I sometimes wish I had a better vocabulary of rhetoric. I nerd out very hard over nomenclature and grammar; there is a reason I'm in a band with Charlie, who once drafted a song called "I'm Like a Simile, You're a Metaphor," and Zach, who introduced us all to the concept of pataphor during a rehearsal.
This week a favorite lyric glided into my thoughts: "I'm not expecting that I'll end up with you just because I need to / I shouldn't count on having air around me just because I breathe." That's from the Loud Family's complicated meditation "Not Expecting Both Contempo and Classique," a song that also namechecks "the full devouring will of Aubrey Beardsley in his grave"; there is, as the kids say, a lot to unpack there.
It's been long enough since I first heard the song that I can no longer remember which heartbreak it evoked then. (I've got a guess or two, but on the whole it's a relief to know that I could forget.) I would have been in college—which is when I was most likely to know the name of the device Scott Miller used in that pair of lines. But I don't think I did know then, and it's driving me to distraction now. It's sort of—analogy by juxtaposition? It's not exactly an indirect metaphor (which omits the thing compared), and it's not just plain juxtaposition (which seems, in most examples I can find, to operate more like Shakespearean antithesis, creating contrast by adjacency). Thomas suggested "extrapolative analogy," which I think is more commonly applied in situations of logical fallacy, though I might have to get a JSTOR subscription to know for sure.
The efforts to figure it out have led me to some unexpected places, including discussions of programming language and math and whatever this is. I even dug into an old comp lit text, A Dictionary of Narratology (which at least reminded me that, as much as I like rhetoric, I'm glad not to be thinking about lit theory all day).
It's all beside the point of the song, of course. Any song has to work on its own terms, not by ticking a certain number of literary boxes; a rhetorical device can succeed without writer or audience knowing what it's called. But I really like knowing the names for things, and I wish I could figure this out.
This week a favorite lyric glided into my thoughts: "I'm not expecting that I'll end up with you just because I need to / I shouldn't count on having air around me just because I breathe." That's from the Loud Family's complicated meditation "Not Expecting Both Contempo and Classique," a song that also namechecks "the full devouring will of Aubrey Beardsley in his grave"; there is, as the kids say, a lot to unpack there.
It's been long enough since I first heard the song that I can no longer remember which heartbreak it evoked then. (I've got a guess or two, but on the whole it's a relief to know that I could forget.) I would have been in college—which is when I was most likely to know the name of the device Scott Miller used in that pair of lines. But I don't think I did know then, and it's driving me to distraction now. It's sort of—analogy by juxtaposition? It's not exactly an indirect metaphor (which omits the thing compared), and it's not just plain juxtaposition (which seems, in most examples I can find, to operate more like Shakespearean antithesis, creating contrast by adjacency). Thomas suggested "extrapolative analogy," which I think is more commonly applied in situations of logical fallacy, though I might have to get a JSTOR subscription to know for sure.
The efforts to figure it out have led me to some unexpected places, including discussions of programming language and math and whatever this is. I even dug into an old comp lit text, A Dictionary of Narratology (which at least reminded me that, as much as I like rhetoric, I'm glad not to be thinking about lit theory all day).
It's all beside the point of the song, of course. Any song has to work on its own terms, not by ticking a certain number of literary boxes; a rhetorical device can succeed without writer or audience knowing what it's called. But I really like knowing the names for things, and I wish I could figure this out.
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