Figures of speech
A figure of speech is a rhetorical device that achieves a special effect by using words in
distinctive ways. There are hundreds of such figures of speech, but here we'll focus on
some of the most common ones.
Figurative language is often associated with literature, poetry in particular, but the fact is,
whether we're conscious of it or not, we use figures of speech every day in writing and
conversation. For example, common expressions such as "falling in love," "racking our
brains," "hitting a sales target," and "climbing the ladder of success" are all metaphors-the most pervasive figure of all. Likewise, we rely on similes when making explicit
comparisons ("light as a feather") and hyperbole to emphasise a point ("I'm starving!").
Using original figures of speech in writing is a way to convey meanings in fresh,
unexpected ways. They can help the reader understand and stay interested in what the
writer has to say. And they are commonly thought to be persuasive because they dress up
otherwise mundane language, the idea being that we are persuaded by the imagery and
artistry because we find it entertaining. Moreover, politicians and pundits use these
language forms to create specific social and political effects by playing on our emotions.
There are two main categories of figures of speech:
tropes: the use of a word, phrase, or image in a way not intended by its normal
signification – usual meaning changed or extended (e.g. irony, metaphor,
metonymy)
schemes: a change in standard word order or pattern – addition, subtraction,
repetition, or arrangement; also includes sound effects like alliteration (repetition
of initial consonant sound), assonance (repetition of vowel sounds in
neighbouring words that don’t rhyme, e.g. light my fire)
allusion
A brief reference, explicit or indirect, to a person, place or event, literary work or text.
Now is the winter of our discount tents
Sign in a an outdoors shop window
Brave New World by Aldous Huxley
Sources from which T S Eliot quotes or to which he alludes in The Waste Land (1922)
include the works of: Homer, Sophocles, Petronius, Virgil, Ovid, Saint Augustine of
Hippo, Dante Alighieri, William Shakespeare, Edmund Spenser, Gérard de Nerval,
Thomas Kyd, Geoffrey Chaucer, Thomas Middleton, John Webster, Joseph Conrad, John
Milton, Andrew Marvell, Charles Baudelaire, Richard Wagner, Oliver Goldsmith,
Hermann Hesse, Aldous Huxley, Paul Verlaine, Walt Whitman and Bram Stoker.
anaphora
Repetition of the same word or phrase at the start of successive phrases clauses or
sentences. (If at the end of the phrases then it is epiphora.)

"Hope – hope in the face of difficulty. Hope in the face of uncertainty. The
audacity of hope!"
(Barack Obama, "The Audacity of Hope," July 27, 2004)

"We shall go on to the end, we shall fight in France, we shall fight on the
seas and oceans, we shall fight with growing confidence and growing
strength in the air, we shall defend our Island, whatever the cost may be, we
shall fight on the beaches, we shall fight on the landing grounds, we shall
fight in the fields and in the streets, we shall fight in the hills; we shall never
surrender."
(Winston Churchill, speech to the House of Commons, June 4, 1940)

"Of all the gin joints in all the towns in all the world, she walks into mine."
(Rick Blaine in Casablanca)

"I'm not afraid to die. . . . I'm not afraid to live. I'm not afraid to fail. I'm not
afraid to succeed. I'm not afraid to fall in love. I'm not afraid to be alone. I'm
just afraid I might have to stop talking about myself for five minutes."
(Kinky Friedman, When the Cat's Away)
epiphora:

When I was a child, I spoke like a child, I thought like a child, I reasoned like
a child. (St. Paul in I Corinthians 13)
antithesis
Juxtaposition of contrasting ideas in balanced phrases or clauses. Adjective: antithetical.

