Open Writing

Being optimistic may be the best way to approach life because you’re more open to opportunities. In fact, one of my favorite quotes is Colin Powell’s “Persistent optimism is a force multiplier.” Perhaps that explains why I’ve been writing a weekly library-related newspaper column for over twenty-five years. About twenty years of those columns have graced the News Miner’s pages, and most have been limited to 700 words. All sorts of tricks help getting around that restriction, and contractions, hyphens, and acronyms remain my fast friends. Another is zeugmas.

The zeugma, according to Wikipedia, is “a figure of speech describing the joining of two or more parts of a sentence with a single verb or noun.” For example, “Felix Pedro found his gold and lost it.” “Zeugma” was coined by Henry Peacham, an Elizabethan Englishman, who described zeugmas as “the delight of the ear” in his 1593 book “The Garden of Eloquence” that laid out 184 figures of speech.

Peacham’s book helped establish the ground-rules of coherent writing, calling good grammar “wisdom speaking eloquently.” He did go into more detail than most readers can tolerate, such as his descriptions of zeugmas’ cousins. For example, the “prozeugma,” also known as the “synezeugmenon,” has a verb in the first part of a sentence that governs several later clauses, while the “mesozeugma” has the verb in the middle, and the “hypozeugma” has the verb at the end.

You can read about them, the “diazeugma,” the “hypozeuxis,” and many more, on one of the Websites dedicated to the “Garden of Eloquence,” such as www.perseus.tufts.edu/hopper/text?doc=Perseus%3Atext%3A1999.03.0096&redirect=true. Don’t confuse Henry Peacham with his son, who’s also called Henry Peacham. The eloquent father was a preacher, while the son preached eloquence in his 1622 best seller, “The Compleat Gentleman.” Education was less structured back then, and “Gentleman” was a guidebook for young men “of good birth” who wanted to make good impressions on the world, telling them what to read and who to emulate. Today it’s a valuable resource for Renaissance scholars due to Peacham’s mentioning lots of prominent sixteenth century people who are largely forgotten today.

Here’s a sample of Peacham the Younger’s book. “For composition, I prefer next Ludovico de Victoria, a most judicious and a sweet composer: after him Orlando di Lasso, a very rare and excellent Author, who lived some forty years since in the court of the Duke of Bavier.” Today this sort of reading’s hard sledding. However, it was hot stuff four centuries ago in Britain and its colonies. For instance, Yankee Magazine’s “2005 Best Village in New England,” Peacham. Vermont, may have been named for Peacham the Younger, whose book was popular there, too.

Some Vermont historians, and many Peachamites, disagree, maintaining that it got its name from a play, “The Beggar’s Opera,” written by English playwright John Gay. Later transformed by Bertolt Brecht into “The Threepenny Opera,” Gay’s original play was enormously popular and featured a character named Polly Peacham, who was portrayed by Lavinia Fenton, a beautiful actress who was the mistress of the Duke of Bolton. The Duke married Fenton, scandalizing high society and delighting the general public. Fenton died in 1760, Peacham, Vermont was founded in 1763, and Benning Wentworth, the American-born governor of New Hampshire (which included Vermont) coveted a peerage and was anxious to curry favor with the high and mighty. In his quest for a title, Wentworth named many of the New England towns he was establishing as governor after British nobility, including several other members of Bolton’s family.

Nevertheless, for entertainment value, give me “Garden of Eloquence” any day. Just consider the “epanalepsis” (repeating a word or phrase with intervening words setting off the repetition, such as “Only the poor know what it is to suffer; only the poor”), “polyptoton” (repeating a word in a different case in the same sentence, as in “My own heart’s heart”), and “tapinosis” (a rhetorical term for name calling). Don’t forget metaphors, using words that ordinarily designate one thing to designate another, like “The public library is the people’s university.” After all, everyone’s education begins at birth, not preschool, and continues until death. Now there’s a zeugma for you to ponder.