An epanorthosis is a figure of speech that signifies emphatic word replacement.[1] "Thousands, no, millions!" is a stock example. Epanorthosis as immediate and emphatic self-correction often follows a Freudian slip (either accidental or deliberate).
The word, attested 1570, is from Ancient Greek Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: epanórthōsis (Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: ἐπανόρθωσις) "correcting, revision" < Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: epí + Greek, Modern (1453-);: anorthóō (Greek, Modern (1453-);: ἀνορθόω) "restore, rebuild" < Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: ana- "up" + Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: orthóō "straighten" < Greek, Ancient (to 1453);: orthós "straight, right" (hence to "straighten up").
Epanorthoses may be spoken or written. When spoken, tone, emphasis, tempo and additional words may be used to signify the correction. The additional words can be interjections or explicitly corrective terms:
Epanorthoses may also be euphemistic, or dysphemistic, replacing a less acceptable term with a more acceptable one, or vice versa:
In typeset literature, the use of italics is typical:
The words in italics are technically the epanorthoses, but all the words following the dash may be considered part of the epanorthosis as well.
Striking through words is another way of signifying epanorthosis. Computerised communication clients with rich text or markup parsers available may allow users to compose strikethrough text:
An older, somewhat leet-like computer convention, using caret notation to denote control characters, is the use of ^H to suggest a backspace, or ^W to suggest deletion of the preceding word. The caret-notation characters may be repeated as necessary:
Sometimes repeated ^H's are used instead of ^W's, because the ^W-convention is less well known than the ^H.
In Aviation English phraseology, the word "correction" must be explicitly used: