Merism

Merism (Latin: merismus, Ancient Greek: μερισμός, romanized: merismós) also known as merismus is a rhetorical device (or figure of speech) in which a combination of two contrasting parts of the whole refer to the whole. For example, in order to say that someone "searched everywhere," one could use the merism "searched high and low."

Etymology

The term entered English in 1894 in the biological sense but had appeared earlier in rhetorical contexts in which it denoted "'synecdoche in which totality is expressed by contrasting parts' (such as high and low, young and old)." It derives from Modern Latin merismus, from Greek μερισμός (merismos) 'a dividing or partitioning,' ultimately from merizein 'to divide', from meros 'part, share'.

Definitions

Most broadly, some, such as Richard Lanham, define a merism as a distribution in which one thing is split into more; this is device is instead sometimes referred to as a distribution, distributio, or the distributor. An example of this definition is found in Edmund Spenser's The Faerie Queene:

Two things he feared, but the third was death;That fierce young mans unruly maistery;His money, which he lov'd as living breath;And his faire wife, whom honest long he kept uneath.

Specifying this definition, others, such as George Puttenham, define it as distributing every part of something, especially for the sake of amplification. Puttenham provides the example of describing each part of a house— the walls, the roof, the floor— being torn down instead of just stating that the house was extirpated; he goes on to quote the following Petrarchan sonnet by Henry Howard (though Puttenham attributes it to Thomas Wyatt):

Set me whereas the sunne doth parch the greene,Or where his beames do not dissolue the yce:In temperate heate where he is felt and seene,In presence prest of people mad or wise:Set me in hye or yet in low degree,In longest night or in the shortest day:In clearest skie, or where clouds thickest bee,In lustie youth or when my heares are gray:Set me in heauen, in earth or els in hell,In hill or dale or in the foaming flood:Thrall or at large, alive where so I dwell,Sicke or in health, in evill fame or good:Hers will I be, and onely with this thought,Content my selfe, although my chaunce be naught.

Which Puttenham argues could have been said in two verses:

Set me wherefoever ye willI am and wilbe yours still.

A merism can also be defined as an inclusive spectrum defined by some of its parts. For example, to search "high and low" is to search medium elevations as well as the extremes. Some definitions specifies that a merism must contain only two contrasting elements; a merism with this definition is sometimes referred to as a universalizing doublet.