Imperial, imperious, imperative

Figure of speech. Professor MacHugh describes Rome as "imperial, imperious, imperative." Later in Aeolus, J. J. O'Molloy recalls John F. Taylor's saying that if anything in marble "of soultransfigured and of soultransfiguring deserves to live," it is Michelangelo's statue of Moses. Both phrasings employ a rhetorical device called polyptoton or paregmenon: using different forms of the same root word in close proximity.

John Hunt 2023

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