Entertainment / Literature / Enallage: (Greek, 'interchange') Intentionally misusing grammar to characterize a speaker or to create a memorable phrase. Boxing manager Joe Jacobs, for instance, became immortal with the phrase, 'We was robbed!' Or, the editors of Punch magazine might tell their British readers, 'You pays your money, and you takes your chances.' Similarly, in Shakespeare, we find 'And hang more praise upon deceased I' (Sonnet 72). We also find the intentional misuse of subject-verb agreement when a Shakespearean character asks, 'Is there not wars? Is there not employment?' (2nd Henry IV, I, ii). Cf. Eclipsis. See schemes.
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Entertainment / Literature / Eclipsis: (Greek 'leaving out,' cf. Modern English eclipse) A type of enallage in which an author or poet omits essential grammatical elements to create a poetic or artful effect. One example might be the follo MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Schema Atticum: This popular grammatical construction appears in ancient Attic Greek (and it is later mimicked in New Testament Greek). It is a specific type of enallage in which a neuter plural subject takes a singu MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Schema Pindarikon: This popular grammatical construction appears in the ancient Attic Greek of Pindar and later in New Testament Greek. It is a type of enallage in which any compound subject takes a singular verb (Smith MORE