Figures of speech and tropes (“költői képek”, “alakzatok”)
The four major tropes are: metaphor, metonymy, synecdoche, and irony
(related terms: symbol, allegory, personification, synaesthesia)
*THE DEFINITION AND STRUCTURE OF METAPHOR
Metaphor (meta+pherein = “carry over”; you can see the word written on trucks in Greece; the Latin is
translatio, meaning the same)
We can define metaphor as the transposition (carrying over) of the meaning of one word onto another word
– or, the transposition of a word into a different field of meaning.
For instance: “your eyes are bright stars”. This statement is nonsensical on a literal level, because of course
nobody’s eyes are stars. If we want to find its meaning, we have to work at the figurative level. The meaning
of the word “star” is carried over from its original  astronomical  field to another field, that of human
anatomy, on the basis of similarity (e.g. “brightness”).
A simpler definition would go like this: metaphor is the identification of two things on the basis of
similarity.
e.g. “Your eyes are bright stars, your skin is velvet” The points of similarity are obvious: brightness and
softness.
To appreciate the workings of metaphor and the complexity of the intellectual work that its understanding
requires, here is a detail from the English writer Mark Haddon’s 2003 novel The Curious Incident of the
Dog in the Night-Time. The narrator is a fifteen-year-old autistic boy who is brilliant in counting things but
is emotionally limited (he does not know what “love” is, for instance, or rather, he can understand it
rationally but is unable to experience it): he has problems with understanding anything that is not entirely
logical and straightforward, he is baffled by any kind of ambiguity, thus, he finds it enormously difficult to
understand other people, simply because most of what we say is full of ambiguity. He finds it very difficult
to understand people “because they do a lot of talking without using words” (he is referring to the emotional
connotations added to language by gestures, movements and other elements of non-verbal communication)
“The second main reason for his difficulties is that people often talk using metaphors. These are examples
of metaphors.
I laughed my socks off.
He was the apple of her eye.
They had a skeleton in the cupboard.
We had a real pig of a day.
The dog was stone dead.
The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and it comes from the Greek
words μετα (which means from one place to another) and φερειν (which means to carry) and it is when you
describe something by using a word for something that it isn’t. This means that the word metaphor is a
metaphor.
I think it should be called a lie because a pig is not like a day and people do not have skeletons in their
cupboards. And when I try and make a picture of the phrase in my head it just confuses me because
imagining an apple in someone’s eye doesn’t have anything to do with liking someone a lot and it makes
you forget what the person was talking about.
My name Christopher is a metaphor. It means carrying Christ and it comes from the Greek words χριστοσ
(which means Jesus Christ) and φερειν and it was the name given to Saint Christopher because he carried
Christ across a river.
Mother used to say that it meant Christopher was a nice name because it was a story about being kind and
helpful, but I do not want my name to mean a story about being kind and helpful. I want my name to mean
me.
The structure of metaphor.
The structure of metaphors is like a triangle. In every metaphor, we make an impossible identification (what
Christopher calls “a lie” in the quote above), that is, we claim that something is something else. The point to
remember about the structure of metaphors is that every metaphor can be transformed into a claim “A” is
“B” because of a common feature, even those metaphors which do not seem to have this structure. Consider
the metaphor “breathing roses” which has a very different grammatical shape. Yet, this metaphor can also
be reduced to the A=B scheme. The hidden claim behind this metaphor is this: “roses have mouths”, that is,
“roses are creatures with mouths”, for instance, animals or human beings (that is, “A” is “B”), and the basis
of the transposition is the similarity between rose petals and human lips (the basis makes the metaphor
triangular). In fact, the basis of the metaphor is another, hidden metaphor: “rose petals are human lips”.
Thus, the three parts of a metaphor are the following:
tenor (“viszonyított”): that of which we speak (as Christopher puts it: “what the person is talking about”;
for instance, in the examples above, “your eyes” and “roses”
vehicle (“viszonyító”): that with which the object is identified, that which is brought in from a different area
of experience: in the examples above, “bright stars” and “human beings”
ground (“az azonosítás alapja”): the common feature between the two identified things, the ground/basis of
the identification: “brightness”, “softness”, “having lips”
The distance between tenor and vehicle is crucial in the success of the poetic metaphor: the widening of the
distance between tenor and vehicle increases the surprise effect of the metaphor.
