Aside
A remark delivered off to the side of the main speech — to the audience, to oneself, or in a parenthesis.
An aside is a short utterance spoken apart from the main flow of speech, conventionally unheard by the other characters on stage or unaddressed to the main audience in prose. In drama it is a formal device: the speaker turns slightly away and tells us what they really think. In everyday writing it survives as the parenthetical, the dash-bracketed confidence, the footnote with a personality.
The device is old and specific. Elizabethan and Jacobean playwrights used the aside to expose the gap between a character's public words and private intent — Iago's asides in Othello are the clearest working example, because they let the audience hold two versions of the same man at once. Restoration comedy turned the same device toward laughter rather than dread.
As a quotation type, asides are unusually quotable and unusually easy to misuse. They are quotable because they are candid, compressed, and often funnier than the surrounding speech. They are easy to misuse because their meaning depends on the fact that they were not meant for everyone — quote an aside as though it were a public statement and you invert its tone.
Common mistake: over-using the written aside. One parenthetical confidence per page reads as intimacy; four per page reads as a writer who cannot commit to a sentence. If the aside carries the real point, promote it into the main clause.
“A little more than kin, and less than kind.”
Keep reading the glossary
A brief, witty remark — sharper than an observation, lighter than an argument.
Notes, comments, and quotations written by a reader in the margins of a book.
The short attributive phrase — 'she said', 'he replied' — that identifies the speaker of a line of quoted dialogue.
A short, witty, often satirical statement built on a clever turn.