[70]
It is important, too, that the figure should
[p. 419]
not depend on ambiguous collocations of words (a
trick which is far more foolish than the last); an
example of this is to be found in the controversial
theme, where a father, accused of a criminal passion
for his unmarried daughter, asks her for the name
of her ravisher. “Who dishonoured you?” he says.
She replies: “My father, do you not know?”1
1 The sense of the words depends on the punctuation, according as we place a full-stop or a comma after My father.
Quintilian. With An English Translation. Harold Edgeworth Butler. Cambridge. Cambridge, Mass., Harvard University Press; London, William Heinemann, Ltd. 1922.
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