I don’t believe I’ve ever seen this in manuals of rhetoric or lists of figures of speech, but these three sentences all use the same rhetorical trick:

1. Nice we’re having weather, isn’t it?
2. What’s a girl like you doing in a nice place like this?
3. I’ve got high friends in places all over time.

The last is the title of one of the three good songs on what is apparently the only album by Scott McQuaig. Can anyone quote more examples? I have a feeling I’ve forgotten one or two.

Randall Jarrell describes a student art exhibit at a fictional women’s college (”Benson”):

The students had learned all the new ways to paint something (an old way, to them, was a way not to paint something) but thye had not had anything to paint. The paintings were paintings of nothing at all. It did not seem possible to you that so many things could have happened to a piece of canvas in vain. You looked at a painting and thought, “It’s an imitation Arshile Gorky; it’s casein and aluminum paint on canvasboard, has been scratched all over with a razor blade, and then was glazed–or scumbled, perhaps–with several transparent oil washes.” And when you had said this there was no more for you to say. If you had given a Benton student a pencil and a piece of paper, and asked her to draw something, she would have looked at you in helpless astonishment: it would have been plain to her that you knew nothing about art. By the time a Benton artist got through exploiting the possibilities of her medium, it was too dark to do anything else that day; and most of the students never learned that there was anything else to do.

(Pictures from an Institution, Chapter 6, “Art Night”, section 2)

I was reminded of this by A. C. Douglas’ comments (here and here) on a contemporary composer’s desciption of how he composes his works. He may be a bit unfair to the composer, who does imply that he has to have an idea before he can tinker with it.

I have been experimenting with making pamphlets for Latin and Greek texts that are too short to fill a whole book. The first one finished is a teaching text of Androclus and the Lion, which I used with my Latin 3 class last semester and have now revised, mostly by adding notes that classroom use showed would be useful. I was pleasantly surprised how well it came out, and wish I’d done it years ago. All it took was a six-year-old DeskJet printer, 28-pound semi-glossy paper, 67-pound cover stock, a long-reach stapler, and quite a few hours getting the formatting just right.

It is only twelve pages. Four contain the text of Aulus Gellius, Noctes Atticae 5.14, with macrons, and with some general interpretative questions below the text. Four more, facing those, contain vocabulary (very full) and grammatical notes (brief). Before the eight pages of text and notes, there is a title page, a copyright page with illustration and dedication, and a preface, and after them a page with further interpretative questions on the whole text.

Not very competent pictures of the cover and part of the text can be seen here and here (the pamphlet itself is much clearer). A Word 97 file containing the facing copyright page and preface, plus one pair of facing pages of text and notes, can be seen here. I should note that students found the format very convenient, and particularly appreciated the individualized dedications: since I print out each copy separately, it’s easy enough to change a few words in each copy. I got into the habit of printing individualized full-color tests, quizzes, and handouts two years ago, when I was teaching classes with 2-4 students at a school where the xerox machine rarely worked. Printer ink is expensive, but not all that expensive, and the aesthetic advantages seemed to outweigh the pecuniary disadvantages. This is another step in the same direction.

If anyone would like a copy, either to read the story, or to see if it is suitable for use in your own classroom, or just to see what can be done with a color printer, some paper, and a stapler, the cost is $3.00 each within the U.S., with 1st-class postage included in the price. Just let me know how the dedication should read. Of course, if anyone would like multiple copies for classroom use, I can provide them.

Watch this space for announcements of further pamphlets in various formats.