Clever, very
Clever,
very
In Brief
Figure of speech. Lenehan's comment on Ignatius Gallaher's journalistic coup ("— Clever, Lenehan said. Very") is transformed in one of the newspaper-like headlines into something that sounds syntactically much stranger: "CLEVER, VERY." Gilbert and Seidman cite this as an example of hysteron proteron, a rhetorical figure in which the conventional order of words is reversed so that what should come last comes first. This is debatable, but the phrase is certainly an example of hyperbaton, a broader term referring to any inversion of normal word order to call attention to some element of a sentence. Other examples in Aeolus include "Hell of a racket they make" and "Was he short taken?"
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Hyperbaton (high-PER-buh-ton, from hyper- = over + bainein
= to step) often places important words where they will be
noticed: "This I must see"; "And you did that why?"
Hysteron proteron, which simply joins the Greek words hysteros
= latter and proteros = first, plays with reversal of
time. It figures in ordinary expressions like "Then came the
thunder and lightning" or "Put on your shoes and socks," and
it is also found in literary constructions like Virgil's "Let
us die, and charge into the thick of the fight" (Moriamur,
et in media arma ruamus, Aeneid 2.353) or
Shakespeare's "Th' Antoniad, the Egyptian admiral, / With all
their sixty, fly and turn the rudder" (Antony and Cleopatra
3.10.2). In such instances, thunder, shoes, death, and flight
are foregrounded because they seem more significant, even
though they happen later in time. The inverted word order
calls attention to the most important element.
Lenehan's comment is perfectly idiomatic: "Clever. Very
[i.e., Very clever]." English speakers do this all the time,
following one-adjective judgments with some elaboration or
emphasis: "Right. You're perfectly right." But by combining
Lenehan's two fragmentary sentences into one, the headline
creates a Yoda-like impression of distorted syntax: Clever
very is it. No reversal of time is involved, so it may be
wrong to call it hysteron proteron, but in a grammatical
sense, at least, the last comes first.
Another form of hyperbaton is anastrophe
(uh-NAS-truh-FEE, from ana- = back + strephein
= to turn), which, when it is not treated simply as synonymous
with hyperbaton, is variously defined as moving the position
of one word in a sentence or as changing the normal
subject-verb-object order. Standing near the printing presses,
Bloom thinks, "Hell of a racket they make," putting the
object-phrase of the sentence in front of its subject for
emphasis. Myles Crawford asks of Garrett Deasy, "Was he
short taken?," moving the adjective in front of its verb
for emphasis. (Slote notes that the OED defines "to be
taken short" as "to have an urgent need to urinate or
defecate.") By the logic of Gilbert and Seidman both
expressions could possibly be described as instances of
hysteron proteron. Vast is the overlap among these three
terms.
