Meter is the music of language,
a rhythm of stressed and unstressed syllables.

The simplest meter is anapestic meter, two light stresses followed by a heavy third stress, sometimes called “galloping meter” because it allows you to speak quickly as it tumbles off your tongue. “Twas the night before Christmas and all through the house not a creature was stirring, not even a mouse.”

The following idioms are also anapestic in their rhythm:

• Get a life
• In the blink of an eye
• By the skin of your teeth
• Get it out of your system
• Feeling under the weather
• Hit the nail on the head
• At the drop of a hat
• Costs an arm and a leg
• In the heat of the moment
• In the still of the night

Can you hear the two light stresses followed by the heavy third stress? “engineer,” “haute couture,” “art nouveau.”

Meter makes phrases memorable as they echo in the articulatory loop (sometimes called the phonological loop) of Working Memory. When possible, employ meter in the signature statements – brandable chunks – within your advertising. BUT DO NOT MAKE THEM RHYME. Meter is more effective when it does not rhyme. Rhyming attracts attention to the meter, thereby exposing it and making it predictable. Let the meter be a subconscious pattern in the mind of your reader/listener, not a conscious one. – Roy H. Williams

And his cohorts were gleaming in purple and gold;
And the sheen of their spears was like stars on the sea,
Like the leaves of the forest when Summer is green,
Like the leaves of the forest when Autumn has blown,
For the Angel of Death spread his wings on the blast,
And the eyes of the sleepers waxed deadly and chill,
And there lay the steed with his nostril all wide,
And the foam of his gasping lay white on the turf,
And so there lay the rider distorted and grey,
And the widows of Ashur are loud in their wail,
So I walk by the edge of a lake in my dream.
– from The Destruction of Sennacherib
by George Gordon Lord Byron (1788-1824)