Have you ever heard someone string together a bunch of disjointed phrases that didn’t seem to work together? “People don’t believe — have you seen the way they — it’s absolutely ridiculous” is anacoluthon in action. This type of construction throws expected grammatical conventions out the window. It’s more likely to make an appearance in speech — perhaps someone is nervous or trying to get too many ideas out at once — but anacoluthon can occur in writing as well. It comes from the Greek “anakolouthon,” broken into “an-” (“not”) and “akolouthos” (“following”).