| Asyndeton (a-SIN-dih-tawn): Figure of omission in which normally occurring conjunctions (and, or, but, for, nor, so, yet) are intentionally omitted in successive phrases, or clauses; a string of words not separated by normally occurring conjunctions. |
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| Examples | |
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"Duty, Honor, Country:
Those three hallowed words reverently dictate what you ought to be,
what you can be, what you will be. They are
your rallying points: to build courage when courage seems to fail;
to regain faith when there seems to be little cause for faith;
to create hope when hope becomes forlorn." -- General Douglas MacArthur, Thayer Award Acceptance Address |
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"There is and
will be rousing language to keep citizens armed and arming; slaughtered
and slaughtering in the malls, courthouses, post offices, playgrounds,
bedrooms and boulevards; stirring, memorializing language to mask the
pity and waste of needless death. There will be more diplomatic language
to countenance rape, torture, assassination.The
conventional wisdom of the Tower of Babel story is that the collapse was
a misfortune. That it was the distraction, or the weight of many
languages that precipitated the tower's failed architecture. That one
monolithic language would have expedited the building and heaven
would’ve been reached. Whose heaven, she wonders? And what kind? Perhaps
the achievement of Paradise was premature, a little hasty if no one
could take the time to understand other languages, other views,
other narratives." -- Toni Morrison - Nobel Lecture |
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"We use words like honor,
code, loyalty. We use these words as the backbone
of a life spent defending something. You use them as a punch line."
-- delivered by Jack Nicholson (from the movie A Few Good Men) |
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"The union survival, its very existence, sent
out a signal to all Hispanics that we were fighting for our dignity,
that we were challenging and overcoming injustice, that we were
empowering the least educated among us, the poorest
among us. The message was clear. If it could happen in the
fields, it could happen anywhere: in the cities, in the courts, in
the city councils, in the state legislatures." -- Cesar Chavez, Commonwealth Club Address |
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"I speak here as a politician and also as a
Catholic -- a layperson baptized and raised in the pre-Vatican II
Church, educated in Catholic schools, attached to the Church first by
birth, then by choice, now by love." -- Mario Cuomo, Religious Belief and Public Morality |
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"From now on we are
enemies, you and I -- because you choose for your instrument a boastful,
lustful, smutty, infantile boy."
-- delivered by F. Murray Abraham (from the movie Amadeus) |
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"Now as an engineer, a
planner, a businessman, I see clearly the value to
our nation of a strong system of free enterprise based on increased
productivity and adequate wages." -- Jimmy Carter, 1976 Democratic National Convention Address |
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"Be one of the few,
the proud, the Marines."
-- Marine Corps Advertisement |
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"When we listen to the
better angels of our nature, we find that they celebrate the simple
things, the basic things -- such as goodness,
decency, love, kindness."
-- Richard Nixon, Inaugural Address |
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"Now the only way to provide for
our posterity is to follow the counsel of Micah: to do justly, to
love mercy, to walk humbly with our God." -- Sandra Day O'Connor, Reading of Winthrop at the Funeral for Ronald Reagan Note: Also contains anaphora, parallelism, climax |
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"Check this out. So you
meet this person. Boy, are they fine, kind, sensitive, loving, witty,
charming, intelligent...."
-- Stevie Wonder |
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