Anacoluthon

[Dr. Goodword]

• anacoluthon •

Pronunciation: æ-nê-kê-lu-thahn • Hear it!

Part of Speech: Noun

Meaning: 1. An inconsistent sentence structure, e.g. "While in the garden, his shoelaces came untied." 2. An abrupt, midsentence interruption of an utterance with an unrelated one, e.g. "George thinks—but what does George know?—himself gorgeous."

Notes: This is a rhetorical term which should be at home among word-lovers, though it is infrequent (to say the least) among the general populace. When speaking about many of them, you may freely use the Greek plural, anacolutha, or the English one: anacoluthons.

In Play: In the past we have—of course, we don't have to follow tradition—always used the In Play section to give examples of rhetorical devices. That means (how did 'means' come to mean "implies"?) we don't have to do what we are presently doing.

Word History: Today's Good Word is a transliterated form of Greek anacoluthon, the neuter of anakolouthos "inconsequent" from an- "not" + akolouthos "following". This latter word comprises a sociative prefix a(n)- "(together) with" + keleuthos "way, path". No one knows how keleuthos entered Greek, but the non-negative a(n) seems to have come from Proto-Indo-European sem-/som- "(as) one". In Greek this PIE word became hama "together with" with a combining form (h)a(n)-. It also became homos "same", as in the English borrowings homogenize, homonym, and homophonic. The Latinized form of akolouthos was acolytus, which English borrowed as acolyte "an attendant, assistant". English inherited the PIE word via its Germanic ancestors as same and some. (Gratitude is due Tony Bowden of London for bringing today's arcane Good Word to our attention.)

[David Myer]

I like this one.

It doesn't quite fit the bill but is close enough to remind me of my father's verbal invention of a quasi-non-sequitur.

It's a clause that doesn't strictly follow its predecessor, but you vaguely know what they mean. Dad's main example was "The peaches are not for the children because I don't eat cheese." This was announced to the children's party by an ancient relative. My father was much amused and coined the expression to cover such verbal situations, even though he was only ten at the time.

[LukeJavan8]

I like it.

[Philip Hudson]

Like the man who had been speaking prose all the time without even knowing it, I have been anacoluthonating all my life without knowing it.

[David Myer]

I suspect Phillip, that your anacoluthation has not been a life-long feature of your conversation. If you are anything like me, the problem gets worse as I age (I think that's an example of the first meaning of the word - in my view, it is bad English). I start a sentence, and before I finish it, I interrupt myself with a distantly relevant aside and then forget where I started. Now, where was I...?

[Philip Hudson]

David, we are singing off the same page and eating kumquats.

[David Myer]

We spell cumquats with a c in Australia. But of course the original word was Chinese so you can spell it any way you like.

And we don't eat them off the page. We turn ours into a delightful zesty marmalade.

[bnjtokyo]

Are the following anacoluthons? (Examples of Garden-path sentences from Wikipedia)

1) The horse raced past the barn fell.
2) The old man the boat.
3) The complex houses married and single soldiers and their families.

[David Myer]

I will be interested in others on this question, but I think these examples are a different anomaly. In them, the problem seems to be that it is not immediately obvious which word is the verb. I recall a local newspaper headline: Ducks Walk Flats Out. In this case there is no verb or at least only an implied one. The flats they were going to build in Ducks Walk are not now going to be built. But this is not an anacoluthon as defined here.

Is there a word for bnjtokyo's examples?

[bnjtokyo]

Merriam-Webster defines "anacoluthon" as "syntactical inconsistency or incoherence within a sentence" while the Wikipedia entry says "[it] is an unexpected discontinuity in the expression of ideas within a sentence, leading to a form of words in which there is logical incoherence of thought."

In the Garden-path sentences, the usual [unmarked] syntax leads the reader to expect the sentence to continue in a certain way but, unexpectedly, there is a discontinuity and the sentence appears to suddenly head in a new direction. The reader must back-track and re-analyze the beginning of the sentence to understand the end. The Garden-path sentence may not actually be inconsistent or incoherent, but, at first brush, it appears to be incoherent and illogical. As such, it seems to me that such sentences are anacoluthons as defined in Merriam-Webster and Wikipedia.

[Dr. Goodword]

Garden path sentences galore! My favorite: "I want to die peacefully in my sleep like my grandfather, not yelling and screaming like the people in the back seat."