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hoy, here’s the update from the far and near shores of marine/rhetorical life and death.

Orcas are still behaving badly, wiping out a whole population of great white sharks at Gansbaai in South Africa’s Western Cape by hunting them down mercilessly to rip out their livers. Secondly, near Port Waikato, New Zealand, surfers were “stunned,” reports the NZ Herald, to be “joined in the waves by a pod of playful orcas.” “Everyone in the cafe above was screaming and going wild,” said one of the surfers, approvingly, seemingly unaware that what they’re probably screaming is, “No, don’t do that.”

And, because time ain’t doing what it used to do, my concludingly tripartite item of “latest news” dates back to November 1970, when the state of Oregon’s Highway Division was tasked with removing a dead, 14 meter-long sperm whale from the beach at Florence. Instead of burying, burning, or displacement, they decided that explosion was the way forwards, though the acting supervisor, engineer George Thornton, eschewed the advice of a passing military expert, and instead went profligate with his use of dynamite. Twenty cases were placed land-side of the corpse, and, to the grand entertainment of the news crew on the scene, and hordes of later internet viewers, the whale exploded all over the shop, spiralling huge chunks of blubber out into the surroundings, crushing cars and threatening onlookers. The best thing about the event, to my mind, is this Thornton, stylish in his ’70s-camera-film-colour work jacket and little silver hard hat, saying, before the detonation, “Well I’m confident that it’ll work.” Would that we could all have the confidence of a highway engineer blowing up a dead sperm whale, half a century ago, forever.

That’s in 1970. In 1973, Roger Moore debuts as secret agent James Bond, in the film Live and Let Die. Near the end, there’s a sticky situation where Kananga, the villain, is just lowering Bond and the Bond girl into a shark pond. He has carved a wound (a Zorro-like slash) into Bond’s right forearm, so that the blood will drip and enrage the shark. But Bond uses his fancy watch to magnetically snatch up a pellet of compressed gas, and to circular-saw through his ropes. Then he forces Kananga to swallow the gas, so that he inflates and explodes, and Bond is not eaten by the pretty shark (which also, I notice, has a slash mark on its right-hand side). See also, in 1975, Jaws the film, in which, again, exploding cannisters of compressed air are used to escape shark death.

But I was thinking of James Bond anyway, because of a particular rhetorical instrument that compelled me. It’s the one used in the first, 1962, film Dr. No, in a conversation that takes place just before we, the camera/audience, actually see our hero’s face (our introductory view of Bond is only of his surprisingly pink fingernails). In the casino, there’s a beautiful woman at the some-sort-of-cards table, and she’s playing against Bond, but her credit is getting over-extended. So before we ever see him, we hear Bond’s voice saying, “I admire your courage, Miss . . .” And here the sentence tails off, because he cannot finish it correctly, because he doesn’t know her surname, to wind up the comment. It’s an incomplete sentence, considered under the lens of honorifical correctness. On the other hand, this sentence works perfectly for its second motive, which is to nudge her towards introducing herself. By providing her title, with an inquishitive intonation, then letting his speech fade out, Bond is actually asking, what’s your name. (I suppose he’s also checking whether or not she’s married, but that’s probably not important.) There’s a sub-ulterior question involved in his phrase, too, which is, obviously, shall we have sex; Bond is good at multiple utterance. And the woman completes the sentence, she fills in the gap (or ellipsis) with, “Trench, Sylvia Trench. I admire your luck, Mr . . .” And it’s only by absolutely copying her pattern of delivery that he then comes to give the now very famous reply that his own name is, “Bond, James Bond.” (Theme tune—heavy eye contact—double entendres kick in.)

To labour the point, Bond coins his catchphrase by: telling her his surname, then repeating it but preceded by his first name. In doing so, he specifies, expands upon the initial answer, intensifies, clarifies, elaborates. He reinforces, reduplicates, almost stutters, narrowing it down that though there might be a category containing many Bonds, he’s this particular one. It’s funny, the repetition of Bond’s name, in this context, because it’s a spoken, orthographic echo of the fact that he, bOndjamesbOnd, is a double O agent. Code named 007; the duplication meaning he’s licensed to kill. Conversely, although he’s specifying his particularity, Bond is also a sort of empty space, a hollow circle or gun-barrel-tunnel-vision, into whose ambit many different actors can besuitedly stride; he might be the only James Bond about, but we the viewers will learn that he’s many and various.

And in this phrase, it looks as though Bond is using the rhetorical device of diacope, which is, I learn, a repetition with intervening parts. (It overlaps with tmesis, splitting in two [as though by an industrial laser]; it overlaps with anaphora, repeating at the start of successive clauses; it overlaps with epanalepsis, using the repetition to bookend. It runs alongside epizeuxis, pure repetition with nothing intervening, again and again and again.)

