Triffids Beard 2 - The Bearded Triffid

ox.
Metonymy uses a name associated with an object instead of the object itself. Thus we might say "New
Zealand has decided to send troops to Iraq" when we really mean that the government of New Zealand
made that decision. Metonymy should not be confused with antonomasia where the surname of a
person is used as a generic term -- quisling or macadam or hoover or boycott, although the latter is
rather odd, being a verb as opposed to the more usual noun.
With hyperbole we have an exaggeration for effect ("If I've told you once I've told you a million times...").
Litotes gives the same effect by use of the negative and often comes across as a dry or amusing
understatement ("I am not unused to saying this...").
The list of rhetorical devices that we employ for effect is again probably endless and highly elaborate
classifications of them have been the delight of rhetoricians and grammarians over the centuries. An
enormous list of hair-splitting definitions was published by Quintilian in a book called Institutio Oratorio
in the first century AD and the list was rendered into English equivalents by one George Puttenham in
the 16th century. I bet most authors would be overjoyed to have their books remembered and used for
as long as Quintilian's was!
Spelling, punctuation, grammar and rhetoric are legitimate subjects of study and generations of British
schoolchildren have learned to hate them. I studied them quite intensively for five years under the
bucket category of English Language. The lessons learned so painfully are probably the most useful I
have ever acquired and scarcely a day goes by that I don't use them.
We are talking about communication and clarity of expression. It is simply not possible to communicate
effectively if the communication channel is corrupt. The language is flexible and will take a lot of abuse
before it finally gives up -- but the greater the degree of corruption, the more the rules are mistreated,
the harder it becomes to extract any meaning from the text. Just consider how much meaning was
destroyed in my umbrella paragraph by only two simple abuses of the system.
Rules are made to be broken and language is an ever-evolving thing (God forbid that it should ever
stagnate). But you simply cannot break the rules meaningfully if you don't know what the rules are in the
first place; that's a given. Many people today do not know what the rules are because nobody has ever
thought to tell them. The study of spelling, punctuation, grammar and rhetoric has largely vanished from
our educational system. People who produce illiterate prose (and therefore fail to communicate) are
generally not stupid, they are merely ignorant. And ignorance is correctable.
I have broken many of the rules of English in the writing of this article. Perhaps you would like to play a
game and see how many violations you can find. I did it deliberately to enhance the effect I was trying to
achieve and in every single case I knew what rule I was breaking and why I was breaking it. Today that is
an increasingly uncommon skill.
We have to learn the rules of all our daily activities. We can't drive a car until we know the rules of
driving, we can't use a computer system until we know the rules of clicking a mouse, we can't buy a
round in the pub until we know the rules of money. Nobody demands or expects perfect knowledge of
these things; just enough to get by. Is it too much to expect a similar working knowledge of your own
language? I don't think so.
Now let's see if I can do it. Thsi (sic) is wot i red on my hols.
Carl Hiaasen bids fair to become my favourite thriller writer. In Lucky You two people (one nice, one
nasty) win the Florida State Lottery. The nasty one does not wish to share the prize and kidnap, murder
and mayhem result; much to the annoyance of a large crab and a waitress with a pair of orange panties.
The novel is brutal and funny and sometimes you don't know whether to laugh or throw up. Hiaasen
reminds me very much of Joseph Wambaugh and by a strange coincidence I came across Wambaugh's
The Golden Orange this month. It is quite an old novel, but it has always escaped me in the past. It
deals with the cynical manipulations of the super-rich. The heroine appears not to have inherited daddy's
fortune. There may not even be a fortune or maybe she has been kept from it. Enter an alcoholic ex-cop