"Love is an ideal thing, marriage a real thing."
(Goethe)

"It was the best of times, it was the worst of times, it was the age of wisdom,
it was the age of foolishness, it was the epoch of belief, it was the epoch of
incredulity, it was the season of Light, it was the season of Darkness, it was
the spring of hope, it was the winter of despair, we had everything before us,
we had nothing before us, we were all going direct to Heaven, we were all
going direct the other way."
(Charles Dickens, A Tale of Two Cities)

"Everybody doesn't like something, but nobody doesn't like Sara Lee."
(advertising slogan)

"We must learn to live together as brothers or perish together as fools."
(Martin Luther King, Jr., speech at St. Louis, 1964)

"You're easy on the eyes
Hard on the heart."
(Terri Clark)

"All the joy the world contains
Has come through wishing happiness for others.
All the misery the world contains
Has come through wanting pleasure for oneself."
(Shantideva)

"Hillary has soldiered on, damned if she does, damned if she doesn't, like
most powerful women, expected to be tough as nails and warm as toast at the
same time."
(Anna Quindlen, "Say Goodbye to the Virago," Newsweek, June 16, 2003)
asyntedon
The omission of conjunctions between words, phrases or clauses.

"Why, they've got ten volumes on suicide alone. Suicide by race, by color, by
occupation, by sex, by seasons of the year, by time of day. Suicide, how
committed: by poisons, by firearms, by drowning, by leaps. Suicide by
poison, subdivided by types of poison, such as corrosive, irritant, systemic,
gaseous, narcotic, alkaloid, protein, and so forth. Suicide by leaps,
subdivided by leaps from high places, under the wheels of trains, under the
wheels of trucks, under the feet of horses, from steamboats. But Mr. Norton,
of all the cases on record, there's not one single case of suicide by leap from
the rear end of a moving train."
(Edward G. Robinson as insurance agent Barton Keyes in Double Indemnity)

"He was a bag of bones, a floppy doll, a broken stick, a maniac."
(Jack Kerouac, On the Road)

"Anyway, like I was saying, shrimp is the fruit of the sea. You can barbecue
it, boil it, broil it, bake it, saute it. Dey's uh, shrimp-kabobs, shrimp creole,
shrimp gumbo. Pan fried, deep fried, stir-fried. There's pineapple shrimp,
lemon shrimp, coconut shrimp, pepper shrimp, shrimp soup, shrimp stew,
shrimp salad, shrimp and potatoes, shrimp burger, shrimp sandwich. That-that's about it."
(Bubba in Forrest Gump)
chiasmus
A verbal pattern (a type of antithesis) in which the second half of an expression is
balanced against the first with the parts reversed. Adjective: chiastic.

"I flee who chases me, and chase who flees me."
(Ovid)

"Fair is foul, and foul is fair."
(William Shakespeare, Macbeth Act 1, Scene 1)

"Your manuscript is both good and original; but the part that is good is not
original, and the part that is original is not good."
(Samuel Johnson)

"The art of progress is to preserve order amid change and to preserve change
amid order."
(Alfred North Whitehead)

"The value of marriage is not that adults produce children, but that children
produce adults."
(Peter De Vries)

"You can take it out of the country, but you can't take the country out of it."
(slogan for Salem cigarettes)

"Never let a fool kiss you--or a kiss fool you."
(anonymous)

"My job is not to represent Washington to you, but to represent you to
Washington."
(Barack Obama)

"The examination of life begins when the life of examinations ends."
epizeuxis
The repetition of a word for effect.

Words, words, words...
(Hamlet)
(In response to Polonius' question "What do read, my lord?")

Education, education, education
(Tony Blair)
euphemism
The substitution of an inoffensive term for one considered offensively explicit.

Ground beef or hamburger for ground flesh of dead cow; pre-owned for used
or second-hand; undocumented worker for illegal alien; collateral damage
for dead civilians; surgical strike for bombing; wind for belch or fart.

Mr. Prince: We'll see you when you get back from image enhancement camp.
Martin Prince: Spare me your euphemisms! It's fat camp, for Daddy's
chubby little secret!
Mr. Prince: You promised you wouldn't make a scene.
("Kamp Krusty," The Simpsons, 1992)

"The more syllables a euphemism has, the further divorced from reality it is."
(George Carlin)

Dr. House: Who were you going to kill in Bolivia? My old housekeeper?
Dr. Terzi: We don't kill anyone.
Dr. House: I'm sorry – who were you going to marginalize?
("Whatever It Takes," House, M.D.)
hyperbole
An extravagant statement; the use of exaggerated terms for the purpose of emphasis or
heightened effect.