It’s very effective. Once I’d discovered the technical term for the device, I started to think about where else it could be found. And I got waylaid by another phrase that implies diacope, without quite actually using it. It’s not any grand quotation from literature or classic cinematic witticism; just an everyday comment. The phrase is, “Fuck around and find out,” and it’s used (sort of self-evidently) in a veiled-threat fashion, to suggest that the hearer really should not carry out a course of action they might be thinking about, because there will be bad consequences if they do. It’s like “You’ll be sorry,” or “No, don’t.” I suppose it in theory comes after the question, “What would happen if I strayed off the straight and narrow?” (or perhaps, “Shall I go surfing with these orcas?”), though it doesn’t in practice have to be such a direct answer to a direct question. This is nice; so much of language and communication is implied, is not resident in the words that you actually say and reply straight back to.

But is “Fuck around and find out” an example of diacope? There’s no repetition in this phrase, you might complain. I’d assert, though, that it has an implied repetition or perhaps recursiveness: fuck around and find out what will happen when you fuck around. In which case you don’t need the first iteration; you could just say: I invite you to find out what will happen if/when you fuck around. But it’s better in the original phrasing, with the direct activity at the start, then the consequence, the expansion on the repercussions, coming after. The phrase is telling the listener that if you do something, if you carry on (with the action OR the sentence) you will learn something more. That’s why I read it as being in parallel to the first phrase: Bond,—then what?—James Bond; fuck around,—then what?—find out what happens when you fuck around. They’re both invitations, in a way. As well as information, expansions on a theme. The listener learns more from the second half. And the listener, in the second phrase, will definitely learn more from the second half: they’re going to be made to learn about come-back, repercussions, consequences.

It’s vague what would actually constitute this fucking around. This is in keeping with the way that the swear word “fuck” expands to incorporate not just sexual but a near-infinite range of activity. (And to incorporate any part of speech, fulfilling any grammatical role in a sentence. Cf. the apocryphal Glaswegian factory worker’s complaint about a non-functioning machine part: the fucking fucker’s fucking fucked.) But more specifically, the term usually refers to anything transgressive, to do with misbehaving, messing around, fooling about.

My American editor wondered whether the phrase might be one of earnest instruction, or antisocial disruption, along the lines of the ubermensch mantra, “Move fast and break things.” But in British English, what I speak, it doesn’t have that humourless / eschatalogical overtone, and it’s not really meant to be taken as helpful suggestion; it’s not like, “Have you tried turning it off and on again?” There’s a definite mischief involved; there’s being stupid. There’s trouble, but it’s probably fun, nonspecifically.

And on reflection, there’s another vagueness to the full phrase. Although I’ve described it as containing a threat, I suppose you could read it as being vague enough that there is no definite, detrimental repercussion. The statement is that you’ll find out what happens when you fuck around. It’s conceivable that the slightly bathetic answer is: nothing bad! You had fun, now it’s over. Next! That’s not how it’s really used in practice, though.

I’ve described the phrase as recursive, but is that right? Meaning, I think, that it repeats itself at every scale, in smaller and smaller fragments, so that each tiny part gives you the information you would need to reconstruct the greater whole. Or, looking through the other end of the telescope, the situation stays the same as it diminishes towards a vanishing point of smallness. There’s a vortex, a vertigo away to the very central kernel. Something at the heart that you’re trying to get to. This, I want this.

And there’s a third phrase or cliche on my mind, following those two, which is, “Play stupid games, win stupid prizes.” This has definitely got repetition, variation, and it rolls off the tongue quite nicely. Is it diacope? I’d say so, as the adjective “stupid” is repeated in each mid-clause, linking the action-reaction of: play games—then what?—win prizes. Those are the specific actions. The descriptive state, the stupidness, remains in place throughout. What does it mean? In general, that you can expect consequences that correspond to, follow inexorably on from, what you’ve done. That you’ll get your comeuppance for behaving foolishly. One thing will come after another: after the action you’ll gain the knowledge. But in particular, why games? Which, by most definitions, are things that aren’t serious, they are playful, frivolous, outwith the official and the formally sanctioned; they are all stupid. Although not unimportant. And if the prizes, too, are stupid, well, that’s ok, that’s appropriate and fitting. Stupid prizes are still prizes; they’re not necessarily bad.

There’s something about this phrase, about all three of them actually, that appeals to me. Maybe to do with vagueness, the sense that the meaning might depend on your frame of mind. Is “Play stupid games” an invitation, like the activity over which Bond, James Bond meets Sylvia Trench (they go on to play mini-golf in his apartment, and to smooch)? Or is it a warning: you might think this is a suave invitation, up until it all explodes round you; in language, there’s always the risk of its going wrong, of injuries, as from the blubber from an ill-judged sperm whale disposal unit. That is perhaps the epitome of stupid prizes. But there are worse things.