Story X" if you use the rhetorical terms, or it could be "The Use of Redundant Words in Proximity for Clarification or Emphasis versus the Act of Omitting Grammatically Necessary Words (Usually in Parallel Constructions) to Concentrate Meaning in Short Story X" if you choose not to use the terms. In this field as in many others, technical terminology serves as a kind of shorthand, providing convenient tags which memory can retrieve quickly, thereby gaining efficient access to the various contents associated with those terms.Turning now to the title term before I am knocked completely off-track, we can define antonomasia as that device you have heard thousands of times, whereby a word or phrase is substituted for a proper name. Technically, I suppose this might include all of the unfortunate names that people call each other in anger every day (like idiot, pig, half-wit, and the whole family of even more offensive examples), but in literary usage it describes a term which is consistently substituted in the place of a given proper name. One excellent example (or more properly, several examples) is the host of names given to Jesus of Nazareth. He is known as The Lamb of God, The Prince of Peace, The Redeemer, The Savior, The Son of God, The Right Hand of the Father, and many others. In every case, we can see his proper name is being replaced with a descriptive phrase, and this is the core of antonomasia. Other well known examples include, fittingly enough, all of the names people have given the devil, like The Prince of Darkness, The Tempter, Old Nick, and the rest. Elvis Presley is known simply as The King, Babe Ruth The Sultan of Swat, Bob Cole The Voice of the Maple Leafs, and Lord Voldemort He Who Must Not Be Named.
Antonomasia is sometimes also applied to the opposite of the naming substitution described above, where a proper name is substituted in place of a more general descriptive label. For example, I can refer to someone as an Einstein, which indicates that he (or she, even though the genders do not fit in this case) is a very intelligent person. Shifts in popular culture lead to many shifts in this kind of naming, as new characters emerge and enter the popular consciousness. For a time, it was possible to refer to an obnoxious male teen as a Stiffler after the American Pie movies, and currently, calling someone Bill Gates means he or she has an excessive amount of money.