Ducking the question.

Have you stopped beating your wife?
More to the point, have you stopped beating yours?

Answering a question with another question is a trick which politicians often use.

Mr Johnson lied about dying in a ditch, did he not?
Yes, but what about Jeremy Corbyn then?

Have you tidied your room up yet?
Mum, what's for lunch?

Teacher: Where is your coursework?
Pupil: I really like that brooch! Where did you get it?

Parliament was discussing a British surrender to Germany in 1941 after the fall of France:

You ask, what is our policy? I will say it is to wage war, by sea, land, and air, with all our might and all the strength that God can give us; to wage war against a monstrous tyranny...
You ask, what is our aim? I can answer in one word: Victory.

Winston Churchill said these words in the House and the die was cast.

But he still dodged the question, although he did mention that “We shall never surrender.”.

A Level Students only:

It is unhelpful to answer a question with a further question – and that is what the Greeks called it: anthypophora (anti-hypo-phora = against + underhand)

Next time someone does it to you, sit them down and quietly explain that you know all about anthypophoria and that it just has not effect on you! This works specially well in tutorials and even better at parties.

Common sense questions

The last blog translated anakoinosis questions as “cuddling up”. Actually it means, “common”. Like in “the common touch”.

Which is why people who are in no way common love it.

Especially politicians.

“Does he want to be PM, really? It’s small issues he deals with. The big issues, he ducks and dives. He likes his protests;” (Conservative Home on Mr Corbyn)

 The first of 60 questins for Boris Johnson from the Labour Party:

1.   Do you still think that the way to deal with advice from a female colleague is  to “just pat her on the bottom and send her on her way”?
2.   Do you still think that children of single mothers are ill-raised, ignorant, aggressive and illegitimate?
3.   Do you still think unmarried women who have children should be pushed into “destitution on a Victorian scale”?
4.   Do you still think a man should “take control of his woman”?

Especially people with stuff to sell you.

From the Political Betting site:

I'm A Celebrity 2019: Who is the favourite to do the first Bushtucker trial?

Who wouldn't love to watch Ian Wright get drenched in beetles?

Especially comedians.

Now for underhand – manipulative questions.(hyphorical ones that is).

Student demonstrators love them.

What do we want?
(Fill in the blanks here).
When do we want it?
Now!

Advertisers love them.

They get everyone joining in – being manipulated!

This blog is spending a lot of time on questions. Why do you think that is?

Questions

Questions are vitally important in writing, especially in getting people's attention.

Look at this:

I am going to talk today about Thomas Clarkson and slavery. Thomas Clarkson was the person who did more than anyone else to drive that evil out of the world.

(yawn...)

Now this:

Who has ever heard of Thomas Clarkson? Nobody? I am horrified. Doesn't anyone realise that he is the person who actually abolished slavery throughout the world?

Well, no actually...

Advertisers know this very well.

“Have you had a road accident recently? We can help...”
“How is your smile? Smile in a day with Darwood and Tanner dental specialists...”

Don't take it too far.

And did those feet in ancient time
Walk upon England's mountains green?
And was the holy Lamb of God
On England's pleasant pastures seen? 

And did the Countenance Divine
Shine forth upon our clouded hills?
And was Jerusalem builded here
Among these dark Satanic mills? 

Not really, although the belief that Jesus took a gap year in UK is now the official liberal intellectual anthem.

Praise works well too as a question (Anacoenosis=cuddling up).

How good is this then?

Who else could have done that? 

How sweet is that?

Or insults (epiplexis=beating up):

What is the point?
Why go on?
How could you?
Do you really mean that?
Could you repeat that please?

Or more simply (more Anacoenosis):

Why not?
What's to stop us?
Why shouldn't we?

Go on, you know you want to!

I put these obvious questions in because they form the backbone of civilization.

If, instead of carrying placards, instead of writing that biting comment, we could once again engage in civilized questioning in a polite way, might we not learn something?

More on this tomorrow. Can you wait that long?

A Level students only:

These types of uestions are all classical old chestnuts. They all have Greek names which you can ferret if it pleases you. Let's don't.

Oh all right then (it's in brackets for nerds)…

Bond, James Bond.

