Yesterday’s Zippy strip shows our Pinhead submitting to (in his words) ‘the desire to repeat a word or phrase’, a condition that (borrowing from literature on rhetoric) he calls palilogia:
Here the palilogic impulse is to repeat the word palilogia itself — even by trees
Earlier Zippy strips referred to the clinical affliction phrase repetition disorder and the mantric or chanting practice onomatomania (there’s a Page on this blog about my postings on “Chants, cheers, mantras, onomatomania”). The rhetorical term — with Greek initial element pali(n) ‘again’ plus the ‘word’ stem log — merely refers to repetition; what Zippy’s usage adds is a note of impulse or compulsion that ties the term to phrase repetition disorder and onomatomania.
The OED story. OED3 (revision of 2005) says that palilogia (with cites from 1588 on) = palilogy; on the noun palilogy, it says:
Rhetoric. The (esp. immediate) repetition of a word or phrase, usually for emphasis; (occasionally) an instance of this. [the 1st cite is from 1721, in a dictionary, so it’s clearly older than this]
The term is still in use in rhetorical studies. The Princeton Encyclopedia of Poetry and Poetics (1974 enlarged edition) has it with the spelling palillogy, as a synonym of anadiplosis / epanadiplosis ‘doubling’. The article on anadiplosis traces this term back to the Ancient Greek rhetoricians and lists synonyms for it “in the general sense of word repetition for emphasis”: palillogy, conduplicatio, “and still others”. The article goes on to catalogue terms for various other kinds of repetition. Rhetoricians have been assiduously mining this field for two millennia, so there’s an impressive amount of analysis and commentary.
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