Fire and Brimstone

The book Figures Of Speech, Twenty Ways To Turn A Phrase, discusses the nounization of adjectives for the purpose of emphasis.

If you refer to a “white house” the houseness seems more important than the whiteness. To avoid that misplaced empasis in the case of the burning brimstone, the adjective is converted into a noun. Thus we get fire and brimstone, to take your focus off the chemical and get it onto the combustion.

regards,
charlie

The link to the column is: What’s up with fire and brimstone? What’s brimstone?

Wiploc, I’m not sure what you’re sayin’ here. Are you saying that the expression “fire and brimstone” came about as a way to avoid “fiery brimstone”? I guess I’d like a citation on that. 'Cause, on the other side, we’ve got the Biblical text that uses the expression “fire and brimstone”, two separate nouns. I guess it’s possible that “nounization” (cough, cough, choke) was happening back in 1200 BC or so, but I’d want to be convinced. I think it more likely that fire and sulphur were different but related nouns, and the combination was for emphasis.

Like “Hell and damnation!” or “Peanut butter and jelly”

Dex, he’s referring to the old rhetorical device of avoiding a phrase like “X-ish Y” by using “X and Y” to mean the same thing. It has a Greek name that I don’t recall but which always reminded me of Mephistopheles (entirely appropriately to the topic at hand!) when I heard it.

And yes, while such tropes are common in older English and particularly in KJV Biblical English, I suspect the reference was intentionally (1) fire and (2) sulphur. It’s worth noting, too, that a burn from sulphur hurts more per degree of burn than one from a “cleaner” burning substance. Hence “brimstone” reinforces the painfulness of the eternal fire set aside for fundamentalist preachers – oops, wrong thread! :wink:

Yeah, I understood that, Polyc, but I’m saying that there is a difference between “hell and damnation” as a wossname for “hellish damnation” (if it is), compared to “peanut butter and jelly” which is NOT such a wossname (or whatever the Greek word is.)

Since the term “fire and brimstone” comes directly from the Hebrew text, I am suspect of a claim that it was “originally” an adjective like “fiery brimstone” that got separated into two nouns… unless someone can show me that happened in ancient Hebrew.
Even then, I think I’d be dubious.

It rained fire upon Sodom. It rained sulphur upon Sodom. It rained fire AND sulphur upon Sodom.

metonymy? using a part as a symbol of the whole?

From the French, “meto” meaning the Paris subway system, and “nymy” being the French version of the knights who say “ny”. Hence, a metonymy, meaning the long stick that goes tick-tock that musicians use to keep thyme.