"His legs bestrid the ocean, his rear'd arm
Crested the world, his voice was propertied
As all the tuned spheres…"
(Antony and Cleopatra, Act 5 Scene 2)

"Ladies and gentlemen, I've been to Vietnam, Iraq, and Afghanistan, and I
can say without hyperbole that this is a million times worse than all of them
put together."
(Kent Brockman, The Simpsons)

"O for the gift of Rostand's Cyrano to invoke the vastness of that nose alone
as it cleaves the giant screen from east to west, bisects it from north to south.
It zigzags across our horizon like a bolt of fleshy lightning."
(John Simon, review of Barbra Streisand in A Star Is Born, 1976)

"If we're going to start crucifying people for hyperbole in this society, there's
going to be a long line. If I were writing a diet book, I wouldn't say, 'It's
going to take a lot of work and it'll be a pain in the butt.' I'd say, 'Thin thighs
in 30 days!'"
(Matthew Lesko. The Week, August 3, 2007)
irony
The use of words to convey the opposite of their literal meaning; a statement or situation
where the meaning is contradicted by the appearance or presentation of the idea.

"It is a fitting irony that under Richard Nixon, launder became a dirty word."
(William Zinsser)

"I'm aware of the irony of appearing on TV in order to decry it, so don't
bother pointing that out."
(Sideshow Bob, The Simpsons)

"For Brutus is an honorable man;
So are they all, all honorable men."
(Antony's funeral oration, Julius Caesar, Act 3, Scene 2)

“It is a truth universally acknowledged, that a single man in possession of a
good fortune, must be in want of a wife.”
(Jane Austen, Pride and Prejudice)
isocolon
A succession of phrases of approximately equal length and corresponding structure. A
well-known example is Julius Caesar's Veni, vidi, vici (I came; I saw; I conquered), which
also illustrates that a common form of isocolon is tricolon, or the use of three parallel
members.

"Never complain, never explain."
(Francis Bacon)

"The louder he talked of his honor, the faster we counted our spoons."
(Ralph Waldo Emerson)

"Climate is what we expect, weather is what we get."
(Mark Twain)

"Never in the history of mankind have so many owed so much to so few."
(Winston Churchill)

"Everything you want, nothing you don't."
(commercial slogan for Nissan automobiles)

"I speak Spanish to God, Italian to women, French to men, and German to
my horse."
(Charles V, Holy Roman Emperor, 1500-1558)
litotes
A figure of speech consisting of an understatement in which an affirmative is expressed
by negating its opposite, as in "this is no small problem".

"The grave's a fine a private place,
But none, I think, do there embrace."
(Andrew Marvell, "To His Coy Mistress")

"for life's not a paragraph
and death I think is no parenthesis"
(e.e. cummings, "since feeling is first")

"We made a difference. We made the city stronger, we made the city freer,
and we left her in good hands. All in all, not bad, not bad at all."
(Ronald Reagan, Farewell Address to the Nation, January 20, 1989)
metaphor
A figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between two unlike things
that actually have something important in common. A metaphor expresses the unfamiliar
in terms of the familiar. Adjective: metaphorical.

"My heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill."
(William Sharp, "The Lonely Hunter")

"Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food."
(Austin O'Malley)

"Language is a road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from
and where they are going."
(Rita Mae Brown)

"The energy, the faith, the devotion which we bring to this endeavor will
light our country and all who serve it--and the glow from that fire can truly
light the world."
(John F. Kennedy, Inaugural Address, 1961)

Carl: According to the map, the cabin should be right here.
Lenny: Hey, maybe there is no cabin. Maybe it's one of them metaphorical
things.
Carl: Oh yeah, yeah. Like maybe the cabin is the place inside each of us,
created by our goodwill and teamwork.
Lenny: Nah, they said there would be sandwiches.
(The Simpsons)

"Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations."
(Faith Baldwin)
metonymy
A figure of speech in which one word or phrase is substituted for another with which it is
closely associated (such as "crown" for "royalty"). Metonymy is also the rhetorical
strategy of describing something indirectly by referring to things around it, such as
describing someone's clothing to characterise the individual. Adjective: metonymic.

