Homoeopropophoron: Alliteration taken to an extreme where nearly every word in a sentence begins with the same consonant. Sometimes, simply a synonym for alliteration or paroemion [a stylistic vice].
NOTE: I have translated all text to English from Babylonian and French. I take full responsibility for any errors.
“Suffering succotash!” was coined by Sylvester Cat in 1951. Nobody knew what it meant, but he was allowed to say it by the cartoon company where he worked because he was a major star. Nobody could touch him. “Suffering succotash” is an alliteration—where the first consonants of adjacent words are the same. It has its roots in ancient Greece, and other ancient cultures, like Babylon, in Hammurabi’s Code: “6. If any one steal the property of a temple or of the court, he shall be put to death, and also the one who receives the stolen stuff from him shall be put to death.” I’ve highlighted “stolen stuff” because it is an alliteration. But, far out on the frontiers of alliteration is a more radical consonant-clanking concoction: homoeopropophoron.
In homoeopropophoron: almost every word in a sentence starts with the same consonant. My great great grandfather, the revered 18th century French philosopher, Marco Poulet used it to great effect in his “Memoir of a Macho Man.” In it, he recounts his life of debauchery until he met love of his life, a palomino named Monsieur Eduardo; a show pony of Spanish origin that he met in Italy at the annual Palio di Siena. Poulet was wandering around Sienna, checking out the competing neighborhoods and looking for a horse and jockey to bet on. As he entered the Caterpillar Neighborhood he saw a giant caterpillar which made him nervous. He didn’t know why. But, as he rounded a corner he heard a voice with a Spanish accent to say: “Cable coded clumps of coddled cod create clanking chords of conscience—Buy me! Purchase me! Make a bid!” It was the horse, of course, Monsieur Eduardo who was begging to be bought.
Poulet was stunned and, of course, immediately purchased the horse. They stayed in a very expensive hotel in Florence for one week before heading for Paris. Poulet had found his muse and could not help but speak, think and write in homoeopropophoron. His influential treatise “Cranial Constipation Closes Colonial Cabanas” liberated generations of Frenchmen and women from ethnocentric thinking and paved the way for the French Revolution, which initially excluded horses. That changed when they stampeded the Bastille and fell in a hail of spears and arrows. Eduardo, who led the charge, was the first to fall, calling out to Poulet as he lay dying: “Tentacles of time thoughtlessly trace transforming territories, transilluminating trouble’s tomb.”
Poulet remained heartbroken for 25 years, taking the blame for Eduardo’s death and falling deeper into homoeopropophoron. In the 25th year of his grief, he broke its spell with his most important work that would become the benchmark of excellence for all subsequent works of French philosophy. It’s title “Cloaked Closet Canary Cabal” rings out like the bells of Notre Dame to all patriotic French people. It was quoted over and over again by the best of French philosophers, and others around the world. The French philosopher Jean Jaques Rousseau wrote in the introduction to his “Confessions”: “Augustine aggregated angelic avenues aglitter with apples, but alas he was acerbic. I Rousseau radiate rectitude, rashly ranging rabbitlike; remiss, ridiculous, and rebellious.”
Poulet died peacefully in a blue brocaded armchair he had placed at the top of the Champs-Élysées, on the Place de l’Étoile, underneath the Arc de triomphe. He languished for weeks, attended only by his adoring nurse whom he had affectionately nicknamed Eduardo, who would read to him day and night, rain or shine. He loved Ovid’s works and the novel “Bélisaire.” When he died, the city of Paris erected a banner across the Arc de triomphe in his honor: “Truth is a Tyrannical Treadmill Tactfully Telling Tales.” After his death, Poulet’s nurse worked tirelessly in support of the establishment of “Joan of Arc Park” down the street from the Tuileries.
Definition courtesy of “Silva Rhetoricae” (rhetoric.byu.edu).
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