polyptoton

Definition:

A rhetorical term for repetition of words derived from the same root but with different endings. Adjective: polyptotonic.

See also:

• Echo Word
• Paronym
• Would You Repeat That, Please?

Etymology:

From the Greek, "use of the same word in different cases"

Examples and Observations:

• "Choosy Mothers Choose Jif"
  (commercial slogan for Jif peanut butter)



• "[S]he now mourned someone who even before his death had made her a mourner."
  (Bernard Malamud, The Natural)



• ". . . love is not love
  Which alters when it alteration finds,
  Or bends with the remover to remove . . ."
  (Shakespeare, Sonnet 116)



• "To be ignorant of one's ignorance is the malady of the ignorant."
  (A. Bronson Alcott, "Conversations." Table-Talk, 1877)



• "By dint of railing at idiots, one runs the risk of becoming idiotic oneself."
  (Gustave Flaubert)



• "The things you own end up owning you."
  (Brad Pitt in the movie Fight Club, 1999)



• "[T]he signora at every grimace and at every bow smiled a little smile and bowed a little bow."
  (Anthony Trollope, Barchester Towers, 1857)



• "Divine Master, grant that I may not so much seek to be consoled as to console;
  To be understood as to understand;
  To be loved as to love;
  For it is in giving that we receive;
  It is in pardoning that we are pardoned;
  And it is in dying that we are born to eternal life."
  (Prayer of St. Francis of Assisi)



• "Morality is moral only when it is voluntary."
  (Lincoln Steffens)



• "Facing it, always facing it, that's the way to get through. Face it."
  (Joseph Conrad)



• "A good ad should be like a good sermon: it must not only comfort the afflicted; it also must afflict the comfortable."
  (Bernice Fitzgibbon)



• "Friendly Americans win American friends."
  (slogan of the United States Travel Service in the 1960s)



• "Behold, I shew you a mystery; we shall not all sleep, but we shall all be changed, In a moment, in the twinkling of an eye, at the last trump: for the trumpet shall sound, and the dead shall be raised incorruptible, and we shall be changed. For this corruptible must put on incorruption, and this mortal must put on immortality. So when this corruptible shall have put on incorruption, and this mortal shall have put on immortality, then shall be brought to pass the saying that is written, Death is swallowed up in victory."
  (St. Paul, 1 Corinthians 15:51-54)



• "His griefs grieve on no universal bones, leaving no scars."
  (William Faulkner, Nobel Prize Acceptance Speech, December 1950)



• "It is sometimes the goal of an argument to take a concept accepted by an audience in one role or category of a sentence action and transfer it to others, an agent becoming an action or an action becoming an attribute and so on. This work is epitomized by polyptoton, the grammatical morphing of the word, as Aristotle explains repeatedly in the Topics. . . . He points out, for example, how people's judgments follow a term as it changes from one part of speech to another. So, for example, an audience who believes that acting justly is better than acting courageously will also believe that justice is better than courage and vice versa . . .. [T]he Topics is not concerned with immutable rules of validity but with the patterns of reasoning that most people follow most of the time, and most people will indeed follow the logic of polyptotonic morphing as Aristotle describes it."
  (Jeanne Fahnestock, Rhetorical Figures in Science. Oxford Univ. Press, 1999)



• "Sentimentality is the emotional promiscuity of those who have no sentiment."
  (Norman Mailer)



• "You can't keep blaming yourself. Blame yourself once, then move on."
  (Homer Simpson)

Pronunciation: po-LIP-ti-tun

Also Known As: paregmenon