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Symploce – a figure of speech in which several successive clauses have the same first and last words. Synchysis – word order confusion within a sentence. Synecdoche – a rhetorical device where one part of an object is used to represent the whole—e.g., "There are fifty head of cattle." or "Show a leg!" (naval command to get out of bed ...
A word salad is a "confused or unintelligible mixture of seemingly random words and phrases", [1] most often used to describe a symptom of a neurological or mental disorder. The name schizophasia is used in particular to describe the confused language that may be evident in schizophrenia . [ 2 ]
Every conversation involves turn-taking, which means that whenever someone wants to speak and hears a pause, they do so. Pauses are commonly used to indicate that someone's turn has ended, which can create confusion when someone has not finished a thought but has paused to form a thought; in order to prevent this confusion, they will use a filler word such as um, er, or uh.
A disfluence or nonfluence is a non-pathological hesitance when speaking, the use of fillers (“like” or “uh”), or the repetition of a word or phrase. This needs to be distinguished from a fluency disorder like stuttering with an interruption of fluency of speech, accompanied by "excessive tension, speaking avoidance, struggle behaviors, and secondary mannerism".
Non-standard: This outline is incomplete and must be flushed out. flounder and founder. To flounder is to be clumsy, confused, indecisive, as if flopping about like a fish out of water (a flounder being a kind of fish). To founder is to fill with water and sink (or, figuratively, to fail).
On the other hand, as is the case with any literary or rhetorical effect, excessive use of pleonasm weakens writing and speech; words distract from the content. Writers who want to obfuscate a certain thought may obscure their meaning with excess verbiage. William Strunk Jr. advocated concision in The Elements of Style (1918):
Former president Donald Trump called Melania 'Mercedes' as he praised his wife during a speech in Washington DC. The crowd at the Conservative Political Action Conference (CPAC) gave the former ...
Obfuscation is the obscuring of the intended meaning of communication by making the message difficult to understand, usually with confusing and ambiguous language. The obfuscation might be either unintentional or intentional (although intent usually is connoted), and is accomplished with circumlocution (talking around the subject), the use of jargon (technical language of a profession), and ...