Syntax & Word Order
Enumeration / Accumulatio
Piling up details, examples, or charges into a deliberate list. By the tenth item the reader stops weighing and starts accepting: the size of the pile becomes the argument.
Whitman's catalogues of trades and bodies in "Song of Myself"
Don't confuse it with. Simple listing is neutral; enumeratio is a list with rhetorical intent — the pile *is* the point. Congeries is the near-synonym.
In the Reader — 15 excerpts
Hath not a Jew eyes? Hath not a Jew hands, organs, dimensions, senses, affections, passions? If you prick us, do we not bleed? If you tickle us, do we not laugh? If you poison us, do we not die?
The slings and arrows of outrageous fortune,
…of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.
In a village of La Mancha, the name of which I have no desire to call to mind, there lived not long since one of those gentlemen that keep a lance in the lance-rack, an old buckler, a lean hack, and a greyhound for coursing.
I have, alas, studied philosophy, jurisprudence and medicine, too, and, worst of all, theology
Half sunk a shattered visage lies
The voice of the sea is seductive; never ceasing, whispering, clamoring, murmuring, inviting the soul to wander for a spell in abysses of solitude; to lose itself in mazes of inward contemplation.
nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind.
nor am I one of your Hollywood-movie ectoplasms. I am a man of substance, of flesh and bone, fiber and liquids—and I might even be said to possess a mind.
He was an old man who fished alone in a skiff in the Gulf Stream and he had gone eighty-four days now without taking a fish.
I saw the best minds of my generation destroyed by madness, starving hysterical naked,
The only people for me are the mad ones, the ones who are mad to live, mad to talk, mad to be saved, desirous of everything at the same time, the ones who never yawn or say a commonplace thing, but burn, burn, burn like fabulous yellow roman candles exploding like spiders across the stars.
Okonkwo was well known throughout the nine villages and even beyond. His fame rested on solid personal achievements. As a young man of eighteen he had brought honor to his village by throwing Amalinze the Cat. Amalinze was the great wrestler who for seven years was unbeaten, from Umuofia to Mbaino.
The Orient was almost a European invention, and had been since antiquity a place of romance, exotic beings, haunting memories and landscapes, remarkable experiences.
This is a cold room in University Administration, wood-walled, Remington-hung, double-windowed against the November heat.
Travels with
Devices that share a passage with enumeration / accumulatio most often — company reveals character.
Asyndeton 9 Litotes 7 Anaphora 7 Hyperbole 6 Polysyndeton 4 Isocolon 4 Parataxis 3 Antithesis 3
The rest of the family
Hyperbaton Anastrophe Periodic Sentence Cumulative (Loose) Sentence Parataxis Parenthesis Apposition / Appositive Zeugma Hendiadys Pleonasm Passive Voice Cleft Sentence