Hendiadys

Part of speech: noun

Definitions

1. A figure of speech in which a single concept is conveyed by joining two nouns with a conjunction, as in nice and warm for warmly pleasant
2. A rhetorical device that expresses one notion through a pair of nouns linked by and, rather than through a noun modified by an adjective
3. The stylistic practice of rendering a single idea as two coordinated words, such as sound and fury for furious noise

Etymology: Virgil's farmers, in the second book of the "Georgics," pour their offerings "pateris et auro," "from bowls and gold." They are not juggling bowls in one hand and lumps of gold in the other. They are pouring from golden bowls. The poet has split one idea into two nouns joined by "and," and the small jolt this gives the ear is the whole point. Grammarians needed a name for the trick, and the one that stuck describes itself: one through two. That name is Greek in its parts but was probably not coined by the Greeks. Its pieces are "hén," "one," the neuter of "heîs"; "diá," "through" or "by means of"; and "dúo," "two," which in the full phrase "hen dia duoin" takes the old dual genitive that Greek used after "diá." The result is a little three-word description: one thing by means of two. Yet the compound itself is not found in classical Greek texts. Aristotle, in the "Rhetoric" and the "Poetics," wrote about paired and coordinated wording but never used this label. It survives instead as a scholar's term, run together into a single word and passed down through Medieval Latin as "hendiadys." The phrase underwent its own small act of fusion, three words becoming one. English took the word from Latin in the late sixteenth century, at the height of the Renaissance enthusiasm for cataloguing figures of speech. George Puttenham discusses it in "The Arte of English Poesie" of 1589, and his illustration, "fiercely fighting with horses and with barbes," shows how freely the term was applied. "Barbes" are the armour of a warhorse, so the two nouns together give a single picture of armoured horses. Puttenham liked to give Greek figures homely English names, and he called this one the figure of twins. An older English gloss explains it as "one thing expressed by two terms." Where its boundaries lie, though, has always been argued. When is a pair a true fusion, and when is it just two things? The question became a serious one in Shakespeare studies, above all in "Hamlet," which is crowded with such pairs: "the book and volume of my brain," "the perfume and suppliance of a minute," "the sensible and true avouch of mine own eyes." In 1981 George T. Wright argued in a well-known essay, "Hendiadys and Hamlet," that the doubling was more than ornament. He suggested that Shakespeare's habit of splitting a single idea in two and leaving the halves uneasily yoked mirrors the disjointed, uncertain world of the play. A figure long used to explain Latin poets' golden bowls had become a way of reading the most famous tragedy in English. The device never left everyday speech, either. "Nice and warm" means pleasantly warm, and "good and ready" means thoroughly ready. Anyone who says them is using the figure without knowing its name.

Synonyms: doublet, binomial