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Terminal Assonance: Assonance is the repetition of vowel sounds within successive words in prose or poetry. If the repeated sounds are consonants, in the middle of words, that's consonance. If assonance or consonance is the repetition of the first sound in successive words in a phrase, it's alliteration. When it occurs at the end of words or phrases, it's terminal assonance or consonance; a rhyme.

These literary devices are used in names, slogans, jingles, advertising pitches, and other branding efforts, because rhythmic sounds in language often make a phrase memorable. Sometimes, they're used with great effect; at other times, it seems they're used without rhyme or reason.

AdSlogans.com founder, Timothy R. V. Foster, writes in The Art and Science of the Advertising Slogan that alliteration can help make a slogan or other advertising message memorable. But, in a recent column in the Los Angeles Times titled Poetry of Popular Patter, Bob Barker complains that we're "awash in alliteration."
We are victims of anxious advertising executives and publicity-hungry politicians. Desperate to sell their messages quickly, they repeatedly load their slogans with words whose first sound repeats. They do this crudely and self-consciously, these villains, cheapening a subtly beautiful literary technique.
While we're speaking of anxious advertising executives and publicity-hungry politicians, it's worth noting, perhaps, that the word asinine is derived from the Latin genus, Equus Asinus, which is commonly called an ass.
A male donkey (jackass or jack) can be crossed with a female horse to produce a mule and a male horse crossed with a female donkey (jennet or jenny) to produce a hinny. These hybrids are almost always sterile due to the fact that horses have 64 chromosomes and donkeys have 62, producing offspring with 63 chromosomes.
Terminally asinine is something else entirely, in which the authors claim to have "made salient a largely unacknowledged and undifferentiated aspect of advertising language."
Posted by abnu on Monday, May 31, 2004 @ 9:58 PM [ + ]

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