Arnold Zwicky's Blog

I’ve been sending out postcards of Edward Gorey drawings recently. Hard to choose favorites, but here are two that tickle me: the title of his story The Epiplectic Bicycle, and the second line in the deathly abecedarian book The Gashleycrumb Tinies:

Epiplectic looks like a bizarre play on epileptic (maybe a portmanteau of epileptic and electric), but it is in fact a rhetorical term. In epiplexis, the speaker reproaches or rebukes by asking questions, as Joseph Welch famously did to Senator Joseph McCarthy, in June 1954:

Let us not assassinate this lad further, Senator. You have done enough. Have you no sense of decency, sir, at long last? Have you left no sense of decency?

(from Gk. epi, ‘upon’ and plessein, ‘to strike’). Or as the BYU site on rhetorical figures puts it:

Asking questions in order to chide, to express grief, or to inveigh. A kind of rhetorical question. (link)

YouTube of the story of the sister and brother Embley and Yewbert and their adventures with the bicycle here. The bicycle does speak, but neither asks questions nor rebukes.

In The Gashleycrumb Tinies (complete alphabet here, animated version here), a series of children from Amy (falling down the stairs) through Zillah (drinking too much gin) are polished off in rhymed couplets of dactylic tetrameter. Basil’s line has always pleased me because of the alliteration, especially in by bears, the sibilant echo in the /z/ of Basil and the /s/ of assaulted, and the /l/s in those two words.

This entry was posted on August 19, 2011 at 9:20 am and is filed under Figurative language, Language play, Linguistics in the comics, Poetic form. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.