Ledeen: Things Can Still Go Bad

In a recent article at NRO, Michael Ledeen argues that despite recent successes in the Terror War, there is still much work to be done. The title of the article is "Syrious Threat". That title is a clever play on words likely inspired by the "Syrial Killers" banners observed last month at the protests in Beirut.

What really caught my attention, however, was the subtitle of Ledeen's article: "This can still go bad." As any English teacher will tell you, the word "bad" is an adjective, not an adverb. As such, it should be used to modify a noun, not a verb. The grammatically correct rendering of the title would have been "This can still go badly." If it had read this way, however, I probably wouldn't have noticed it. As such, I probably wouldn't have given due consideration to the points that the author most wanted to emphasize- that our work is not done, that we are not out of danger.

And that's the thing about figures of speech, about rhetorical flourishes: they are designed to catch our attention, to make us sit up and take especial notice of what was said. This line - this can still go bad - works so well both as a subtitle and as the closing line of the essay because it does just that. The name for this device is Anthimeria, the substitution of one part of speech for another, e.g. a noun used as a verb. I rarely come across this figure of speech. Ledeen's use of it is as good as any I have seen.