4 August 2013

epanalepsis

[ep-uh-nuh-lep-sis]

noun Rhetoric .

– a repetition of a word or a phrase with intervening words setting off the repetition, sometimes occurring with a phrase used both at the beginning and end of a sentence, as in Only the poor really know what it is to suffer; only the poor.

Origin:
1575–85; < Greek epanálēpsis literally, resumption, taking up again, equivalent to ep- ep- + ana- ana- + lêpsis taking hold ( lēp-, variant stem of lambánein to take + -sis -sis)

Examples:

* The king is dead; long live the king.

* Severe to his servants, to his children severe.

* They bowed down to him rather, because he was all of these things, and then again he was all of these things because the town bowed down. —Zora Neale Hurston, Their Eyes Were Watching God

* Beloved is mine; she is Beloved.

* Blow winds and crack your cheeks! Rage, blow! —Shakespeare, King Lear, 3.2.1

* Nice to see you, to see you, nice. —Bruce Forsyth

Today’s aphorism

‘He is noticeable for nothing in the world except for the markedness by which he is noticeable for nothing’.

– Edgar Allan Poe, (‘The Literati of New York City’, Godey’s Lady’s Book, Sep. 1846)

On this day

4 August 1181 – Supernova (not the rock band), SN1181, observed by Chinese and Japanese astronomers in the constellation Cassiopeia. It was visible for 185 days. A supernova is the explosive death of a star, resulting in a nebula of illuminated gas.

4 August 1914 – United States declares its neutrality in World War I.

4 August 1944 – German police and Gestapo officers arrest Jewish diarist, Anne Frank and her family, in Amsterdam. The family was eventually transported to the Auschwitz concentration camp. In March 1945 a typhus epidemic spread through the camp, claiming the Anne’s life. The camp was liberated only weeks later, in April 1945, by British troops. Anne Frank kept a diary which later was published and became a best seller.

4 August 1964 – the second Gulf of Tonkin Incident in which it was believed North Vietnamese troops fired on two US destroyers, the USS Maddox and the USS Turner Joy. It is now believed the second incident may have involved false radar images and not the North Vietnamese.