"al·lit·er·a·tion
-noun
| 1. | the commencement of two or more stressed syllables of a word group either with the same consonant sound or sound group (consonantal alliteration), as in from stem to stern, or with a vowel sound that may differ from syllable to syllable (vocalic alliteration), as in each to all. Compare consonance (def. 4a). |
| 2. | the commencement of two or more words of a word group with the same letter, as in apt alliteration's artful aid."
-Dictionary.com
|
Re-reading The Everlasting Man today, I noticed something that merited a second glance. I might not have noticed it if I hadn't been studying the topic recently as a writing technique rather than just wordplay. This was the sentence:
"He would find the trail of monsters blindly developing in directions outside all our common imagery of fish and bird; groping and grasping and touching life with every extravagant elongation of horn and tongue and tentacle; growing a forest of fantastic caricatures of the claw and the fin and the finger."
- Chapter 1
Maybe not all of those were intentional, but they inveigled my interest.`
1 comment:
Alliteration is very interesting. Wordplay in writing can make it marvelous.
:)
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