Wednesday, August 29, 2012

Hypotyposis

Meaning: a rhetorical term - a description so vivid, it as if the hearer/reader has seen an image.

Usefulness: 2

Logofascination: 2

In the wild: Umberto Eco's Name of the Rose, when Adso comments on William's belief in the usefulness of lists in hypotyposis.

Degrees: 3 (surprisingly: I expected type to turn up somewhere)

Connections: hypotyposis - type - prototype

Which is used in: Ekskybalauron - I think it's time we met the Admirable Crichton, depicted here entertaining the Italian court on Shrove Tuesday (Mardi Gras), being as perfect a court jester as he is everything else: "he did with such variety display the several humours of all these sorts of people, and with a so bewitching energy, that he seemed to be the original; they the counterfeit and they the resemblance whereof he was the prototype. He had all the jeers, squibs, flouts, buls, quips, taunts, whims, jests, clinches, gybes, mokes, jerks, with all the several kinds of equivocations, and other sophistical captions, that could properly be adapted to the person by whose representation he intended to inveagle the company into a fit of mirth; and would keep in that miscelany discourse of his, which was all for the splene, and nothing for the gall".

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