"The pen is mightier than the sword."
(Edward Bulwer-Lytton)

"Many standard items of vocabulary are metonymic. A red-letter day is
important, like the feast days marked in red on church calendars. Red tide,
the marine disease that kills fish, takes its name from the colour of onecelled, plant-like animals in the water. . . . On the level of slang, a redneck is
a stereotypical member of the white rural working class in the Southern U.S.,
originally a reference to necks sunburned from working in the fields."
(Connie C. Eble, "Metonymy," The Oxford Companion to the English
Language, 1992)

"Bush has bombed Afghanistan and Iraq."

"The suits on Wall Street walked off with most of our savings."

"The B.L.T. left without paying."
(waitress referring to a customer)
oxymoron
A figure of speech in which incongruous or contradictory terms appear side by side; a
compressed paradox. Adjective: oxymoronic.

"O brawling love! O loving hate! . . .
O heavy lightness! serious vanity!
Misshapen chaos of well-seeming forms!
Feather of lead, bright smoke, cold fire, sick health!
Still-waking sleep, that is not what it is!
This love feel I, that feel no love in this."
(William Shakespeare, Romeo and Juliet)

"A yawn may be defined as a silent yell."
(G. K.Chesterton)

"O miserable abundance, O beggarly riches!"
(John Donne, Devotions Upon Emergent Occasions)

"I always avoid prophesying beforehand because it is much better to
prophesy after the event has already taken place."
(Winston Churchill)

"The phrase 'domestic cat' is an oxymoron."
(George Will)

Bill could be described as a cheerful pessimist.

the expressions "act naturally," "original copy," "found missing," "alone
together," "peace force," "definite possibility," "terribly pleased," "real
phony," "ill health," "turn up missing," "jumbo shrimp," "alone together,"
"loose tights", "small crowd," and "clearly misunderstood"
paradox
A statement that appears to contradict itself. Adjective: paradoxical.

"The swiftest traveler is he that goes afoot."
(Henry David Thoreau, Walden)

"If you wish to preserve your secret, wrap it up in frankness."
(Alexander Smith)

"War is peace."
"Freedom is slavery."
"Ignorance is strength."
(George Orwell, 1984)

"There was only one catch and that was Catch-22, which specified that
concern for one's own safety in the face of dangers that were real and
immediate was the process of a rational mind. Orr was crazy and could be
grounded. All he had to do was ask; and as soon as he did, he would no
longer be crazy and would have to fly more missions. Orr would be crazy to
fly more missions and sane if he didn't, but if he was sane he had to fly them.
If he flew them he was crazy and didn't have to; but if he didn't want to he
was sane and had to."
(Joseph Heller, Catch-22)

"I was so much older then, I'm younger than that now."
(Bob Dylan, My Back Pages)
parallelism
Similarity of structure in a pair or series of related words, phrases, or clauses.

"It is by logic we prove, but by intuition we discover."
(Leonardo da Vinci)

"The more we do, the more we can do."
(William Hazlitt)

"Under capitalism, man exploits man. Under communism, it’s precisely the
opposite."
(John Kenneth Galbraith)

"Truth is not a diet but a condiment."
(Christopher Morley)

"I don’t want to live on in my work. I want to live on in my apartment."
(Woody Allen)

"Immature poets imitate; mature poets steal."
(T.S. Eliot)

"Today's students can put dope in their veins or hope in their brains. If they
can conceive it and believe it, they can achieve it. They must know it is not
their aptitude but their attitude that will determine their altitude."
(Jesse Jackson)
paraprosdokian
When the latter part of a sentence or phrase is surprising or unexpected in a way that
causes the reader or listener to reframe or reinterpret the first part.

"She got her good looks from her father, he's a plastic surgeon."
(Groucho Marx)

"I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it ."
(Groucho Marx)

"I want to die like my father, quietly, in his sleep – not screaming in fear
like his passengers."
(Bob Monkhouse)

"I haven't slept for ten days, because that would be too long."
(Mitch Hedberg)
"If all the girls at Vassar were laid end to end, I wouldn't be surprised."
(Dorothy Parker)

personification
A figure of speech in which an inanimate object or abstraction is given human qualities
or abilities.

