Yada, Yada, Yada

I’ve discovered another great word: pleonasm. It means “the using of more words than are required to give the sense intended . . . often resorted to deliberately for rhetorical effect.”

Barbara Wallraff, the Ms. Grammar of The Atlantic, points out an interesting contradiction: “Oddly, the two main ways to be forceful in English are to be succinct and to be wordy. The latter is out of fashion, and people who don’t like it call it redundancy. Those of us who do sometimes like it call it pleonasm.”

I totally agree. One of the biggest problems that my Comp students have (besides atrocious grammar, but we won’t go there now) is wordiness, which I faithfully mark in the margins beside their run-on sentences and multiplicities of repetition. “Conciseness is a virtue!” I frequently remind them.

But, verbosity can be wonderful in the hands of a language virtuoso. The key is in the definition: “for rhetorical effect.” The author who can get by with wordiness doesn’t just run off at the mouth because he has no control. He has talent, skill, and a plan. It’s like grammar and usage—you have to master the rules before you’re allowed to break them. You have to be able to write succinctly to be able to expound at length in a way readers will appreciate. (Of course, since one of my focus areas in my doctoral studies is 18th century British literature, I have to believe this.)

Just think about it. Abraham Lincoln could have said “87” instead of “four score and seven years ago . . .” The crowd would have understood Martin Luther King, Jr. if he’d said “I have a dream” just one time, but would they have felt his passion? Would Moby Dick or Les Miserables have been quite as beautiful without the long digressions? Henry Fielding and Lawrence Sterne had fun with wordiness, using it to mock the pretentiousness of other authors. I could go on listing examples of skillful garrulousness, but I’ll stop with one word: Faulkner.

Now I’m scared to post this without running Word Count first.