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
A common figure of speech in which the literal sense of what is said falls detectably short of the magnitude of what is being talked about. Ex: saying “pretty fair” when meaning “splendid”.
Understatement
Intentional understatement for humorous or satiric effect. A common device in ironic expressions.
Meiosis
A grammatically correct construction in which 1 word is placed in the same grammatical relationship to 2 words but in quite different senses, as stain is linked in different senses to honor & brocade in Pope’s line “Or stain her honor, or her new brocade.” - occurs when of the object taking words (| | preposition & transitive verb) takes 2 or more objects that are on different levels. A type of zuegma.
Syllepsis
A figure of speech in which someone (usually someone absent or dead), some abstract quality, or a nonexistent personage is directly addressed as though present or living. Ex: “Age, thou art sham’d” Shakespeare
“Milton, thou should be living @ this hour.” -Wordsworth
“Roll on, though deep blue Ocean, roll.” -Byron
Apostrophe
A type of poetic metaphor. A fanciful notion, usually expressed through an elaborate analogy & pointing to a striking parallel between ostensibly dissimilar things.
Conceit
A word that resembles another & is used in its place for the sake of euphemism, insult, avoidance of libel, etc. Ex: using “gad”, “gosh”, & “golly” for “God”. Ex: Ezra Pounds invented poetaster “Alfred Ueneson” is obviously a - for “Alfred Tennyson”. “Nick Noxin” for “Dick Nixon” in John Seelye’s -Dirty Tricks-.
Paragram
A recurrent repetition of some word, phrase, situation or idea that tends to unify a work through its power to record earlier occurrences. Ex: “rain” in a -A Farewell to Arms- by Ernest Hemingway is a -.
Leitmotif (Leitmotiv, Leitmotive)
A - refers to an elaborate analogy or complicated metaphor pointing to a striking parallel between dissimilar things. The - - is an ingenious kind of - used as the controlling image & often exploiting verbal logic to the point of the grotesque, sometimes w/ such extravagant turns of meaning that it becomes absurd.
Metaphysical Conceit
In literature, recurring images, words, objects, phrases, or actions that tend to unify the work. Nobokov’s -Lolito-, for example, is saturated by a light-dark - as in patterns of day & night, blonde & brunette, summer & winter, white & black, etc.
Motif
Harsh & in harmonious sounds, a marked breaking of the music of poetry.
Dissonance
The tendency to credit nature w/ human emotions in an exaggerated way. Any false emotionalism resulting in a too impassioned description of nature. The carrying over to inanimate objects the moods & passion of a human being. A frequently occurring expression of the imagination it becomes a fault when it is overdone to the point o absurdity.
Pathetic Fallacy
The repetition of initial consonant sounds or any vowel sounds in successful or closely associated syllables, especially stressed syllables.
Ex: consonantal -: The (f)air ((b))reeze ((b))lew, the white (f)oam (f)lew. The (f)urrow (f)ollowed (f)ree.
Ex: vowel -: “(A)pt - (a)rtful (a)id is often an ((o))ccasional ((o))rnament.
Alliteration
A self-contradictory combination of words. Comes from the Greek meaning sharp-dull, itself an -.
Ex: bittersweet, jumbo shrimp, guest host, chiaroscuro.
Oxymoron
An analogy identifying 1 object w/ another & ascribing to the 1st object 1 or more qualities of the 2nd.
Metaphor
A rhetorical figure whereby a speaker retreats or corrects something said, as in W.B. Yeats’ “Easter 1916”: “What is it but nightfall? No,no, not night but death.
Metanoia
A statement that although seemingly contradictory or absurd may actually be true. Many of St. Paul’s utterances in the Bible are
-ical as in 2nd Corinthians, “For when I am weak, then I am strong.” Also discoverable in such oxymorons as “soft hardness” & “happy sadness”. - is a common element in epigrammatic writing ( which consists o pithy, often antithetical sayings).
Paradox
The substitution of the name of an object closely associated w/ a word for the word itself. Ex: “the crown” for a monarch, “In the sweat of thy face shalt though eat bread.” The sweat refers to hard labor.
Metonymy
Words that by their sound suggest their meaning. Ex: hiss, buzz, whirr, sizzle.
Onomatopoeia
The collection of - in a literary work, often synonymous w/ trope or figure of speech. Sight, sound, touch, taste, smell.
Imagery
An exaggeration; to lighter effect or for humor.
Hyperbole
The ascription of human characteristics to nonhuman objects. In some mythologies gods are described as having human form & attributes.
Anthropomorphism
Play on words based on the similarity of sound between 2 words w/ different meanings. - involving son & sun, & I & eye are staples of English literature. Ex: Thomas Hood’s “They went & told the sexton & the sexton tolled the bell.” Shakespeare work has many -.
Pun
Another name for personification which the personified abstraction speaks as in the 1st chapter of Proverbs in the Bible:
“Wisdom cries aloud in the streets, in the markets she raises her voice.”
Prosopopoeia
Pleasing sounds. Opposite of cacophony. Difficult to establish that sounds as such can be either pleasing or unpleasing in isolation from meaning, but p, t, k, f, s are generally more cacophonic than | |.
Euphony
A figure of speech used so long that it is taken in its denotative sense only, w/o the conscious comparison to a physical object it once conveyed. Ex: In “The keystone of his siptem is the belief in an omnipotent God,” “keystone” - literally a stone in an arch - functions as a - -.
Dead Metaphor
A harsh, unpleasant combination of sounds. Opposite of euphony.
Cacophony
Patterning of vowel sounds w/o regard to consonants. Sometimes refers to same or similar vowel sounds in stressed syllables that end in different consonant sounds. - differs from rhyme in that rhyme typically involves vowel & consonant sounds. Ex: lake & fake demonstrates full rhyme; lake & fate demonstrate -.
Assonance