The wind stood up and gave a shout.
He whistled on his fingers and
Kicked the withered leaves about
(James Stephens, The Wind)

"The operation is over. On the table, the knife lies spent, on its side, the
bloody meal smear-dried upon its flanks. The knife rests."
(Richard Selzer, The Knife)

"The road isn't built that can make it breathe hard!"
(advertising slogan for Chevrolet automobiles)

"The only monster here is the gambling monster that has enslaved your
mother! I call him Gambler, and it's time to snatch your mother from his
neon claws!"
(Homer Simpson in The Simpsons)
pun
A play on words, either on different senses of the same word or on the similar sense or
sound of different words.

"When it rains, it pours."
(advertising slogan for Morton Salt)

"When it pours, it reigns."
(slogan for Michelin tires)

"What food these morsels be!"
(slogan for Heinz pickles, 1938; allusion to "Lord, what fools these mortals
be!" Shakespeare, A Midsummer Night's Dream, Act 3 Scene 2.)

Don's Plaice, Sofa So Good, Silent Night, Cut ‘n’ Dried, For Eyes, Eye
Society
(shop names in London)

"Grave men, near death, who see with blinding sight"
(Dylan Thomas, "Do not go gentle into that good night")

"It is better to be looked over than to be overlooked."
(Mae West)

"Hanging is too good for a man who makes puns; he should be drawn and
quoted."
(Fred Allen)

"Time flies like an arrow. Fruit flies like a banana."
(Groucho Marx)

A bicycle can't stand alone because it is two-tired.

I have finally realised why universities are called ivory towers. It must be
because we are hanging on by the skin of our teeth.
simile
A figure of speech in which two fundamentally unlike things are explicitly compared,
usually in a phrase introduced by like or as.

"The harpsichord sounds like two skeletons copulating on a corrugated tin
roof."
(Sir Thomas Beecham)

"Humanity, let us say, is like people packed in an automobile which is
traveling downhill without lights at terrific speed and driven by a four-yearold child. The signposts along the way are all marked 'Progress.'"
(Lord Dunsany)

"Life is like an onion: You peel it off one layer at a time, and sometimes you
weep."
(Carl Sandburg)

"He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food."
(Raymond Chandler)

"you fit into me
like a hook into an eye
a fish hook
an open eye"
(Margaret Atwood)

"She dealt with moral problems as a cleaver deals with meat."
(James Joyce, "The Boarding House")

"Life is rather like a tin of sardines: we're all of us looking for the key."
(Alan Bennett)
synecdoche
A figure of speech is which a part is used to represent the whole, the whole for a part, the
specific for the general, the general for the specific, or the material for the thing made
from it. As in 'hired hand', 'a fresh pair of legs', 'No 10 announced today', 'have you seen
the latest Spielberg?'.

"Take thy face hence."
(William Shakespeare, Macbeth V.iii)

"I should have been a pair of ragged claws
Scuttling across the floors of silent seas."
(T. S. Eliot, "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock")

"The daily press, the immediate media, is superb at synecdoche, at giving us
a small thing that stands for a much larger thing."
(Bruce Jackson)
understatement
A figure of speech in which a writer or a speaker deliberately makes a situation seem less
important or serious than it is.

"I am just going outside and may be some time."
(Captain Lawrence Oates, Antarctic explorer, before walking out into a
blizzard to face certain death, 1912)

"I have to have this operation… It isn't very serious. I have this tiny little
tumor on the brain."
(Holden Caulfield in The Catcher In The Rye, by J. D. Salinger)

"It's just a flesh wound."
(Black Knight, after having both of his arms cut off, in Monty Python and the
Holy Grail)

"Well, that's cast rather a gloom over the evening, hasn't it?"
(Dinner guest, following a visit from the Grim Reaper, in Monty Python's
The Meaning of Life)

"The British are feeling the pinch in relation to recent terrorist bombings and
threats to destroy nightclubs and airports, and therefore have raised their
security level from 'Miffed' to 'Peeved.' Soon, though, security levels may be
raised yet again to 'Irritated' or even 'A Bit Cross.' Brits have not been 'A Bit
Cross' since the Blitz in 1940 when tea supplies all but ran out."
(anonymous post on the Internet, July 2007)