Polysyndeton:the use of a conjunction between each word, phrase, or clause. The rhetorical effect is often a feeling of multiplicity, energetic enumeration, and building up.
Example: They read and studied and wrote and drilled. I laughed and played and talked and flunked.
"And then I'll be arrested and sent to jail and you'll live happily ever after with a friendly guardian, spending your time inventing things and reading books and sharpening your little monkey teeth, and bravery and nobility will prevail at last, and this wicked world will slowly but surely become a place of cheerful harmony, and everybody will be singing and dancing and giggling like the littlest elf! A happy ending! Is that what you had mind?" -Lemony Snicket
ReplyDelete"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...."
ReplyDelete-Barbara Jordan
"Let the white folks have their money and power and segregation and sarcasm and big houses and schools and lawns like carpets, and books, and mostly--mostly--let them have their whiteness." - Maya Angelou
ReplyDelete"'And the Germans will not be able to help themselves from imagining the cruelty their brothers endured at our hands, and our boot heels, and the edge of our knives. And the Germans will be sickened by us. And the Germans will talk about us. And the Germans will fear us. And when the Germans close their eyes at night, and their subconscious tortures them for the evil they’ve done, it will be with thoughts of us that it tortures them with.' Lieutenant Aldo Raine (Brad Pitt), Inglourious Basterds" -The Almighty Wikipedia
ReplyDelete"When I first saw New York I was twenty, and it was summertime, and I got off a DC-7 at the old Idlewild temporary terminal in a new dress which had seemed very smart in Sacramento but seemed less smart already, even in the old Idlewild temporary terminal, and the warm air smelled of mildew and some instinct, programmed by all the movies I had ever seen and all the songs I had ever heard sung and all the stories I had ever read about New York, informed me that it would never be quite the same again. In fact it never was."
ReplyDeleteFrom Goodbye to All That by Joan Dideon, 1968.
What I really love about this passage is the short sentence that follows the lengthy one. Now that's writing!
“…Peering in maps for ports and piers and roads;
ReplyDeleteAnd every object that might make me fear
Misfortune to my ventures…”
The Merchant of Venice, Lines 20-22
William Shakespeare