Figures of Speech & Sound Devices Flashcards
Often picturesque metaphorical compounds. Ex: in the Anglo-Saxon epic -Beowulf- examples are “sea-farer” for ship, “swan-road” & “whale-road” for sea, & “twilight-spoiler” for dragon. Also “widow-maker” for anything that kills men & W.H. Auden’s “undried sea” are houses for fish in “The Wonderer”.
Kenning
A trope in which a part signifies the whole (or the whole signifies the part). Ex: using “threads” to refer to clothes, “wheels” to a car, or “hands” for people who work @ manual labor. “The hand that rocks the cradle rules the world.” Here, “hand” refers to mothers.
Synecdoche
A form of understatement in which a thing is affirmed by stating the negative of the opposite. Ex: she was not unmindful (she paid careful attention); she’s not ugly (she’s beautiful).
Litotes
A figure that endows animals, ideas, abstractions, & inanimate objects w/ human form.
Personification
The relationship between words in which the final consonants in the stressed syllable agree, but the vowels that proceed them differ, as “add-read”, “mill-ball”, & “torn-burn”. Most eye rhymes (such as “word” & “land”) are instances of - because of differences in ways that vowels are pronounced.
Consonance
The treatment of abstractions as concrete things. Representation of ideas as though they had concrete form. Also, the reduction of people & ideas to marketable | |. Ex: Truth is a deep well; Thought sinks into a sea of forgetfulness.
Reification
The marked use of sibilant (hissing) sounds represented by s, z, sh, zh, etc.
Sigmatism
The description of 1 kind of sensation in terms of another; that is, the description of sounds in terms of colors, as a “blue note”, of colors in terms of sound, as “loud shirts” of sounds in terms of taste, as “how sweet the sound” of colors in terms of temperature, as a “cool green”. 1 of the most distinctive characteristics of the poetry of the symbolist movement.
Synesthesia
A use of words peculiar to a given language which cannot be translated literally. “To carry out” literally means to carry something out (of a room perhaps), but -atically it means to see that something is done, as “to carry out a command”. Ex: “to paint the town red” - to have a good time.
Idiom
Something that is itself & also stands for something else. Ex: a flag standing for a country; The very title -The Scarlet Letter- points to a double symbol: a color - coded letter of the alphabet; the meanings of the letter A multiply as the story progresses.
Symbol
An accidental interchange of sounds, usually the initial consonants in 2 or more words, such as “blushing crow” for “crushing blow” or “well-boiled icicle” for “well-oiled icicle”. Owes its name to Dr. W.A. -, of New College Oxford who was supposedly prone to such transpositions as “You | | hissed all your mystery lectures & tasted 2 whole worms.”
Spoonerism
A figure of speech involving a “turn” or change of sense - the use of a word in a sense other than the literal. In this sense figures of comparisons (metaphor, simile) as well as ironical expressions.
Trope
A piling up of terms, as in the line, “Painted emulsion of snow, eggs, yarn, coal, manure” in Hart Crane’s “The Wine Menagerie@ or in the phrase “mactations, immolations, oblations, impitrations” in T.S. Eliot’s “Difficulties of a Statesman”.
Synathroesmus
A figure of speech in which normal sentence order is transposed or rearranged in a major way, as illustrated in these lines:
Which when Beelzebub perceived
Than whom
Satan except, none higher sat, w/ grave
Aspect he rose.
Hyperbaton
The adding of 1 trope or figue to another, along w/ such extreme compression that the literal sense of the statement is eclipsed or reduced to anomaly or nonsense.
Ex: 1 can say that Helen had much to do w/ causing the Trojan War & its aftermath - the many parts of their complex process are | | in the -, figure in Marlowe’s
-Doctor Foustus-. “Was this the ship that launched a thousand ships & burnt the topless”.
Metalepsis (Transumption)
Literally “a cutting”. A fairly rare verbal figure whereby a word is cut in 2 parts between which 1 word or more is inserted. Ex: “a whole nother thing” (the word “another” is split & “whole” is inserted between). Ezra Pound used “consti-damn-tution”. Split infinitives may be classed as -. “To slowly walk” - should be to walk slowly.
Tmesis
A figure of speech in which a similarity between 2 object is directly expressed & is usually introduced by “as” or “like”. The comparison of 2 essentially unlike things. Ex: not comparing 1 house to another but comparing it to something like life using “like” or “as”.
Simile
