Definition:
A rhetorical term for the repetition of a word or phrase broken up by one or more intervening words. Plural diacopae or diacopes. Adjective: diacopic.
See also:
- Effective Rhetorical Strategies of Repetition
- Epanalepsis
- Epizeuxis
- Ploce
- Would You Repeat That, Please?
Etymology:
From the Greek, "a cutting in two"Examples and Observations:
- "Scott Farkus staring out at us with his yellow eyes. He had yellow eyes! So help me, God! Yellow eyes!"
(Ralphie Parker, A Christmas Story, 1983) - "It is the tragedy of the world that no one knows what he doesn't know; and the less a man knows, the more sure he is that he knows everything."
(Joyce Cary, Art & Reality, 1958) - "It is explained that all relationships require a little give and take. This is untrue. Any partnership demands that we give and give and give and at the last, as we flop into our graves exhausted, we are told that we didn't give enough."
(Quentin Crisp, Manners From Heaven, 1984) - "All happy families are alike, but an unhappy family is unhappy after its own fashion."
(Leo Tolstoy, Anna Karenina, 1877) - "I am neat, scrupulously neat, in regard to the things I care about; but a book, as a book, is not one of those things."
(Max Beerbohm, "Whistler's Writing." The Pall Mall Magazine, 1904) - "He wore prim vested suits with neckties blocked primly against the collar buttons of his primly starched white shirts. He had a primly pointed jaw, a primly straight nose, and a prim manner of speaking that was so correct, so gentlemanly, that he seemed a comic antique."
(Russell Baker, Growing Up, 1982) - "Put out the light, and then put out the light."
(Othello in William Shakespeare's Othello, the Moor of Venice, Act Five, scene 2) - "And now, my beauties, something with poison in it, I think. With poison in it, but attractive to the eye and soothing to the smell."
(The Wicked Witch of the West, The Wizard of Oz, 1939) - "They will laugh, indeed they will laugh, at his parchment and his wax."
(Edmund Burke, "A Letter to a Noble Lord," 1796) - "Someone ate the baby,
It's rather sad to say.
Someone ate the baby
So she won't be out to play.
We'll never hear her whiny cry
Or have to feel if she is dry.
We'll never hear her asking, 'Why?'
Someone ate the baby."
(Shel Silverstein, "Dreadful") - "I can picture in my mind a world without war, a world without hate. And I can picture us attacking that world, because they'd never expect it."
(Jack Handey, Deep Thoughts) - "I'm gonna cut out now with this unusual song I'm dedicating to an unusual person who makes me feel kind of unusual."
(Christian Slater as Mark Hunter in Pump Up the Volume, 1990) - "You're not fully clean until you're Zestfully clean."
(advertising slogan for Zest soap) - "[British Prime Minister] Blair sounded like a man who had spent the morning riffling through handbooks of classical rhetoric: 'This indulgence has to stop. Because it is dangerous. It is dangerous if such regimes disbelieve us. Dangerous if they think they can use weakness, our hesitation, even the natural urges of our democracy towards peace, against us. Dangerous because one day they will mistake our innate revulsion against war for permanent incapacity.'"
(Anthony Lane, "The Prime Minister." The New Yorker, March 31, 2003) - Diacope in Shakespeare's Antony and Cleopatra
Cleopatra: O sun,
Burn the great sphere thou movest in! darkling stand
The varying shore o' the world. O Antony,
Antony, Antony! Help, Charmian, help, Iras, help;
Help, friends below; let's draw him hither.
Antony: Peace!
Not Caesar's valour hath o'erthrown Antony,
But Antony's hath triumph'd on itself.
Cleopatra: So it should be, that none but Antony
Should conquer Antony; but woe 'tis so!
Antony: I am dying, Egypt, dying; only
I here importune death awhile, until
Of many thousand kisses the poor last
I lay upon thy lips.
(William Shakespeare, Antony and Cleopatra, Act Four, scene 15)
"Throughout the text [of Antony and Cleopatra] we find not rational and syllogistic logic, but persuasive figures that indicate tension, friction and explosion. . . . The play is filled with exclamations of vehemence and hyperbole, made more emphatic by the undercurrent of the colloquial. For example the iteration of thou at 4.2.11, the device ploce, works to construct conversational ease; at the same time the repetition of words with one or more in between, or diacope, although similar to ploce, has a very insistent and desperate effect, as in Cleopatra's 'help' at 4.15.13-14."
(Sylvia Adamson, et al., Reading Shakespeare's Dramatic Language: A Guide. Thomson Learning, 2001) - "I knew it. Born in a hotel room--and goddamn it--died in a hotel room."
(last words of playwright Eugene O'Neill)
Pronunciation: di AK oh pee
Also Known As: semi-reduplication