Kinds of metaphor
a conceit is a metaphor (or a simile) in which the distance between tenor and vehicle is great
E.g. “my skin bright as a Nazi lampshade” (Sylvia Plath). Here, we have simile rather than metaphor, but
the distance between tenor and vehicle makes the image surpising.
explicit metaphor (“teljes”): both tenor and vehicle are there;
implied metaphor (“csonka”): either tenor or vehicle is missing and has to be suplied by the reader. Such
metaphors are like puzzles or rebuses: we are invited by a surprising statement to guess as to the ground of
the transposition/identification.
E.g. “The roses kept breathing in the dark”. The tenor is there (roses), but the vehicle is missing and we
have to supply it. In the most successful metaphors, the ground is usually complecx, not simply a single
common feature: this is why many metaphors have more than one “correct” solutions.
nominal metaphor (“névszói”): this is the most frequent type, the “A” = “B” type, idnetification is made
between two nouns (“your skin is velvet”)
verbal metaphor (“igei”): usually implied metaphor; the identification is not explicitly stated but indicated
by a verb. e.g. “my heart is flying” = the full, explicit form of the metaphor is “my heart is a bird”
a dead metaphor: a metaphor that has lost its force and surprise effect, that has ceased to behave as a trope
(e.g. “foot of the hill”); the word “metaphor” is itself a dead metaphor, for it originally means to carry sg.
over in a physical sense
*METONYMY
Metonymy. The transposition of a name (or identification of two things) on the basis of connection,
contiguity. Thus, metonymy is also an absurd identification (a “lie”) like metaphor, but here the two things
are identified on the basis not of similarity but of logical connection.
Here is a short quote from Charles Dickens’s novel Nicholas Nickleby
“ – [I am looking for] Mrs Nickleby. – said Ralph.
– It’s the second floor, Hannah – said the same voice. – … Is the second floor at home?
 Somebody went out just now, but I think it was the attic – replied the girl.”
In this example, we use the name of the place the place instead of its inhabitant. Of course “the second
floor” cannot stay at home or go out, it is the occupant of the second-floor flat that the characters are talking
about. The relationship (the ground for the identification) is a spatial relationship between the room and its
occupant. The same metonymical structure works in phrases like “the White House said”, “according to
Washington”, “the Kremlin approves of the negotiations”, “Downing Street has issued an official
statement”, etc. It is a metonymy to say that “the United States and Great Britain have sent troops to Iraq”.
Because a logical (spatial, temporal, causal) connection already exists between the two identified things,
metonymy is usually not as surprising as metaphor (the surprise effect of metaphors is the result of the
distance between tenor and vehicle).
Because metonymy is not based on similarity, thus, the ground of the identification is not a separate thing or
quality (as “brightness” or “having human lips”), we don’t speak of tenor, vehicle and ground in the case of
metonymies. Instead, the analysis of metonymy involves the identification of the type of connection
between the two things.
There are four major types of metonymy:
spatial (the connection is that of space), e.g. the Dickens quote, or “the ship never sleeps”
temporal (the connection is that of time), e.g. “this is a cruel century”
material (e.g. saying “gold” instead of money, or “steel” instead of “sword”)
causal (the connection is that of cause and effect), e.g. “this woman will be your death”
Synecdoche
A figure of speech: identification of the part with the whole or the whole with the part. Here are some
examples:
a, Saying the part instead of the whole
“A gun for sale” (an assassin offering his services, the title of a novel by Graham Greene); “skin and
bones”: these are examples when we say part instead of the whole
b, saying the whole instead of the part
“animal” or “creature” instead of “dog”: here the broader category (“creature”, “animal”) is used
instead of the narrower. (In fact, “dog” is already synecdochical, since we could say “Alsatian” or
“retriever” or Collie” instead)
Since part-and-whole relationship is a logical connection not unlike spatial or temporal or causal links, we
might say that synecdoche is very close to metonymy; sometimes they are difficult to distinguish. For
instance, if we consider President George W. Bush to be “part” of the White House, statements like “the
White House said” may be considered synecdochical. The famous József Attila line “A sarkon reszket
egy zörgő kabát” (in “Külvárosi éj”) may also be considered either as a metonymy (the coat is connected
to the beggar) or as a synecdoche (the coat is “part of” the beggar). (Consider the famous line in W. B.
