By BJ
Via Balloon Juice, this snippet from the Economist blog:
Presumably I'm late to the ball noticing this, but it's just struck me how often Mr Obama falls into a rhetorical pattern of three anapests and a spondee.
Every now and again, I have to remind myself that English is in fact my first language, and that as a result, the above sentence probably should make sense to me. Oh well.
The pattern is not rhetorical (except in a broad sense that would include anything that contributes to the persuasiveness of oratory). It�s metrical. In Greek and Latin poetry, an anapaest consists of two short syllables and a long; in English, it consists in two unstressed syllables followed by a stressed syllable: e.g. �in the gr��, �on the t��; �The Assyrian came down like a wolf on the fold� (Byron). (Metrical boundaries don�t have to coincide with word boundaries.)
ReplyDeleteA spondee consists in two stressed syllables: �fat chance�, �my turn�. The commenter thinks that Obama often uses a pattern like this:
? ? � ? ? � ? ? � � �
�in the b�tiful d�, in the d� l�s��
The effect is to put a lot a weight on the end of the phrase. In Latin prose, this would be called a clausula or cadence.
Whether the commenter is right I don�t know. Almost the only model now for public oratory in the US -- the only one people are regularly exposed to -- is the sermon. Preachers often do use cadences, so I wouldn�t be surprised if Obama did so, perhaps without even realizing it.