In an email that I composed at work today, I came up with this phrase:
“invidious implications of incompetence”
I would say it is more than assonance, which seems to be the repetition of vowel sounds anywhere within a string of words, not necessarily at the beginning.
It is not alliteration, strictly speaking, which is supposed to be repetition of consonants at the beginning of words.
This illustrates the repetition of a syllable (‘in’ and it’s close relative ‘im’) at the beginning of these words. Is there a name for this? Should we coin one? “Sylliteration”?
Roddy
I guess I was taught wrong, but my teachers seemed to agree that alliteration worked for any kind of repeated sound at the beginning of words, and they were happy to include similar-but-not-quite-same sounds just like poets often cheat and use words that almost rhyme.
I believe panache45 was noting that it’s reminiscent of Agnew’s “nattering nabobs of negativism”.
Wikipedianotes: “Alliteration may also include the use of different consonants with similar properties (labials, dentals, etc.) [2] or even the unwritten glottal stop that precedes virtually every word-initial vowel in the English language, as in the phrase “Apt alliteration’s artful aid” (despite the unique pronunciation of the “a” in each word) [3].” (emphasis mine)
In other words, your phrase is indeed alliteration, because the glottal stop is a consonant (phonetically, although not lexically).
I thought it was at least a little clever, but perhaps context is everything.