intensification

In rhetoric, a type of amplification in which an idea is emphasized or a feeling heightened through restatement, expansion, detailed illustration, or other device.

See also:

• Accumulation
• Auxesis
• Congeries
• Copia
• Example
• Hyperbole
• Repetition
• Synathroesmus

Examples and Observations:

• "As a child, I imagined that a permanent antagonism existed between my father and me, that I was always, in tastes and opinions, on the opposite side from him."
  (Edmund Wilson, Piece of My Mind: Reflections at Sixty, 1956)



• "The door opened and it was God Himself who walked into the room, straight from His glittering throne, God dressed in a camel's hair polo coat and a flat, camel's hair cap, God with a flat nose and little piggy eyes, a big grin, and a fat black cigar sticking out of the side of it."
  (Paul Gallico, sports reporter for the New York Daily News, describing Babe Ruth's legendary visit to a young boy in a hospital; quoted by Charlie Poekel in Babe & the Kid: The Legendary Story of Babe Ruth and Johnny Sylvester. The History Press, 2007)



• "Prime Minister’s Questions was the most nerve-racking, discombobulating, nail-biting, bowel-moving, terror-inspiring, courage-draining experience in my prime ministerial life, without question."
  (Tony Blair, A Journey: My Political Life. Knopf, 2010)



• "There is something about the literary life that repels me, all this desperate building of castles on cobwebs, the long-drawn acrimonious struggle to make something important which we all know will be gone forever in a few years, the miasma of failure which is to me almost as offensive as the cheap gaudiness of popular success."
  (Raymond Chandler, letter to Hamish Hamilton, 1962)



• "Ten o'clock Sunday morning in the hills of North Carolina. Cars, miles of cars, in every direction, millions of cars, pastel cars, aqua green, aqua blue, aqua beige, aqua buff, aqua dawn, aqua dusk, aqua Malacca, Malacca lacquer, Cloud lavender, Assassin pink, Rake-a-Cheek raspberry, Nude-Strand coral, Honest Thrill orange, and Baby Fawn Lust cream-colored cars are all going to the stock car races, and that old mothering North Carolina sun keeps exploding off the windshields."
  (Tom Wolfe, "The Last American Hero." The Kandy-Kolored Tangerine-Flake Streamline Baby. Farrar, Straus & Giroux, 1965)



• "Hyperbole is more than emphasis, which implies that what hyperbole emphasizes could be accurately understood without the help of ornamentation and embellishment. Hyperbole is the drive toward magnification and intensification that comprises all of rhetoric."
  (Stephen H. Webb, "Reflections on the Hyperbolic Imagination." Rhetorical Invention and Religious Inquiry: New Perspectives, ed. by Walter Jost and Wendy Olmsted. Yale Univ. Press, 2000)



• "Intensification involves the reduplication of a particular lexical item, whether a root, word, or phrase, to increase its particular semantic scope or force, e.g., size (large, small), quality (good, bad, etc.), diversity (many different kinds), and so forth, usually within the span of a single utterance or clause. . . . Thus the expression 'the men feared a great fear' . . . means that they were utterly terrified. Similarly, . . . 'the sacrificing of sacrifice[s]' and the 'vowing of vows' may accentuate the nature of such reverent action in terms of quality (e.g., thoroughly committed vows, the best available sacrifices) or quantity (e.g., repeated sacrifices, reiterated vows)."
  (Ernst R. Wendland, Prophetic Rhetoric: Case Studies in Text Analysis and Translation. Xulon Press, 2009)