A merism is a figure of speech that describes something by listing its various traits or components, often indicating completeness. There are two types: one that contrasts two extremes to define the whole, and another that uses some parts to denote the whole. Merisms are conventional phrases and are commonly used in legal writing and the Bible. The word “merismo” also has a biological meaning, describing the repetition of similar parts in an organism.
A merism is a figure of speech in which something is described by enumerating many of its different traits or components. Merisms often indicate completeness. They are also usually conventional phrases, reused in the same way by most English speakers. Examples of common English merisms include “hook, line and sinker” and “high and low”.
A merism serves to define a whole by describing some or all of its parts. There are two main methods to achieve this. The first is to describe two contrasting extremes. For example, the merism “young and old” describes the entire population; if someone claims that a product will appeal to “young and old”, he is claiming that the product will appeal to everyone. Similarly, if someone wishes to convey that he has searched an entire area, he can use the expression “searched above and below,” which uses two contrasting extremes to define the whole.
The second common type of merism is one in which a number of parts of a thing, though not necessarily all, are used to denote the whole. A classic example of this is the expression “lock, stock and barrel,” which originally referred to the parts of a gun. Now refers to the set of any object. A similar expression, “hook, line, and sinker” refers to the parts of a fishing line. “She swallowed it hook, line and sinker” means “she swallowed it whole”.
Merisms are standard sentences in English and are almost always repeated in an identical format. To return to the example of “lock, stock, and barrel,” it would be unheard of for an English speaker to say “stock, lock, and barrel” or “barrel, stock, and lock.” Similarly, people are looking for “high and low”, not “low and high”, and it is much more common for a crowd to be addressed as “ladies and gentlemen” than “ladies and gentlemen”.
Merisms are a common feature of legal writing, where they often originate from terms that previously had distinct meanings but no longer have. Examples of legal merisms include “last will and testament”. Merisms are also common rhetorical devices in the Bible, where, for example, the phrase “the heavens and the earth” means all of creation.
The word “merismo” comes from a Greek root, “merismos”, which means “to divide” or “partition”. Consequently, the word has an alternative meaning. In biology, merism describes the repetition of similar parts of an organism, such as the repeating pattern of scales on fish. Classifying animals by counting these repeating features is called meristics.
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