Doing a literature
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Today's Dinosaur Comics:
Mouseover title: “this has TREMENDOUS implications for my two original characters, Anna Phora and E. P. Strophe”
One of the comments on Ryan North's bluesky post for this strip is:
The dudes who start every reply with "Well, actually…" are doing a literature??
Who knew?!?
— MisterJayEm (@misterjayem.bsky.social) Aug 30, 2024 at 9:35 AM
Well actually, they're doing a rhetoric.
And nobody does rhetorical repetition like Donald Trump…
…though his epistrophe/anaphora machine also typically jumps around among several topics (as in this recent example):
And groceries, food has gone up at levels nobody's ever seen before
we've never seen anything like it
fifty sixty seventy percent.
You take a look at bacon and some of these products and
some people don't eat bacon anymore.
And
uh we are going to get the energy prices down,
when we get energy down-
you know this was caused
by their horrible energy-
Wind, they want wind all over the place.
But when it doesn't blow we have a little problem.
This was caused by energy.
This was really caused by energy and also their
unbelievable spending, they're spending us out of-
out of wealth, actually, they're taking our wealth away.
But it was caused by energy,
and what they've done is they've started cutting way back
[…]
For more examples, see "Past posts on Donald Trump's rhetoric", 1/5/2024.
See also "Discourse as turbulent flow", 11/1/2003…
Philip Taylor said,
August 31, 2024 @ 6:14 am
« The dudes who start every reply with "Well, actually…" are doing a literature?? ». As, presumably, are those who start every reply with "So, " — a verbal phenomenon which is becoming increasingly ubiquitous, at least as far as BBC interviewees are concerned..
KevinM said,
August 31, 2024 @ 8:18 am
Thelonious Monk: Epistrophy, 1957
https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=YecvWY8RQyY
I imagine Trump in the hungry i with this behind him.
Robert Coren said,
August 31, 2024 @ 9:53 am
@Philip Taylor: If my husband starts a conversation with either "Well…" or "So…" I know that some difficulty (like maybe making a decision, the horror) is approaching. I haven't determined, over many decades, which one is more serious.
Yves Rehbein said,
August 31, 2024 @ 2:48 pm
I don't know about epistrophe but I really like Éstrich, as a German speaker, that is e-stroke or é for short.
Pouring Estrich (or "screed", as Wiktiinary has it) is a shit job but people want all their i's dotted and o's colored-in there will be someone willing to do it for the right money, mostly foreign entities from places like România and España. They know all about the é, pretty sure they invented it turn of the century. After all the étymon is Laté Latîn.