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• anadiplosis •

Pronunciation: æn-nê-dê-plo-sis • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: A rhetorical device for emphasis involving the repetition of a word in a phrase in the following phrase, as in "Phillippe frequently returned to the library, the library where Mildred worked."

Notes: Today's Good Word is one of a synonymous pair that includes epanadiplosis, which is now only rarely encountered. The plural of today's word is anadiploses [æn-nê-dê-plo-sees]. If there is an adjective, it is anadiplotic. It doesn't appear in the major dictionaries but has been used on the Web.

In Play: The purpose of anadiplosis is to emphasize a particular word: "Rhoda Book worked hard on her manuscript, a manuscript that had nearly cost her her sanity." But there are variations of this type of word repetition. In Herman Wouk's novel, The Caine Mutiny, Captain Queeg uses one when he says, "Aboard my ship, excellent performance is standard. Standard performance is sub-standard. Sub-standard performance is not permitted to exist."

Word History: Today's Good Word is Latin anadiplosis, borrowed by the Romans from the Greek. The Greek noun came from the verb anadiploun "to fold back, double" from ana- "on(to)" + diploun "to double", based on the adjective diplous "double". Diplous started out its life as a compound made up of dwi "two" + plo- "fold", also the origin of English fold. The mother of dwi was dwo which also went on to become English two, Latin duo, and Russian dva, all meaning the same thing. (Let's redouble our thanks to Luciano Eduardo Oliveira, one of the Good Word editors, for suggesting today's Good Word.)

Anadiplosis is common in the Hebrew Old Testament, preserved in KJV, although some modern translations smooth it out for English. The repetition becomes a sort of intensive adjective or adverb.

Wisdom literature in OT and NT (James, e.g.) frequently creates a chain with a word or thought from the previous verse triggering the next thought. This effect is usually captured in all translations.

You are quite right. This is especially evident in the Book of Psalms.

22:4
- Our fathers trusted in thee: they trusted, and thou didst deliver them.
22:5
- They cried unto thee, and were delivered: they trusted in thee, and were not confounded.

And the first thing I thought of was the start of the old Latin (Tridentine) Mass:

Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam. ("I will go in to the Altar of God. To God, the joy of my youth.")

I've forgotten an awful lot of Latin since my juventutem!

And the first thing I thought of was the start of the old Latin (Tridentine) Mass:

Introibo ad altare Dei. Ad Deum qui laetificat juventutem meam.

And the first thing I thought of was the capital of Maryland

This is the line that springs to mind when recalling the Latin language records that appeared in Catholic classrooms to teach us all how to get into the new user-intensive Mass. I wondered if the recording was a thousand years old and if not, what authority it had on pronunciation...