Anacoluthon

In Paradise Lost, John Milton uses an anacoluthon with Satan's first words to illustrate his initial confusion: Additionally, Conrad Aiken's Rimbaud and Verlaine has an extended anacoluthon as it discusses anacoluthon: ==Etymology==

The word anacoluthon is a transliteration of the Greek (), which derives from the privative prefix 'not', and the root adjective 'following'. This, incidentally, is precisely the meaning of the Latin phrase in logic. However, in classical rhetoric, anacoluthon was used for the logical error of and for the syntactic effect or error of changing an expected following or completion to a new or improper one. ==Use of the term==

The term anacoluthon is used primarily within an academic context. It is most likely to appear in a study of rhetoric or poetry. For example, the 3rd edition of ''The King's English'', a style guide written by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, mentions it as a major grammatical mistake: The word, though not the underlying meaning , has been somewhat popularized due to its use as an expletive by Captain Haddock in the English translations of The Adventures of Tintin series of children's books. The poet and critic Rachel Blau DuPlessis defines anacoluthon as "the grammatical switching of horses in midstream of a sentence: beginning a sentence in one grammar and ending it in another". She argues that it involves "the employing of multiple discursive ranges and disjunctive transpositions from one to the other[,] hence in any one poem, far from being in one mode, one register, one stable voice, a writer is like an acrobat ... a Barthesean weaver of a wacky fabric, or someone who 'samples', like a certain kind of contemporary DJ". ==See also==