Mrs. Potter, eat your heart out!

I had an infamous English teacher my junior and senior year of high school. She was smart, incredibly intelligent when it came to the English language, but in my opinion, very disorganized in her curriculum. Looking back, she was just typical of the standard genius-but-scatterbrained quality. We clashed many a-time, as was ironic, since I was probably one of the few, if not only, kid who was in the AP English classes two years in a row not because it looked good for college but because I had developed a genuine, immature and imperfect love for the English language. We were two strong-willed, opinionated people, and through the medium of our school newspaper and the classroom, butted heads.

I like to think by the time we graduated, we had earned each other's grudging respect. And as the years have passed, I have come to appreciate her incredible (if not eccentric, to put it nicely) capacity for intelligence.

Because of her intense love for the language, we came out well prepared for college writing. I felt prepared, anyway, because I knew the definition of anaphora and chiasmus, of logos, pathos and ethos, that James Joyce first coined the word epiphany as a literary tool and where it came from.

But it is only the tip of the iceberg, I fear, as I kick off the second week of my Shakespeare class. On Monday alone, we went over these figures of literature:

Bomphiologia - grandiose language
Commiseratio - "Woe is me" type talk, basically emo
Paralogismus - fallacious argument
Parachesis - repetition of consonents
Meiosis - to reduce something by the name of which you call it
Epistrophe - when phrases end with the same word
Catachresis - farfetched metaphor
Decensus - imagery of descending
Aetiologia - adding a reason to a statement
Commoratio - dwelling on a point
Synonymia - aplification through repetition of synonyms
Enjambent - when a line overflows into the next line
Exclamatio - an exclamation!
Syllogism - a three part argument involving a major premise, minor premise and conclusion
Enthymeme - truncated syllogism, usually leaving out a major premise
Chiasmus - ABBA inversion
Erotesis - a rhetorical question
Apophasis - a denial or refutation of an argument
Dichologia - self justification
Epiplexis - question asked to reproach
Conformatio - personification
Antanaclasis - a pun, a play on words (Yeah, why did they expand the word pun to anatanclasis? Those sick English badgers)
Auxesis - substitution of a word for a stronger one
Conduplicatio - repetition of a word
Analogia - analogy (duh)
Gesticulatio - pointing physically, generally used in plays
Anaphora - repetition of a beginning of a phrase
Macrologia - the use of unnecessary and superfluous words

Of course, this doesn't go over other words we've discussed such as commendatio, inversio, metonymy, procthesis, accusatio, apostrophe, isocolon, epitheton, incrementum, periodus, parrhesia and so forth. Bonus points and possibly a candy bar to the one who can first describe all those.