polyptoton

Definition:

Repetition of words derived from the same root but with different endings. See also: Paronym.

Etymology:

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

Examples:

• "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)



• "Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired."
  (Robert Frost)



• "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)



• "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)



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



• "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