The Art of Alliteration
If I had a penny for every time I’ve recently heard the phrase ‘credit crunch’ I’d almost have enough cash to buy out both Lehman Brothers and Goldman Sachs. As life’s not like that my mind has instead been wandering from the financial fiasco to the more interesting subject of cognitive linguistics, or more precisely the art of alliteration.
Why has the phrase ‘credit crunch’ so quickly entered our common vernacular? What causes certain phrases to suddenly be heard everywhere from national broadcasters to the local boozer?
Let’s start at the beginning with a quick definition of alliteration. The OED takes it as commencement of adjacent or closely connected words with same letter or sound. This sound can take the form of assonance (repetition of vowel sounds) or consonance (similar consonant sounds) and the rhythm it delivers serves as one of the building blocks of verse.
Alliteration is all-around: piss-poor results, naughty but nice, abara cadabara, sweet smell of success, trick or treat etc. It makes children’s tongue twisters memorable; Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers. It’s found in poetry, probably most famously in the Anglo-Saxon epic Beowulf which often uses repetitive alliteration instead of rhyme; Now Beowulf bode in the burg of the Scyldings, Leader beloved, and long he ruled In fame with all folk since his father had gone. And it crops up in names. I dare say the reason Clark Kent is more memorable then Bruce Wayne is because of the alliteration. Likewise would Marilyn Monroe have become a global star if she has remained plain Norma Jean?
Without alliteration phrases loose a certain resonance. Just look what happens to ‘it takes two to tango’ if you change it to ‘you need a couple to waltz’.
However none of this tells us how alliteration becomes memorable. Now here you have a choice, you can read some real research from R. Brooke Lea, eminent professor of psychology at Macalester College in Minnesota or you can read my half baked theory.
Well here’s my back of an envelope equation for how some alliterative phrases enter everyday speech. A + B x (Zx2) = X.
Where quality of alliteration (A) is added to frequency use of phrase (B) and then multiplied by zeitgeist / or resonance to people score (Z) to give a score for penetration of phrase (X). Using this measure we can take the two alliterative phrases, the ‘people’s princess’ and ‘Mystic Meg’, and compare their popularity. I’ll let you do the maths.
So what does this have to do with the credit crunch? Well to stop the meltdown of the money markets and as an alternative to pumping in pounds, why not just get newspaper editors and broadcasters to re-brand the problem as ‘deep financial gloom’? Taking out the alliteration will make it less memorable, so causing less public interest and therefore panic, subsequently lessening the risk of a run on the pound.
October 13, 2008 at 9:15 pm
Good god, Chris. Why would you ruin language by turning it into math? While you’re at it why don’t you go ahead and turn wine into water? Chocolate into child abuse? Kittens into chlamydia?!
October 19, 2008 at 6:11 pm
For the marriage of words and maths (with the ‘s’) I give you Aristotle, Sir Isaac Newton, Leonardo Da Vinci, the music of Mozart and the renaissance. How can you write for the web without maths? Keyword density, Flesch–Kincaid readability tests and the Gunning-Fogg index all rely on it. But most importantly without a link between words and numbers you have no Scrabble.
October 24, 2008 at 7:05 am
Hi Chris, nice and interesting blog.
My new ebook uses alliteration and acronyms to remember the North American regions, while having fun travelling with a vegetarian werewolf.
Well, it works for me anyway!
October 27, 2008 at 3:03 pm
Touche, Chris. Touche. Apart from the keyword density bit, because in no way does this have anything to do with anything that is good, wholesome or beautiful about the English language (or any other language for that matter).