Way back in primaeval times (1982 to be exact), a woman in a red dress is sitting at the baccarat table. She loses and loses until finally, she says that she has to borrow another thousand pounds. And now we hear the hero's voice, off camera. He says, rather sarcastically, "I admire your courage, Miss…"

"Trench" the lady replies testily. And then, seeing who asked the question and clearly finding him attractive, she adds her first name, "Sylvia Trench."

Then she replies, clearly miffed, "I admire your luck Mr…"

The camera turns to the mysterious man, and he, still making fun of her and mimicking her rather silly introduction, says, "Bond, James Bond."

I lifted all this almost word for word from my mentor, Mark Forsyth, one of the wittiest writers I have ever had the pleasure of reading. Just as Shakespeare copied bits out of Holinshed, so I copy bits out of his Elements of Eloquence.

This little exchange is called a diacope - cutting in half, to be exact. 

It really works in USA (unless you actually live there).

Live, baby, live.
Yeah, bruvva, yeah. 

Game over, man, game over.

Diacope is so easy to do and it adds emphasis too.

Do you like fishing?
Do I like fishing? Yes, your Grace, I like fishing. 

Labour! Vote Labour! (Please add your own preference here), 

Winter is winter. 

Diacope. Use Diacope.

Imaginative people can easily use this as a strapline as advertised in the title - yes the title - of this blog- this very blog.

Sentences.

Short sentences are very contemporary. This comes from Spiked online.

The piece offers a grim reminder of the growing charge sheet against Corbyn’s Labour. Mirvis references the reported 130 outstanding cases cases of anti-Semitism being investigated by the party, as well as the Jewish MPs who have effectively been driven out by vile racist abuse.

Speaking today, at the launch of Labour’s ‘race and faith manifesto’ no less, Corbyn said ‘anti-Semitism in any form is vile and wrong’. He said ‘there is no place for it’ in Labour, reminding the audience that his is the party that ‘passed [the] Human Rights Act, that set up the Equality and Human Rights Commission’.

I have highlighted the four sentences in these two very short paragraphs to show how modern journalism works. Pithy, short sentences laid side by side like rank upon rank of soldiers.

But what if you want to be a bit more leisurely? What if you want a sort of chatty paragraph? Why not try and hide some clauses in those sentences?

We could write this:

Lawyers are only interested in money. Lawyers pay you compliments. Compliments are free!

Here is how Charles Dickens handles it:

It was a maxim with Mr Brass that the habit of paying compliments kept a man's tongue oiled without any expense; and that, as that useful member ought never to grow rusty or creak in turning on its hinges in the case of a practitioner of the law, in whom it should be always glib and easy, he lost few opportunities of improving himself by the utterance of handsome speeches and eulogistic expressions.

So what use is this?

One of the huge problems today is getting the institutions to listen to you, You can e mail them and get your email returned with a brief note: 

…unfortunately Miss Bossie-Boots is out of the office at the moment… 

…If you want to make a complaint press four...

A good letter does the trick every time. With an envelope and a stamp.

Robin Cooper wrote a book about this called the Timewaster Letters. Here is an example of his skill:

You might think that good letters need quite long paragraphs to make them look impressive. Notice the shortness of the sentences though and the modest size of the paragraphs.

The style nowadays is to use a lot of full stops. 

A level students only:

In your writing, short sentences are much easier to understand, and therefore mark, than very long ones. The day of the very long sentence and the very long paragraph has passed, I am afraid. Use full stops or, if you want to be clever: throw in a couple of colons; semi-colons too: it all adds up.

For those interested in long words, “táxis” is the Greek word for a rank of soldiers and so if you put the ranks (aka sentences) side by side, you get paratáxis which is the word for short sentences strung alongside each other in a paragraph.
KISS – keep it simple, stupid.

How long should a sentence be?

A long sentence is called a “Period”. This is a picture of Edward Gibbon who wrote volumes on the decline and fall of the Roman Empire. He adored very long sentences, some of which went on for pages.

Here is another long sentence with just one full stop. Please read it. It is adapted from a real comment on a real blog.

