The Ancient Art of Advocacy Logo

Macrologia

ma-cro-lo'-gi-a / From Greek: macro, "long" and logos, "speaking"
Also known as: macrology

Longwindedness. Using more words than are necessary in an attempt to appear eloquent.

Examples:

Polonius exemplifies macrologia in the following speech from Hamlet.

"My liege, and madam, to expostulate
What majesty should be, what duty is,
Why day is day, night night, and time is time,
Were nothing but to waste night, day, and time;
Therefore, [since] brevity is the soul of wit,
And tediousness the limbs and outward flourishes,
I will be brief. Your noble son is mad:
Mad call I it, for to define true madness,
What is't but to be nothing else but mad?"
—Shakespeare, Hamlet 2.2.86-94

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Acknowledgement

The above information on individual rhetorical techniques is reproduced from the website “Silva Rhetoricae” (www.rhetoric.byu.edu ) under the terms of the Creative Commons Attribution 3.0 licence. Credit for this content lies with Professor Gideon O Burton of Brigham Young University.