Polyptoton

Part of speech: noun

Pronunciation: /ˌpɑ.ləpˈtoʊ.tɑn/

Definitions

1. A rhetorical device in which words with the same root but different forms appear in close proximity to create emphasis or stylistic effect
2. A literary technique employing different grammatical forms of the same root word in successive clauses to achieve rhythmic or emphatic impact
3. The rhetorical practice of repeating a word stem with varying inflections or derivations within a passage for expressive force

Etymology: To a Greek grammarian, a noun that changed its ending had fallen. The upright form, the one you would name a thing by, stood straight; every other form tipped over from it. That image of language as something that topples is buried inside polyptoton, the rhetorical figure in which a word returns in a different grammatical shape. The Greek word for a grammatical case was "ptōsis", literally "a falling", from the verb "píptō", "to fall". The Stoic philosophers called the nominative the "orthē ptōsis", the upright case, and grouped the rest as "plagiai", the slanting or oblique cases. When Roman scholars took over Greek grammar, they translated the metaphor along with the system. Latin "casus" comes from "cadere", "to fall", and it gave English "case". Every schoolchild who has learned that German has four cases or Latin six has been using a 2,000-year-old picture of words falling over without knowing it. The English "oblique case" preserves the Stoics' slant. Greek rhetoricians built on the same root. "Polúptōtos" meant "having many cases" ("polús", "many", plus the falling root). Its neuter form, "polúptōton", named the device of repeating one word in several of its cases, so that a sentence keeps knocking it over into new positions. Latin rhetoric took the term over directly, and Quintilian discusses the figure in his handbook on oratory. Strictly, the name pointed to cases, but in practice the figure already covered any word or root coming back in a different grammatical form. One of the best-known Latin examples, from Juvenal, is no change of case at all: "Quis custodiet ipsos custodes?", "Who will guard the guards themselves?" A verb and a noun are made from the same root. The term reached English through Latin, along with the rest of the Greek vocabulary of rhetoric that Renaissance schoolmasters drilled into their pupils, and it arrived with that broad sense intact: verb and noun, active and passive, singular and plural. The King James Bible gives "Judge not, that ye be not judged." Shakespeare, trained in exactly that grammar-school rhetoric, built one of his most famous sonnets on it: "Love is not love / Which alters when it alteration finds, / Or bends with the remover to remove." The name still describes the old picture. In those lines "alters" falls into "alteration" and "remover" into "remove", each form toppling out of the one before.