undyingking | Mo's Rather Interesting World of Figures of Speech and Other Rhetorical Devices

#5 in an occasional series -- your challenge is to use it at least once today.

Anacoluthon / Anacoloutha

Literally, "lacking sequence" / "not following".

These are actually two quite different figures of speech, although confusingly similar in name. (Especially as the plural of 'anacoluthon' is 'anacolutha'.) Avoid embarrassment at parties with this handy guide to telling them apart!

Anacoluthon roughly means starting a sentence one way and finishing it another, abandoning your grammatical structure partway through. For example, rather than saying "The England cricket team just won the Ashes", you start off like that but end up like "The England cricket team, aren't they wonderful?"

It's pretty common in speech (even the norm, for some people), but in writing you'd use it either to convey a conversational tone or else for emphasis.

Anacoloutha is a bit more obscure. It means the substitution of one word for another, where the reverse substitution would not be possible, ie. a one-way metaphor. (The converse, ie. if the reverse substitution were also possible, is acoloutha.) So if I were to say "I'm reading the latest garbage by Dan Brown", that's anacoloutha, because I couldn't conversely say "Put those potato peelings in the [hack novel]".

This is such a natural use of metaphor that I couldn't even think of a good example of the converse -- can anyone else? To be honest I'm not sure if it really merits its own term, particularly not one that's very similar to another!