The writers among us should appreciate this Q&A from Ask Figaro:
Dear Figaro,
Does the following sentence employ an incremental epistrophe?
In New York City, especially in Greenwich Village, down among the cranks and the misfits and the one-lungers and the has-beens and the might’ve-beens and the would-bes and the never-wills and the God-knows-whats, I have always felt at home. (Joseph Mitchell, Up in the Old Hotel, “Joe Gould”s Secret”)
Martin and Leia
Dear M&L,
Ah, Joe Mitchell, the greatest writer journalism ever produced (yeah, that includes, you, Mr. Hemingway). Your collection of Mitchell’s New Yorker non-fiction mixes the hard-boiled with the lyrical like no other literature.
The quotation qualifies as a polysyndeton, a figure that connects parts of a sentence with a repeated conjunction (“This AND this AND this…”). Mitchell uses it to make his list seem longer, and to bracket each item. It’s a subtle way of boldfacing each point.
But that’s not all. He embeds his glorious polysyndeton, performing another figure called the parenthesis. (And you know what a parenthesis is.) Mitchell’s parenthetical tour de force gives the impression of a man who strays from the beaten path, both literally and syntactically.
These two figures combine to give the impression of an inspired wanderer. Which is what he was.
Fig.