Periphrasis

The stylistic device that is in charge of renaming of the kind is called periphrasis.

Periphrasis is a stylistic device that consists in the renaming of an object by a phrase that brings out some particular feature of it. Rendering a purely individual perception of the object the device can be decipherable only in context. If a periphras­tic locution is understandable outside the context, it is not a stylistic device but merely a synonymous expression. Such easily decipherable periphrases are also called traditional, dictionary or language periphrases.

e.g.      'My dear Tina, we have paid our homage to Neptune. He will forgive us if we now turn our backs on him.'

Though this periphrasis is not strikingly genuine, it is still rather difficult to grasp the speaker's idea. One needs context to perceive that Charles Smithson. the main male character in The French Lieutenant's Woman by John Fowles. Suggests to his com­panion that they stop gazing at the sea and go back to town.

Writers of past epochs employed periphrasis a great deal, seeing in it a more elegant manner of expression. No wonder, it was one of the most favourite devices of Victo­rian writers. The same can be attributed to all the educated people of the time, hypoc­risy being its distinguishing feature - the thing Oscar Wilde made the object of his ridicule in the play quoted above.

Read the following fragments and identify logical and figurative (both metaphoric and metonymical) periphrases, and comment on the effect achieved.

The 'sixties had been indisputably prosperous: an affluence had come to the ar-tisanate and even to the labouring classes that made the possibility of revolu­tion recede, at least in Great Britain, almost out of mind. Needless to say, Charles knew nothing of the beavered German Jew quietly working, as it so happened, that very afternoon in the British Museum library: and whose work in those sombre walls was to bear such bright red fruit. Had you described that fruit, or the subsequent effects of its later indiscriminate consumption. Charles would almost certainly not have believed you — and even though, in only six months from this March of 1867. the first volume of Kapitcri was to appear in Hamburg.