Figure of speech. J. J. O'Molloy recalls that John
F. Taylor was very sick when he arrived to give his speech:
"His dark lean face had a growth of shaggy beard round it. He
wore a loose neckcloth and altogether he looked (though he was
not) a dying man." The parenthetical phrase is an
example of what ancient rhetoricians called epanorthosis,
or sometimes metanoia––a correction of something that
the speaker has just said.
Epanorthosis (EP-uh-nor-THO-sis, from Greek epi- = in
addition + ana- = again + orthos = straight,
right, correct, so "setting right again") is a correction of
something that went before. Metanoia (MET-uh-NOY-uh, from meta-
= change + noein = to think, so "changing one's
mind") means the same thing. The author of the Rhetorica
ad Herennium says that this figure (which he calls by
its Latin name correctio) "retracts what has been said
and replaces it with what seems more suitable." Gideon Burton
(rhetoric.byu.edu) defines it as "Amending a first thought by
altering it to make it stronger or more vehement." He gives
the example "I am angry––no, I am furious about the delay."
The Herennium author too has examples of this sort:
"O Virtue's companion, Envy, who art wont to pursue good men,
yes, even to persecute them."
But, on the contrary, Richard Nordquist (www.thoughtco.com)
observes that epanorthosis can often be a retraction or
weakening of what was said. He cites these sentences from
Golding's Lord of the Flies: "Maybe there is a
beast.... What I mean is...maybe it's only us." He also quotes
Paul Simon: "I don't like the majority of what I do. I
shouldn't say I don't like it, but I'm not satisfied with
almost everything that I do." In The Hermeneutics of
Original Argument: Demonstration, Dialectic, Rhetoric (1998),
cited by Nordquist, P. Christopher Smith recalls a classic
instance of such partial retraction, Augustine's "Give me
chastity and continence––but not yet" (Confessions
8.7). O'Molloy's statement is of this sort: John Taylor looked
like a dying man, but in fact he was only very ill.
Some rhetoricians, including John Walker in A Rhetorical
Grammar (1822), have remarked on the resemblance between
epanorthosis and the parenthesis, which briefly
interrupts the grammatical flow of a sentence to insert some
relevant thought. Joyce's example of the figure certainly
supports this inference, being set off from its sentence in
parentheses.
