Questions about an ill-fated gun trafficking scandal upset Attorney General Eric Holder this week, and he lashed out at a reporter. Not only is the nation’s chief law enforcement officer being hounded by media, he is also being dogged by a rhetorical hendiadys.
Fast and Furious — that’s the hendiadys and the name of the scandal. It is also the name of the underlying ATF program that has seen 300 Mexicans die from guns trafficked to Mexican drug cartels. Fifty-two members of Congress and three governors have asked for Holder’s resignation. They are furious with him and want him out — fast. But President Obama is standing firmly behind his AG.
Pity Eric Holder. If you are ever involved in a scandal, pray that the title for your humiliation does not take on rhetorical physiognomies that make the name a household word. The way news is breaking, Fast and Furious could take on as much equality with scandal as does the word Watergate.
Fast and furious is a smooth sounding alliteration. But even more important as scandals go, the name constitutes an adjectival hendiadys, a rhetorical device that creates brain dendrites and long-term memories among those that hear the term. In short, Fast and Furious is a memorable, sexy name for a controversy.
For writers, the recipe for a traditional hendiadys takes a noun and an adjective as ingredients. Instead of allowing the adjective to modify the noun in tandem, the writer inserts a conjunction. The pair becomes separate nouns. Words that usually stand independently are joined in an unconventional way. Some familiar examples of a hendiadys include: we had wind and weather; we suffered the hot and sun; for thine is the kingdom, and the power, and the glory.
Perhaps the most famous hendiadys is Shakespeare’s phrase sound and fury, taken from scene five of Macbeth, where the general utters the sentence, “It is a tale told by an idiot, full of sound and fury, signifying nothing.”
The hendiadys sound and fury was borrowed by William Faulkner to become the title of his book, The Sound and the Fury, about a family of Southern aristocrats. Hollywood turned the story into a movie in 1959 with the talents of Yul Brynner and Joanne Woodward.
Likewise, Hollywood popularized fast and furious with John Ireland’s movie The Fast and the Furious in 1955. But it was Vin Diesel and the series of new action films from Universal Studios that renewed the fame of fast and furious into pop culture in the new millennium.
Writers hoping to coin a new hendiadys that will survive over time must use the rhetorical device to startle a reader without permitting him to stumble. The worst hendiadys is a construction that is merely redundant. The best hendiadys presents a sharp delineation between words that are normally paired, yet unifies the two independent words to amplify a single descriptive thought.
Shakespeare used the hendiadys well – almost to compulsion, promoting the technique hundreds of times in his plays. He is eclipsed by fast and furious on the Internet. Today “fast and furious” yields nearly 40 million Google search results, while “Eric Holder” generates only nine million. “Sound and fury” gets only three million.
So the flurry of fast and furious usage breeds two life lessons. First, if you are a bureaucrat, choose an awkward code word for your controversial black ops, not a memorable hendiadys (if discovered, your operation will make unremarkable news). Second, if you are a writer, find that memorable combination of words that usually stands alone; and then join those words to create a poetic moment.
News Roundup:
- The House of Representatives continues hearings into Operation Fast and Furious.
- House Oversight Committee Chairman Darrell Issa (R-California) has issued a subpoena for Justice Department documents related to the program.
- The Justice Department says it has provided thousands of documents to Congress and that it is cooperating in the investigation.
- Attorney General Eric Holder will testify before the House Judiciary Committee on Dec. 8, 2011.
- After being questioned by a Daily Caller reporter on November 29, Holder pointed at the reporter and said, “You guys need to — you need to stop this. It’s not an organic thing that’s just happening. You guys are behind it.” The Daily Caller is a conservative-leaning web site.
- The Obama Administration has sealed court records containing details of how Mexican drug smugglers murdered U.S. Border Patrol agent Brian Terry with a gun connected to Operation Fast and Furious.
- News reports today documented the complaints of ATF agents who were the whistle-blowers on details of Operation Fast and Furious. Several have been transferred to new cities or moved to desk jobs.
- No managers behind Operation Fast and Furious have been fired; one has resigned; others have been promoted.
- President Barack Obama says Holder has his “full support.”
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