Talk:Isocolon

Examples
The examples seem a bit one-sided, three out of six are by Winston Churchill and all of those within the same two weeks!

If someone knowledgeable could come up with some more diverse ones that'd be great.

TH 21:53, 3 May 2006 (UTC)


 * Seconded. I added a [citation needed] to the claim that he "often" used this device. Several other examples are of rather poor quality and probably original research too, however; I've tagged those too. --Nemo 23:13, 26 February 2014 (UTC)

What on earth is this "Anonymous (own translation from Latin)" that replaced both the Caesar and the Aeneid quotes? It seems to be a (grammatically incorrect) rephrase of a quote from Cicero's In Catilinam I,

"Non feram, non patiar, non sinam."

- Cicero, Oratio Prima in Catilinam

If someone wants to put in this clear example of Ciceronian tricolon I will have no objections, but for now I've restored the Caesar and Aeneid examples that are also clearly helpful. M. Caecilius (talk) 16:52, 10 August 2014 (UTC)

Translation of tetracolon
Era calcina grossa, e poi era terra cotta, e poi pareva bronzo, e ora è cosa viva.

google gives me

Mortar was big, and then it was clay, and then seemed bronze, and is now living thing.

Heck my italian is bad. Is that about casting a statue? --Maxus96 (talk) 22:43, 11 March 2017 (UTC)

This appears to be a quote from Gabriele D'Annunzio's Le Faville del Maglio, but I cannot for the life of me find a decent, high-quality source to cite.

If you go to this page and Ctrl + F for "era calcina" you'll find the passage in question. I don't speak a lick of Italian, so I won't be making an attempt at editing the citations, but perhaps someone who does speak Italian can enlighten us about the meaning of the passage and make the necessary changes in the article.

There are also several more examples of parallelism and isocolon just within that same paragraph. Again, hopefully someone with more knowledge than myself can include those in the text of the article.

CoconutPi (talk) 20:06, 21 December 2020 (UTC)

Special Cases?
In that section, some of the supposed counter-examples actually are true examples of isocolon, by the definition that it uses parallelism and the same word or syllable count. "Lost and found" and "over and done with" each use two adjective phrases, so would they not also count as bicolon? I might be tempted to think it's something about them being gerunds, but "alive and kicking" (with the exact same structure) is listed as an example directly above them. Etymographer (talk) 21:52, 8 October 2019 (UTC)

I was confused when it said that Siamese twins are a bicolon... and then gave a second list of Siamese twins that aren't biocolons. Shankyouverymuch08 (talk) 02:50, 27 January 2020 (UTC)


 * Agreed, not sure what it's trying to say here. While I was here, I updated the terminology -- they're now usually called irreversible binomials. --Macrakis (talk) 03:22, 27 January 2020 (UTC)

The examples generally don't fit the definition
If it's true that isocolon "is a rhetorical scheme in which parallel elements possess the same number of words or syllables," then most of the examples don't satisfy that definition. Here are the first three examples given for bicolon:
 * "buy one, get one free" (two words and two syllables, then three words and three syllables)
 * "When Israel went out of Egypt, the house of Jacob from a barbarous people" (six words and nine syllables, then eight words and twelve syllables)
 * "Judea made his sanctuary, Israel his dominion." (four words and nine syllables, then three words and seven syllables)

These are simply parallel statements with no apparent regard to matching word counts or syllable counts. Either the definition should be changed, or most of the examples should be replaced.

RCTodd (talk) 16:30, 29 January 2024 (UTC)