I am waiting for the so called green tv debate just to see where we are, although my favourite recent quote "we get that there are no jobs on a dead planet" perhaps seems a little extreme for some, (even though we should have got going in the 1970s oil crisis), all of which brings me to ask whether it is really all just about green energy, and furthermore it also prompts me to reply that the energy transition is important but so is cutting pollution, particularly in rivers, bodies of water and so on; and let me add that I am not too sure that the truth about both hydrogen production and transport has been thought through, and that goes for recycling solar pv as well as for batteries, all of which, nevertheless, pales into comparison when we come to Retro fitting some housing with insulation since we can heat modern housing designs electrically.

Well, what was that all about?

I adapted it myself and read it several times too and all I can remember is a load of jumbled thoughts strung together with words like “which”, “nevertheless” and cleverly placed semi-colons and commas.

Keep it short.

But if you keep it too short, you cannot make an argument.

“Tell me, do you plan, Mr Corbyn, to stamp out all racism in the Labour Party?”

“Of course.”

“Are you going, Mr Johnson, to make Britain Carbon neutral by 2050?”

“Yes.”

So you look as if you are fibbing.

As with everything, do it in moderation.

Except in short stories where you have to shoot out the sentences like bullets.

A Level students only

For your essays, you are often bound to write just five paragraphs - three in the middle and a start and a finish. If you keep the paragraphs, on a sheet of A4 down to about ten to fifteen lines, you are doing it right. That is in handwriting of course. Perhaps three or four sentences in each paragraph - except the start and finish which should both be short and punchy.

I am uncomfortable, as an English man, using the word Period. However, in USA it simply means a full stop!
Remember - all rules are there for the guidance of fools and the advice of wise men.

Word disorder.

Try this:

She took a green little jug off the shelf.

Why does this sound stupid?

Or this

He held out his lovely little old rectangular green French silver whittling knife to show me proudly.

That is strange, yes, but still good English.

Word order matters to us.

Here is the grammarians' way of doing adjectives: opinion, size, age, shape, colour, origin, material, purpose. Get one wrong and the whole things falls apart. Try it for yourself!

Here are some more very strict rules:

How do you like Hop-Hip music? Or the Dong-Ding of a bell?

Vowels like to go in this order: I A O.

Tit for tat, flip flop, bing bang bong.

The first and last words in a sentence are in the strongest position.

Angrily, she turned away.
Out of the door he ran.
Shut the hell up!
Will you stop that child bashing binging and bonging?
Must you do that?

To get the right words in the strongest place, you have to break grammatical rules of word order.

After all, rules you have to break sometimes.

Subject – verb - object.

He – hit – the ball.

The ball he hit flew like a bird.

She said, “Wha'ever.” 

“Wha'ever”, said she.

Alter the word order at your peril – but hey – risks you sometimes have to take!

Anyway, Nice to see you – to see you, nice!

For A Level students only:

This is called, in ancient Greek, “changing over”. (Hyperbaton) Changing the order of words works much better in Greek and Latin though, because they have word endings which show what each word it doing in the sentence; we got rid of our word endings centuries ago.

So we depend on word order.

And with that we must not mess.

Except when…

Drifting off into thoughtful silence...

Those little three dots/full stops are rarely used, which is a shame.
If only...
The trouble is that once you have discovered them, it is hard to stop.
I understand that alcohol is very similar...
And chocolate too...



There are three ways to use this excellent trick.

“Helen, I lov...” With that, Roberto fell back dead. He could not go on.

The second one is that you need not go on.

“Global warming is real,” Greta Thunberg proclaimed. “Polar bears are balancing on tiny icebergs. Penguins are being eaten by seals. The Maldives are sinking. Venice is under water. And then there are the fires in Australia, Florida and California...”
She had made her point. To continue would be to insult her audience.

The third way is that you want the audience to pause and think.

“OK. So you say that smoking cannabis is good for your health. I wonder if you have ever seen any smoker's lungs on the autopsy table?”
The professor sniffed. “My mother died of cancer...”

Once you have discovered these three full stops you just cannot stop. It is as catching as the exclamation mark!

She sprayed on some perfume just in case...
In case of what?
Just in case…

It is excellent for threats.

A friend of mine was working in an inner city school full of very violent boys. He was asked by the Principal to design a school motto in Latin for the new Academy. This is what he produced: “Tua Mater...”
The Principal did not have Latin so he asked my friend to explain.
It means “Your Mum...”

