Those That at a Distance Resemble Flies

Michael Dirda of the Washington Post reviews Umberto Eco’s The Infinity of Lists.

In one of my favorite chapters, Eco describes rhetorical devices, or tropes, used in listmaking, such as asyndeton, the avoidance of conjunctions. For example, I left out “and” when speaking of “schedules, calendars, in-boxes, deadlines, memoranda.” Asyndeton conveys the impression that a series could go on forever. In my immediately following sentence, I employed polysyndeton, in which a conjunction — in this case “or” — appears between each activity mentioned. Such repetition creates a feeling of almost naive breathlessness or awe, as if the writer, overwhelmed by the number of choices, can only point to an item there and another here and still another over there and . . .