Forsyth has tested this on many people. The Wicked Witch of the West in the 1939 Wizard of Oz, sending her flying monkeys after Dorothy, says — what?
Fly, my pretties, fly!
Almost everyone remembers it. They have heard the line. They saw the movie as a child or as an adult. They can recall the witch's voice, the pitch, the line's delivery.
The line is not in the movie. She says at one point, fly, fly, fly, fly. She never says fly my pretties fly. But we all remember it as that.1
Why? Because diacope is so structurally powerful that the brain edits the actual line into the diacope shape. Fly, fly, fly, fly (the actual movie line) is forgettable repetition. Fly, my pretties, fly! (the misremembered line) is perfect diacope — word, sandwiching interruption, same word.
The diacope-shaped version fits the cognitive slot the brain has for memorable lines. The actual non-diacope version doesn't. Over time, the brain stores the slot-fitting version even though it never heard it.
The Wizard of Oz misquote is one of the strongest pieces of evidence for the rhetorical-figures-as-cognitive-receptors thesis. It proves three things:
Proof 1 — The figures operate below conscious craft. The audience doesn't notice the editing happening. They believe their memory is faithful to the source. The figure's force operates at a level the introspective mind has no access to.
Proof 2 — The figures shape collective cultural memory. This is not an individual quirk; everyone misremembers the line the same way. The cultural memory of the movie has been edited collectively over decades. The slot-fitting version is what survives in collective recall.
Proof 3 — The figures can overwrite literal facts. If a structural form is strong enough, it can overcome direct sensory exposure. People who have rewatched the movie multiple times still misremember the line. The form-pressure outweighs the corrective pressure of repeated exposure.
This is the cleanest demonstration of why the rhetorical-figures matter operationally rather than merely stylistically.
The same mechanism explains other famous misquotes:
In each case, the misquote is more rhetorically-figure-shaped than the original. The collective cultural memory is structurally biased toward the figures.
Two practical implications:
Implication 1 — Engineer for the slot. If you want a line to enter cultural memory, build it in a rhetorical-figure shape. The figure-shaped line will be remembered as you wrote it. The non-figure-shaped line will be misremembered into a figure-shape — or forgotten entirely.
Implication 2 — Be aware that your perfectly-chosen line may be edited in transmission. Even careful readers may misquote a writer toward the more figure-shaped form. The original line may become the misremembered version in second-hand circulation. The writer cannot fully control this. The best move is to write the figure-shaped line directly so that the cultural-memory version and the actual line are the same.
False-memory-via-rhetoric and diacope are inextricably linked — the Wizard of Oz case is a diacope-induced false memory. The mechanism applies most strongly to diacope because diacope is the most cognitively dominant of the figures, but all the figures (chiasmus, tricolon, anadiplosis) can induce similar memory edits at smaller effect-size.
False-memory-via-rhetoric converges with chiasmus's felt-truth mechanism — both demonstrate that rhetorical figures operate on the audience at a level the audience does not introspect. The chiasmus produces felt-rightness; the diacope produces edited memory. Both happen below the conscious-craft threshold.
False-memory-via-rhetoric maps onto two adjacent domains where the same form-pressure-overrides-content principle appears: psychology (the reconstructive-memory tradition's findings about narrative-driven memory editing) and behavioral-mechanics (the propaganda tradition's exploitation of mnemonic-form for ideological transmission).
Psychology: Memory Malleability and Perception Construction — cognitive psychology has spent decades demonstrating that human memory is reconstructive, not reproductive. Memories are reassembled at retrieval from fragments, current state, and subsequent narrative rehearsal. The Wizard of Oz case is a specific demonstration: the actual line is reassembled at retrieval in a rhetorically-cleaner form. The structural identity: both fields converge on the operational finding that memory is shaped by retrieval-time form-pressures, not just by encoding-time accuracy. The insight neither domain generates alone: Forsyth's rhetorical analysis converges with cognitive-science findings on a single underlying mechanism — the brain stores form-pressure-edited versions over time. A literary writer who knows the cognitive science has scientific confirmation of why diacope-shaped lines survive; a memory researcher who studies misquotes has a rhetorical-vocabulary for the specific structural pressures driving the edits.
Behavioral-Mechanics: Slogan Engineering for Cultural Transmission — political and commercial slogans are engineered specifically for survival in cultural transmission across imperfect retellings. Make America Great Again survives because it is rhetorically clean and memorable. We need to focus on improving America's industrial and economic positioning would not survive because it has no figure-shape for cultural memory to lock onto. The structural identity: propaganda and slogan-engineering deliberately design for the slot-fit that the Wizard of Oz case reveals operates below conscious attention. The insight neither domain generates alone: the false-memory mechanism is what makes slogans work. Writers who understand this can design lines that survive cultural transmission; analysts who study propaganda can use the rhetorical-figures taxonomy to diagnose which slogans have the survival-architecture and which don't.
A third connection worth marking: false-memory-via-rhetoric has structural similarity to governing scenes from individual memory to collective culture — both describe mechanisms by which individual cognitive pressures shape collective cultural memory.
The Sharpest Implication
If the rhetorical figures can overwrite the literal facts that people have directly experienced (the Wizard of Oz audience watched the actual movie and still misremembers the line), then the cultural canon of famous quotes and iconic lines is structurally curated by the rhetorical-figures taxonomy rather than by the actual content of the source material. The uncomfortable implication: our collective sense of what great writers said is partially fictional — the quotes that survive are the form-fitting versions, not the originals, and the originals have been edited out of cultural memory by the form-pressure. The implications extend beyond writing — the political slogans, religious teachings, and aphorisms that constitute our shared cultural inheritance have been shaped by this mechanism over centuries. We are remembering the diacope-edited, chiasmus-balanced, tricolon-cleaned versions of our cultural inheritance, not the messier originals.
Generative Questions