de Quincey, Confessions of an English Opium Eater (1821)
A common variation on the triplet starts with two repetitions of a word but delays the last one for a moment. The couplet at the start typically comes off as a cry or gasp or call to battle; the singlet then arrives with more thought attached, and explains the feeling behind the couplet, or elaborates on it, or makes it more articulate.
O Romeo, Romeo! wherefore art thou Romeo?
Romeo and Juliet, 2, 2
A horse! a horse! my kingdom for a horse!
Richard III, 5, 4
The heart! the heart! ’tis God’s anointed; let me pursue the heart!
Melville, Pierre (1852)
The common prose applications put more space between the couplet at the start and the repetition that comes later.
[T]o these evils, monstrous as they are, you owe it to your national character, to truth, to justice, to every consideration, political, social, religious, moral, at once to provide the cure. What shall it be? Public opinion! Public opinion! We have been hearing of it this long time – this many a day we have been hearing of public opinion.
Sheil, speech in the House of Commons (1843)
Ill! Ill! I am bearded and bullied by a shop-boy, and she beseeches him to pity me and remember I am ill!
Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (1839)
Owners, owners? Thou art always prating to me, Starbuck, about those miserly owners, as if the owners were my conscience.
Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
We were told – told emphatically and abundantly – that the method of their going would be a masterpiece of tactical skill. Tactics! Tactics! Ladies and gentlemen, the country is tired of their tactics.
Campbell-Bannerman, speech at London (1905)
The reverse order is less common but also effective: one, then two, in which case the pattern is not quite one of exclamation followed by explanation; it more commonly is a statement about a thing, then an extra blast of emphasis as if the speaker can’t contain himself:
Damn her, lewd minx! O damn her, damn her!
Othello, 3, 3
Mr. Nickleby against all the world. There’s nobody like him. A giant among pigmies, a giant, a giant!
Dickens, Nicholas Nickleby (1839)
Death and devils! men, it is Moby Dick ye have seen – Moby Dick – Moby Dick!
Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
Strictly speaking these last examples are cases of epimone (the repetition of phrases), not just epizeuxis (repetition of individual words); epimone is considered in more detail below. Here as elsewhere in the book, minor liberties sometimes are taken with the placement of examples for the sake of showing them where they will be most instructive.
2. Conduplicatio generally. As mentioned in the introduction to this chapter, conduplicatio likewise involves repetition of the same word, but this time with each instance separated by other words. Some examples with repeated nouns:
No lawyer can say so; because no lawyer could say so without forfeiting his character as a lawyer.
Grattan, speech in the Irish Parliament (1793)
Before I had been standing at the window five minutes, they somehow conveyed to me that they were all toadies and humbugs, but that each of them pretended not to know that the others were toadies and humbugs: because the admission that he or she did know it, would have made him or her out to be a toady and humbug.
Dickens, Great Expectations (1861)
Coming back to the same word makes it a theme of the utterance and leaves it strongly in the listener’s ear. Some examples with repeated modifiers:
A bad cause will ever be supported by bad means and bad men. . . .
Paine, The American Crisis (1783)
Verily, her ways were as the ways of the inscrutable penguins in building their inscrutable nests, which baffle all science, and make a fool of a sage.
Melville, Mardi (1849)
Too often the American that himself makes his fortune, builds him a great metropolitan house, in the most metropolitan street of the most metropolitan town.
Melville, Pierre (1852)
Eighteen of Mr. Tangle’s learned friends, each armed with a little summary of eighteen hundred sheets, bob up like eighteen hammers in a pianoforte, make eighteen bows, and drop into their eighteen places of obscurity.
Dickens, Bleak House (1853)
Cases of conduplicatio can be combined, as in this fine case where several nouns and modifiers (empire, revenue, army, worst) are repeated to create a tightly wound effect:
I allow, indeed, that the Empire of Germany raises her revenue and her troops by quotas and contingents; but the revenue of the Empire and the army of the Empire is the worst revenue and the worst army in the world.
Burke, Speech on Conciliation with the Colonies (1775)
3. Conduplicatio for enlargement. A distinctive type of conduplicatio, worth treating separately, occurs when the speaker repeats a word for the sake of elaborating on it in some way.
a. To strengthen a statement. The repetition of a word with more emphatic language around it often comes as a little surprise, and when it is just for the sake of being more pejorative it can produce a bit of amusement.
Mr. Urquiza had the misfortune (equally common in the old world and the new) of being a knave; and also a showy specious knave.
de Quincey, The Spanish Nun (1847)
Omar Khayyam’s wine-bibbing is bad, not because it is wine-bibbing. It is bad, and very bad, because it is medical wine-bibbing.
Chesterton, Heretics (1905)
Butchers we are, that is true. But butchers, also, and butchers of the bloodiest badge have been all Martial Commanders whom the world invariably delights to honor.
Melville, Moby-Dick (1851)
b. To expand a statement or further define it.
This pulpit style, revived after so long a discontinuance, had to me the air of novelty, and of a novelty not wholly without danger.
Burke, Reflections on the Revolution in France (1791)
You can blast my other passions, but revenge remains – revenge, henceforth dearer than light or food!
Shelley, Frankenstein (1818)
Conduplicatio of this kind may be extended beyond just the one repetition; the word can be repeated again to permit enlargement upon it in different directions.
Sir, I pronounce the author of such sentiments to be guilty of attempting a detestable fraud on the community; a double fraud; a fraud which is to cheat men out of their property, and out of the earnings of their labor, by first cheating them out of their understandings.
Webster, speech in the Senate (1834)
I think, and shall try to show, that it is wrong – wrong in its direct effect, letting slavery into Kansas and Nebraska, and wrong in its prospective principle, allowing it to spread to every other part of the wide world where men can be found inclined to take it.
Lincoln, debate with Stephen Douglas at Peoria (1854)
c. To add explanation.
And the odious letters in the writing became very long; – odious because he had to confess in them over and over again that his daughter, the