_Examples_: Come and trip it as you go, on the light fantastic _toe_. American commerce is carried in British _bottoms_. He bought a hundred _head_ of cattle. It is a village of five hundred _chimneys_. He cried, “A sail, a sail!” The busy _fingers_ toll on.
Indicate the figure of speech used in each of the following sentences:
1. Come, seeling Night, scarf up the tender eye of pitiful Day.
3. From two hundred observatories in Europe and America, the glorious artillery of science nightly assaults the skies.
5. Blow, blow, thou winter wind, thou art not so unkind as man's ingratitude.
6. His reasons are as two grains of wheat hid in two bushels of chaff.
7. Laughter and tears are meant to turn the wheels of the machinery of sensibility; one is wind power, the other water power.
8. When you are an anvil, hold you still; when you are a hammer, strike your fill.
10. There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads on to fortune; omitted, all the voyage of their lives is bound in shallows and in miseries.
Turn each of the above sentences into plain language. Key: (the numbers in parantheses indicate the figure of speech in the sentences as numbered above). 1. (4); 2. (7); 3. (2); 4. (7); 5. (5); 6. (1); 7. (2 and 6); 8. (2 and 6); 9. (7); 10. (2).
There have been many definitions of style; but the disputes of the rhetoricians do not concern us. _Style,_ as the word is commonly understood, is the choice and arrangement of words in sentences and of sentences in paragraphs as that arrangement is effective in expressing our meaning and convincing our readers or hearers. A _good style_ is one that is effective, and a _bad style_ is one which fails of doing what the writer wishes to do. There are as many ways of expressing ideas as there are ways of combining words (that is, an infinite number), and as many styles as there are writers. None of us wishes precisely to get the style of any one else; but we want to form a good one of our own.
We will briefly note the elements mentioned by those who analyse style, and then pass on to concrete examples.
Arrangement of words in a sentence. The first requirement is that the arrangement of words should be logical, that is grammatical. The rhetorical requirements are that―