Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric: Wow

Long-time friend and occasional RipChurch commenter Izzy O'Cayce has been generous with both music and word, friendship and constructive criticism, anal-retentive coffee-making and single-malt scotch pouring over the years.

His latest contribution to the Otter-Life has just arrived, and is Ward Farnsworth's Classical English Rhetoric.  My first impression on picking it up is that it's a well-made book, the sort where the paper feels particularly good to the fingers.

Then you open it, and it gets even better.

The premise is that "Everyone speaks and writes in patterns" that sometimes arise from "unconscious custom" (vii).  Farnsworth's vast achievement here is not merely to codify rhetorical devices: anybody who's looked at classical rhetoric will flinch at the first sign of definitions of Greek rhetorical terms like "chiasmus" and "anastrophe" and "prolepsis."

Never you mind.

What really sets Farnsworth's book apart here is the rambunctious joy with which he piles up examples from great English speeches, poems, plays, novels, and essays.

As one who flees screaming when told that "polyptoton" means "repeating the root of a word with a different ending," I (like other lovers of language and English in particular) get a frisson reading the elegant, rolling samples: "Judge not, lest ye be judged"; "With eager feeding food doth choke the feeder"; "The prophecy was that I should be dismemebered; and - Aye! I lost this leg.  I now prophesy that I will dismember the dismemberer."

(That last, in case you were curious, was Captain Ahab from Melville's Moby Dick.  You will remember not reading it in tenth grade.)

What makes Farnsworth so readable is that the samples he gives are a joyous riot of great English.  If you don't care about that, or think that good style is The New York Times, you won't like this book much.

But if you care about language, and if you care about making it beautiful and astonishing and effective, this book might be for you.

I'm considering using it in my college composition classes next term and asking students to imitate the masters of prose.

Why not?  Who's it gonna hurt if they drop a little anastrophe into their status updates and some asyndeton into their text messages?

Comments

[Kathy]

Books about language do I love. You must I thank for this post.
I came, I read, I added another item to my to-do list.