Epistrophe

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ɪˈpɪstrəfi/

Definitions

1. The stylistic repetition of the same sounds or phrases at the end of successive clauses or sentences
2. a rhetorical device in which identical words or phrases are repeated at the conclusion of consecutive sentences or clauses for emphasis
3. the practice of returning to and reiterating the same terminal words across multiple successive statements for stylistic or persuasive effect

Etymology: Each time a speaker lands on the same word at the end of line after line, an old dance step from the Greek theatre is being repeated. The chorus of a Greek tragedy sang its odes in matched pairs of stanzas: the strophe, or "turning," as the dancers moved one way across the orchestra, then the antistrophe, the "turning back," as they reversed in the same rhythm. Rhetoricians borrowed that choreography for sentences, and one of the names they gave it reached English as epistrophe. The root is the Greek verb "strephein," to turn, and its noun "strophē." Aristotle opens his Rhetoric by declaring rhetoric the "antistrophos" of dialectic, its counterpart in the way one stanza answers another. Later, discussing prose style, he compares well-built periodic sentences to the paired stanzas of the old choral poets. Greek teachers of rhetoric eventually used "antistrophē" for a particular figure: a word or phrase repeated at the close of successive clauses, so that each clause turns back to the same ending. The variant "epistrophē," with "epi-," "upon" or "back," means "a turning about" and named the same device. Rome took over the Greek terms of its rhetoric wholesale, and Latin writers used "epistrophe" as a borrowed word. They also translated it. The Rhetorica ad Herennium, one of the oldest surviving Latin handbooks of oratory, calls the figure "conversio," "a turning around," and describes it as returning again and again to the last word rather than the first. Other writers preferred "epiphora," "a bringing upon." Repetition at the start of clauses got its own name, anaphora, and the two became a standard pair in every textbook. English borrowed the term from Latin by the 1640s, when educated speakers were trained on classical rhetoric. Familiar examples of the figure include the King James rendering of Paul, "When I was a child, I spake as a child, I understood as a child, I thought as a child," and Lincoln at Gettysburg promising government "of the people, by the people, for the people." In each, the sentence keeps swinging back to the same word like a chorus to its mark. The Greek word had another life as well. Outside the schools, "epistrophē" meant a turning toward something, and Greek writers used it for conversion. In the Acts of the Apostles it names the turning of the Gentiles to the faith, and in Plotinus it is the soul's turn back toward its source. The rhetoricians' figure and the believer's conversion share a single word for turning around. In the early 1940s, Thelonious Monk and Kenny Clarke wrote a jazz tune built on a short figure repeated over and over, and called it "Epistrophy."

Synonyms: epiphora