Definition:
A sentence style that employs many conjunctions (opposite of asyndeton). Adjective: polysyndetic. See also:
Etymology:
From the Greek, "bound together"Examples:
- "We lived and laughed and loved and left."
(James Joyce, Finnegans Wake, 1939) - "He pulled the blue plastic tarp off of him and folded it and carried it out to the grocery cart and packed it and came back with their plates and some cornmeal cakes in a plastic bag and a plastic bottle of syrup."
(Cormac McCarthy, The Road, Knopf, 2006) - "Let the whitefolks have their money and power and segregation and sarcasm and big houses and schools and lawns like carpets, and books, and mostly--mostly--let them have their whiteness."
(Maya Angelou, I Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, 1969) - "And she pushed St. Peter aside and took a keek in, and there was God--with a plague in one hand and a war and a thunderbolt in the other and the Christ in glory with the angels bowing, and a scraping and banging of harps and drums, ministers thick as a swarm of blue-bottles, no sight of Jim [her husband] and no sight of Jesus, only the Christ, and she wasn't impressed. And she said to St. Peter This is no place for me and turned and went striding into the mists and across the fire-tipped clouds to her home."
(Ma Cleghorn in Lewis Grassic Gibbon's Grey Granite, 1934) - "There were frowzy fields, and cow-houses, and dunghills, and dustheaps, and ditches, and gardens, and summer-houses, and carpet-beating grounds, at the very door of the Railway."
(Charles Dickens, Dombey and Son, 1848) - "Oh, my piglets, we are the origins of war--not history's forces, nor the times, nor justice, nor the lack of it, nor causes, nor religions, nor ideas, nor kinds of government--not any other thing. We are the killers."
(The Lion in Winter, 1968)
Pronunciation: pol-ee-SIN-di-tin
