Definition:
A succession of clauses of approximately equal length and corresponding structure. See also:
Etymology:
From the Greek, "of equal members or clauses"Examples and Observations:
- "Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get."
(Mark Twain) - "It takes a licking, but it keeps on ticking!"
(advertising slogan of Timex watches) - "Pity is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the sufferer. Terror is the feeling which arrests the mind in the presence of whatsoever is grave and constant in human sufferings and unites it with the secret cause."
(James Joyce, A Portrait of the Artist as a Young Man) - "An inconvenience is only an adventure wrongly considered; an adventure is an inconvenience rightly considered."
(Gilbert Keith Chesterton) - "Isocolon is a sequence of sentences of equal length, as in Pope's 'Equal your merits! equal is your din!' (Dunciad II, 244), where each sentence is assigned five syllables, iconizing the concept of equal distribution. . . .
"Parison, also called membrum, is a sequence of clauses or phrases of equal length."
(Earl R. Anderson, A Grammar of Iconism, Fairleigh Dickinson University Press, 1998) - "The Tudor rhetoricians do not make the distinction between isocolon and parison. . . . The definitions of parison by Puttenham and Day make it identical with isocolon. The figure was in great favor among the Elizabethans as is seen from its schematic use not only in Euphues, but in the work of Lyly's imitators."
(Sister Miriam Joseph, Shakespeare's Use of the Arts of Language, Columbia University Press, 1947) - "I'm a Pepper, he's a Pepper, she's a Pepper, we're a Pepper--
Wouldn't you like to be a Pepper, too? Dr. Pepper!"
(advertising jingle for Dr. Pepper soft drink)
Also Known As: parison
