‘The human face is truly like that of a god in some Oriental theogony, a whole cluster of faces side by side, but on different planes and never all visible at once.’ Marcel Proust: In Search of Lost Time
WORD OF THE WEEK: Anacoluthon, (1856) A want of grammatical sequence, the passing to a new syntactical construction before the original one is completed.
I fear that like Proust’s Albertine I am inclined to anacoluthons, although I hope not to lies.
‘The cruelty was turned on me. Not as a refinement of style, but to cover her (Albertine) careless lies she used unexpected leaps of syntax which resembled what grammarians refer to as anacoluthon, or something like that…I wished I could remember the beginning of her sentence so as to decide myself when she shifted ground what the ending would have been. But as I had been listening for the end I could hardly remember the beginning…’ Marcel Proust: The Prisoner And The Fugitive.
