So just to recap, polyptoton is a favorite of Jesus, Shakespeare, and John Lennon. - Mark Forsyth

Above all, I hope I have dispelled the bleak and imbecilic idea that the aim of writing is to express yourself clearly in plain, simple English using as few words as possible. This is a fiction, a fib, a fallacy, a fantasy and a falsehood. To write for mere utility is as foolish as to dress for mere utility.

Mountaineers do it, and climb Everest in clothes that would have you laughed out of the gutter. I suspect they also communicate quickly and efficiently, poor things. But for the rest of us, not threatened by death and yetis, clothes and language can be things of beauty. I would no more write without art because 1 didn't need to, than I would wander outdoors naked just because it was warm enough. Again.

These figures grow like wildflowers, but they can be cultivated too. I do not believe that The Beatles had any idea what anadiplosis was, any more than I believe that the Rolling Stones knew about syllepsis. They knew what worked, and it did.

The figures of rhetoric are the beauties of all the poems we have ever read. Without them we would merely be us: eating, sleeping, manufacturing and dying. With them everything can be glorious. For though we have nothing to say, we can at least say it well.

Curiosity may have killed the cat, but it was the sausage-maker who disposed of the body.

If you are to use Alexander Graham Bell’s product, which is to say the blower, you should, in all courtesy, use it as he would have wished; and Dr Bell insisted that all phone calls should begin with the words ‘Ahoy, ahoy’. Nobody knows why he insisted this – he had no connection to the navy – but insist he did and started every phone call that way. Nobody else did, and it was at the suggestion of his great rival Edison that people took to saying ‘Hello’. This seems unfair.