Super Glossary

Tmesis

Entertainment / Literature / Tmesis: Intentionally breaking a word into two parts for emphasis. Goldwyn once wrote, 'I have but two words to say to your request: Im Possible.' In the movie True Lies, one character states, 'I have two words to describe that idea. In Sane.' Milton writes, 'Which way soever man refer to it.' The poet W. H. Auden makes emotionally laden use of tmesis in 'Two Songs for Hedli Anderson,' where he stretches out the word forever by writing: I thought that love would last For Ever. I was wrong. In English, this rhetorical scheme is fairly rare, since only the compounds of 'ever' readily lend themselves to it, but it is much more common in Greek and Latin. An exception to this generalization is the American poet e. E. Cummings (the lack of capitalization in his name is a rhetorical affectation). Critics note that cummings makes particularly potent use of tmesis in poems like 'she being Brand / -new', in which words like 'brand-new' and 'O. K' are artificially divided across separate lines of text to create an unusual, broken reading experience. Particularly clever poets may use a sort of infixation to insert other words of phrases between the two parts that have been split apart. For instance, a southerner might say, 'I live in West--by God--Virginia, thank you very much!' Shakespeare, in Troilus and Cressida, writes the phrase, 'how dearly ever parted' (III.iii), when we would expect to find the phrase written as 'however dearly parted' in normal grammatical usage. Tmesis is an example of a rhetorical scheme.
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