Parachesis

"In rhetoric, parachesis is the repetition of the same sound in several words in close succession. Alliteration (initial rhyme) is a special case of parachesis."

So says the Wikipedia. It's disappointing, because if I heard someone say, "I'd like a parachesis," I would imagine they meant a couple of delicious bricks of cheddar.

Alliteration is one of those fingers of speech that one learns right away & uses to annoy everyone except English teachers. I still remember when, in ninth grade, I told my teacher, whose name might have been Mrs. Holder, that a phrase in Poe's "The Raven" was a perfect example of alliteration: "the grim, ungainly, ghastly, gaunt... bird of yore." She might have given me a gold star. Or boxed my ears.

Alliteration is a form of consonance, which is when you have repeated consonant sounds, except alliteration is simply at the beginning of words. Poe uses a little consonance above with "ungainly." He's a bad-ass.

He's also great (not bad) at assonance, which is repeated vowel sounds in words. All of these are examples of parachesis, which is not a word anyone ever said to me in school. Even now, as I thumb through a fun little book I've had for many moons called "Figures Of Speech: 60 Ways To Turn A Phrase" by Arthur Quinn, I see this author regards all forms of parachesis to be a bit beneath him. He prefers instead metaplasmus, which is misspelling for effect, used often in dialect, although Shakespeare (of course) does it all the time.

Don't tell my wife about it, though - she'll claim all her spelling mistakes are "for effect." Also, she'll beat me at Scrabble with "metaplasmus" over a triple words score.