Churchhill Arranges Words

Last week, I posted about schemes, or formal arrangements of words.

Yesterday, I was reading through Schott’s Original Miscellany ,  an odd collection of facts.  My husband keeps this book and the Guiness Book of  World Records in our “bathroom library” for browsing.  I had forgotten that Schott’s has a list of Churchill’s use of schemes, some of which didn’t appear on the other list.  Obviously, because of copyright issues, I can’t retype all of them for you, but here are a couple.

Winston Churchill’s  Schemes

• Episeuxis–Emphatic repetition.
  “. . . this is the lesson: never give in, never give in, never, never, never, never. . .”
• Antimetabole–Reversing the word order of a phrase previously employed.
  “This is not the end. It is not event he beginning of the end. but it is, perhaps, the end of the beginning.”
• Anaphora–repetition of words or phrases at the start of successive clauses.
  “We shall fight on the beaches. We shall fight on the landing grounds. We shall fight in the fields, and inthe streets, we shall fight in the hills. We shall never surrender.”

In Churchhill’s hands, these arrangements of words are effective!