VOCABULARY FOR WEEK October 18-22

ANACHRONISM: Placing an event, person, item, or verbal expression in the wrong historical period. In Shakespeare's Julius Caesar, Shakespeare writes the following lines:

Brutus: Peace! Count the clock.
Cassius: The clock has stricken three (Act II, scene i, lines 193-94).

Of course, there were no household clocks during Roman times, no more than there were DVD players! The reference is an anachronism, either accidental or intentional. Elizabethan theater often intentionally used anachronism in its costuming, a tradition that survives today when Shakespeare's plays are performed in biker garb or in Victorian frippery. Indeed, from surviving illustrations, the acting companies in Elizabethan England appeared to deliberately create anachronisms in their costumes. Some actors would dress in current Elizabethan garb, others in garb that was a few decades out of date, and others wore pseudo-historical costumes from past-centuries--all within a single scene or play.

DECORUM
Fitness in matters of language and usage: the grand and important theme is treated in a dignified and noble style, the humble or trivial in a lower manner. "Though initially just one of several virtues of style ('aptum'), decorum has become a governing concept for all of rhetoric. Essentially, if one's ideas are appropriately embodied and presented (thereby observing decorum), then one's speech will be effective. Conversely, rhetorical vices are breaches of some sort of decorum. Decorum invokes a range of social, linguistic, aesthetic, and ethical proprieties for both the creators and critics of speech or writing. Each of these must be balanced against each other strategically in order to be successful in understanding or creating discourse." (Silva Rhetoricae)
(See Cicero's discussion of decorum in De Oratore.)

MEIOSIS (See tapinosis.)
To belittle, use a degrading epithet, often through a trope of one word.
[Gk. "lessening"]
"rhymester" for "poet"; "shrink" for "psychiatrist"; "treehugger" for "environmentalist."

EPIZEUXIS
Repetition of a word for emphasis (usually with no words in between).
[Gk. "A fastening together"]
-"And my poor fool is hanged! No, no, no life!
Why should a dog, a horse, a rat have life,
And thou no breath at all? Thou'lt come no more,
Never, never, never, never!
Pray you, undo this button." (William Shakespeare, King Lear, V.3)
-"O dark, dark, dark, amid the blaze of noon." (Milton, Samson Agonistes, 80)
-"Break, break, break
On thy cold gray stones, O Sea:" (Tennyson)
-Waitress: Shut up! Shut up! Shut up! Bloody vikings. You can't have egg, bacon, spam and sausage without the spam.
Mrs. Bun: I don't like spam!
Mr. Bun: Shh dear, don't cause a fuss. I'll have your spam. I love it. I'm having spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, spam, baked beans, spam, spam, spam and spam.
(Monty Python, "The Spam Sketch")

OXYMORON
The yoking of two terms that are ordinarily contradictory.
[Gk. "sharp-dull"]
-"That building is a little bit big and pretty ugly."
(James Thurber)
-"O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches!"
(Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions)
-"This woman had known the hot whispers of a man who loved her, entirely if not eternally. And that she had answered, fiercely soft." ("Chasing Down the Dawn," Jewel Kilcher)
-"Act naturally," "found missing," "alone together," '"peace force," "terribly pleased," "small crowd," "clearly misunderstood."

TROPE
Rhetorical device that produces a shift in the meaning of words-- traditionally contrasted with a scheme, which changes only the shape of a phrase. Sixteenth-century rhetorician Peter Ramus identified four major tropes: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony. Post-Saussurean theorists have challenged such distinctions between the tropological and "literal" aspects of language, arguing that the rhetorical and metaphorical dimension of language is integral to all discourse, not just poetic and literary language.
[Gk. "a turn"]