reality and anaphora

I guess it would be surprising if a new genre in entertainment didn't bring on a new trend in speech. Today, I'm thinking about the anaphora.

That word means different things in different classrooms. In grammar, an anaphora is a place-holder word that you use to avoid cluttering up a sentence with repetition: "I hate the overuse of anaphora; everyone does." The does is the anaphora that keeps you from saying "everyone hates the overuse of anaphora."

In the rhetoric classroom, though, the word refers to a way of adding repetition intentionally, for effect, by repeating the first part of a phrase like a chorus: "We will fight them on the beaches! We will fight them on the streets! We will fight them in the hills! And we will never surrender!" It can be incredibly powerful.

It can also be helpful to a person speaking extemporaneously. Unlike other rhetorical devices, this one can cover for a lack of eloquence or preparation. Sure, when Winston Churchill or Martin Luther King delivers a speech laden with anaphora ("I have a dream that one day in the hills of Georgia.... I have a dream that one day the state of Mississippi will.... I have a dream that one day my four little children.... I have a dream today...."), it's the result of careful preparation. But its ability to turn a single well-made sentence into several with only slight changes makes it a good crutch as well, for those less prepared.

Enter the reality show. Reality shows, which require people of average intelligence but above-average charisma to speak extemporaneously, have brought a resurgence in the anaphora. The interview camera requires that people comment insightfully on a situation they've just come out of or are about to enter. (Or maybe not so insightfully: my favorite quote from Survivor is, "If tonight goes down the way I think it will, I'm gonna be shocked.")

So, again and again, you see people turning to the anaphora: "I can picture him being the perfect husband; I can picture him being the perfect father to kids; I can picture him being the perfect companion." Once you've come up with your basic statement, you can expand it into a wonderful tricolon (always a tricolon! always!) by simply adding two words. Same thing with the anaphora's equally telegenic mirror-image twin, the epistrophe ("This makes me smile; that makes me smile; you make me smile!") Great television achieved: you deliver a nice tasty paragraph, we get to look at your beautiful face.

Until it gets old. The beautiful faces rarely get old, but man oh man, the anaphoras!