Blog slog

Sorry to be so quiet recently, but I have been a bit under the weather. With any luck, the blog will be up and running again over the weekend.

Also, I have been slow to post because I just can't think of a good mnemonic image for the last figure of speech: Anapodoton, pronounced "anna-poh-DOH-ton", the omission of an element gramatically (but not always logically) implied by the sentence.

I only wrote two lines in my last post: "I don't" and "Do you?" Both were attempts at anapodoton, but once again the Vitriuvian Duck has been more attentive than I: he caught that the lines I imported from a news story were themselves shot through with figuration. I see more clearly now than ever that figures of speech cannot be tidily separated out from regular speech as though the figures constitute "poetry" and regular speech "prose". All speech is shaped, and to the extent that it is shaped well it takes on one of the recognized "figures."

So now I want to post about other things, but I may have to pass for the moment on a mnemonic picture. ("On a pod dot on"? What the heck would a "doton" be?)