SAM LEITH picks a scholarly but funny reference book

My most cherished classic read is not a novel but a reference book. Yet I have loved it ever since I first acquired a copy as an undergraduate, and it is a strong candidate to join me on Radio Four’s Desert Island should that flattering exile ever be my fate. I give you Professor Richard A Lanham’s A Handlist of Rhetorical

Terms (second edition, University of California Press, 1991).

Here is an A–Z list of every one of those obscure Latin and Greek terms – built up over centuries, muddled and overlapping – used in the ancient art of rhetoric. Lanham was the giant on whose shoulders I tottered as I wrote my own book about rhetoric, You Talkin’ To Me? It may sound dry, but it is a wondrous cabinet of curiosities and will be of interest to anyone who cares about the language, about the shapes of arguments, or about the history of rhetoric. Plus, it’s not only scholarly but opinionated and, in bits, genuinely funny.

Opening a page at random I discover Lanham’s thoughts on topics as diverse as ‘Hypozeuxis’, ‘Hysteron proteron’ and ‘Ignoratio elenchi’ (see also ‘Fallacy [logical]’ and ‘chapter 2 at Invention: Ten invalid topics’). Who could resist? And as those cross-references suggest, you can wormhole your way through it powered only by curiosity and end up, hours later, in quite a different place.

Particular zest is given by Lanham’s inclusion of the English names (they never caught on) given to the ancient figures by that fabulous rogue and fraud George Puttenham in The Arte of English

Poesie (1589). So, zeugma becomes ‘Single Supply’ and mycterismus (insult plus hand gesture) becomes ‘Fleering Frumpe’.

Lanham’s personality comes through too. Considering that ‘occupatio’, thanks to a long-ago transcription error, has long been in use as a synonym for occultatio, Lanham reports a colleague taking the view we should retire it from use: ‘Let us by all means do so; reducing the number even by one helps clarify the muddle.’ Still, what a glorious muddle! It’s a stone-cold classic and every bookshelf should have one.