Sunday Word: Aposiopesis

[sallymn]

aposiopesis [ap-uh-sahy-uh-pee-sisl-kawr]

noun:
a sudden breaking off in the midst of a sentence, as if from inability or unwillingness to proceed; the leaving of a thought incomplete usually by a sudden breaking off (as in "his behavior was - but I blush to mention that")

Examples:

"I can’t even" indicates a speaker or writer is just on the

Comments

[full_metal_ox]

An effective use occurs in “The Voice of the Lobster” from Alice’s Adventures in Wonderland:

'Tis the voice of the Lobster: I heard him declare
"You have baked me too brown, I must sugar my hair."
As a duck with its eyelids, so he with his nose
Trims his belt and his buttons, and turns out his toes.
When the sands are all dry, he is gay as a lark,
And will talk in contemptuous tones of the Shark;
But, when the tide rises and sharks are around,
His voice has a timid and tremulous sound.

I passed by his garden, and marked, with one eye,
How the Owl and the Panther were sharing a pie:
The Panther took pie-crust, and gravy, and meat,
While the Owl had the dish as its share of the treat.
When the pie was all finished, the Owl, as a boon,
Was kindly permitted to pocket the spoon;
While the Panther received knife and fork with a growl,
And concluded the banquet by ---

[sallymn]

Oh yes, I love that (huge Alice fan here...)

[spikesgirl58]

I do that all the time, but I honestly think it has more to do with attention span than anything else...

[full_metal_ox]

All sorts of people never exposed to the sort of highfalutin’ education that bestows knowledge of those sesquipedalian Latinate terms use rhetorical devices all the dang time- they’re what argument and persuasion are made of, and instruction in their existence and use would help to foster critical thinking (although a more up-to-date terminology would be in order.)

They spoke in fragments and ellipses, in periphrastics and aposiopesis, in a style abundant in chiasmus, metonymy, meiosis, oxymoron, and zeugma; their dazzling rhetorical techniques left him baffled and uncomfortable, which beyond much doubt was their intention.

Welcome to Internet meme culture.

[sallymn]

I admit, I don't know most of 'em, even when I use the thing they describe...

[full_metal_ox]

My point being that Lord Macaulay, in being snootily dismissive of his culture’s admittedly classist educational system, was himself committing classist collateral damage: the peasants have been doing this stuff, automatically and intuitively, long before Aristotle, let alone Oxbridge, codified it!

(Which is one reason I love the likes of Urban Dictionary and TV Tropes, as regularly refreshed bodies of descriptive rather than prescriptive folkademia.)