People on tv, especially men, when overcome with emotion often break off in the middle of a sentence, turn away and look at the floor. That is the same sort of thing.

“Tell me,” said the reporter shoving her microphone at her victim, “how do you feel now that your dog has been run over?”
“She was the best friend I have ever had. Excuse me a moment...”

Talk about the bleedin' obvious...
If only people would think before they write things...

A Level Students only:

Next time you do that Shakespeare play, count the dots! Loads of them. I won't list any of them here – you do the work yourself on this blog!
These three dots are called Aposyopesis. It just means, in classical Greek, fading away into silence...

Feelings...

We have five ways of feeling: eyes, nose, ears, mouth, fingertips. Did you know?
So we smell coffee, we see things, we hear stuff, we taste breakfast, we touch brickwork.
What if we made it into a game?
What if we smelled sights?

He looked down at London, spread beneath him like a tasty pizza.

What if we saw smells?

She smelt of jungle (Chenua Ochebe).

What if we heard tastes?

The gilded notes of the Beethoven quartet tasted like vintage port.

What if we tasted sound?

The home made brandy tasted like the screech of tyres.

You have to have a bit of imagination...

She walked along the street like trumpet solo.
She glared at me like a glass of ice cold water being thrown in my face.
The wine-dark sea. (Homer)

For wimps:

His velvet voice entranced the old lady.
Her silken tones echoed round the chamber.
She had enjoyed her taste of honey. Now it was time to face the reality.

Here is a helpful little table: just pick one from each side and see if you (like me) find this fun.

sight	touch
smell	taste
sound	smell
taste	sight
touch	sound

A Level students only:

This is called synaesthesia – as if you want to know. Greek - meaning joining feelings together.

Only trying to be helpful. An-aesthesia means not feeling anything at all.

Different parts of speech: same meaning.

This is just punning taken to a higher level.

Be clever, write the right words, clever clogs!
Take the same word and and give it a different take.

Please lend a little ear to my pleas.

Nothing you can do that can't be done

“I have been a foreigner in a foreign land.”

Clever eh?

And it really is quite easy:

A sewing advert: Get your alterations altered here.

Drive through your driving test here.

Seen on a beer advert: Drink the drink and taste the taste!

You can also reply using this trick, as the great Shakespeare so often did:

“But I was only....” “But me no buts.”

“To someone you want to put down: “Hello me no Hellos.” “Sorry me no sorries.” Especially useful to teenage daughter: “Whatever me no whatevers.”

The words are (almost) the same but nouns change into adjectives, verbs change into nouns.

“Forgive us our trespasses, as we forgive those who trespass against us.”

Nothing succeeds like success.

Sing me that song.

He can talk the talk, but can he walk the walk?

As with most difficult things, once you get the hang of it, difficulties can go and hang themselves. So hang in there!

PS For A level people only:

“There is no end of it, the voiceless wailing,

No end to the withering of withered flowers,

To the movement of pain that is painless and motionless,

To the drift of the sea and the drifting wreckage,

The bone’s prayer to Death its God. Only the hardly, barely prayable


Prayer of the one Annunciation…” - TS Eliot.

The clever word for this rhetorical trick is the Greek Polyptoton which means “many different Grammatical cases”. Americans adore this kind of very long Greek word, so impress with a clever impression of being clever!

Repetion, Repetition, Repetition, Repton

Repton is the name of the famous public school where John Grundy went in the 1950s. He told me this way back in the 1960s in Ghana.
I have remembered it ever since. Those four words sum up boarding school life perfectly.
So why did I remember them?

Pick up a Penguin.

That is another strap line which I have never forgotten.

Proper preparation prevents piss-poor performance.

Once again the army gets it right. You cannot ever get that out of your mind.



So how does it work?
You guessed?
Just string some words together and repeat the first letter.

Round the rugged rock, the ragged rascal ran.

Furry felines feeling funny.

Full fathom five thy father lies.

Corbyn – kind, concerned, corrupt.

Boris – benign, bombastic, beaming.

Screaming Swinson.

And it works everywhere.

Nicholas Nickelby,

The Pickwick Papers,

Pride and Prejudice.

Alliteration

Works every time!
Just do not overdo it.