Quote: “We are drawing a line in the sand, saying enough is enough.” New Orleans Governor Ray Nagin, quoted in Time.
Figure of Speech: ploce, the braided figure. From the Greek, meaning “plaiting.” (Here’s another example.)
Crime is getting out of hand in the Big Easy, with nine murders in eight days. So the shoot-from-the-hip mayor declares a crackdown with a ploce, a figure that repeats a word while weaving a few other words between. The repeated word changes meaning or emphasis as it winds through the sentence.
Our favorite ploce comes in The Deer Hunter, when the cabdriver Merle says, “This is this, Vince. It isn’t something else. This is this!” It’s one of the great movie lines of all time.
And that is that.
Snappy Answer: “Which, Figaro predicts, won’t be enough.”