Word of the Day

Word of the Day

anastrophe (n)

Inversion of the normal syntactic order of words

"Mrs. Woolf also makes use of other figures of speech, such as anastrophe (the deliberate inversion of word order)..."
--Monarch Notes, Works of Virginia Woolf: To the Lighthouse

Thanks to my Star Wars-obsessed offspring, I'm aware that the most famous anastropher (is that a word?) in contemporary popular culture is Yoda:

"Ready are you? What know you of ready? For eight hundred years have I trained Jedi. My own counsel will I keep on who is to be trained. A Jedi must have the deepest commitment, the most serious mind. This one a long time have I watched. All his life has he looked away... to the future, to the horizon. Never his mind on where he was. Hmm? What he was doing. Hmph. Adventure. Heh! Excitement. Heh! A Jedi craves not these things."