Rhetorical figures, arguments, computation

Then he went about his regular, non-Twitter affairs. The next afternoon, fresh from a nap, he checked his account, stared at the outcome, and tweeted to @upulieto, an associate, “I just woke up. What a mess” [49]. His tweet had spiraled virally: tens of thousands of likes, retweets, endless streams of commentary. Why? Well, lots of factors, of course. There is rarely a single factor to which one can point in rapid cultural propagation. But the pithiness of the tweet, its form/function iconicity, and its argumentative force are surely three of those factors – perhaps the three most important – and all of them are a direct consequence of the tweet’s rhetorical figures. Its figures notably capitalize on repetition, a stylistic move one might think is anathema to twitter. Repetitions are highly redundant, contributing very little new information. They should therefore be corrosive to the concision so necessary to effective tweets. Repetitions distend the ideational function, not condense it, making them very costly in twitter, which provides only a 140-character vehicle. And yet: the tweet was instantly and broadly recognized as a brilliant, incisive, necessarily brief and highly effective argument. Most notable among its figuration is the compound figure, symploce, in which the same word or words are repeated at the beginnings and endings of proximal clauses or phrases (Women in and wearing hijab). Symploce is a compound figure because it is a combination of epanaphora (phraseor clause-initial