Yeats’s “Sailing to Byzantium”: “An aged man is but a paltry thing, / A tattered coat upon a stick”).
Here is an instance of a synecdochical text from Salman Rushdie’s novel Midnight’s Children, that is, a
passage where the dominant trope is synecdoche. The speaker is a young boy, Saleem, who is spying after
his mother. The mother is secretly seeing her first  Platonic  lover, the poet Nadir-Qasim, whom she had
known before she got married to the father of the peeping Saleem: their relationship was and is Platonic,
they do not even touch each other. In this passage, they are sitting in a café, and the son is peeping at them
from outside, seeing only part of what is happening.
“But now hands enter the frame – first the hands of Nadir-Qasim, their poetic softness somewhat callused
these days; hands flickering like candle-flames, creeping forward across the table, then jerking back; next a
woman’s hands, black as jet, inching forwards like elegant spiders; hands lifting up, off tabletop, hands
hovering above three fives a brand of cigarettes, beginning the strangest of dances, rising, falling, circling
one another, weaving in and out between each other, hands longing for touch; … and there are feet beneath
the table and faces above it, feet advancing towards feet, faces tumbling softly towards faces, but jerking
away all of a sudden in a sudden censor’s cut.”
Synecdoche works very effectively here: the text names the part instead of the whole (parts of the body
instead of the whole), which suggests the unfulfilled, partial nature of the love between the mother and
Qasim, the taboo on touching. On the other hand, the synecdochical (partial) nature of the paragraph
suggests that the child’s perspective (which is ours in the passage) is necessarily partial: he does not know
his mother’s past or the world of love and desire which is part of an adult world he cannot yet understand.
Personification. A figure of speech in which we attribute human qualities to objects
Here is a passage from Dickens where personification is the dominant trope. The room that is described here
belongs to a miser; the human features attributed to the objects belong to their master.
“A tall grim clock upon the stairs, with long lean hands and famished face, ticked in cautious whispers, and
when it struck the time in thin and piping sounds, like an old man’s voice, rattled as if ‘twere pinched with
hunger. … Elbow-chairs there were, but they looked uneasy in their minds, cocked their arms suspiciously
and timidly, and kept upon their guard. Others were fantastically grim and gaunt, as having drawn
themselves up to their utmost height, and put on their fiercest looks to stare all comers out of countenance.
Others again knocked up against their neighbours, or leant for support against the wall, somewhat
ostentatiously, as if to call all men to witness that they were not worth the taking.” (Charles Dickens:
Nicholas Nickleby)
An important thing to note concerning personification is that when we identify a trope, it is never enough
simply to say that it is personification. Every personification is either a metaphor or a metonymy (or
synecdoche). The relationship between the inanimate object and human beings is either that of similarity or
that of logical connection. In the Dickens passage above, the objects in the room have become similar to
their master in the course of years of connection, of belonging to him (thus, there is both metonymy and
metaphor behind the personification). For a more fully metonymic example, consider the following: “the
ship never sleeps.” Here, it is obvious that what is really meant is the crew, that is, the relationship is mainly
metonymical.
*METAPHOR AND METONYMY AS THE TWO PRINCIPLES OF HUMAN THOUGHT
Establishing connections between different things is one of the basic activities of the human mind. In very
general terms, we could say that our thinking may bring together two things on the basis of two principles:
similarity and connection. We find links between things, creatures, persons and events in the world either
on the basis of some similarity between them, or on the basis of some logical connection (including partand-whole relationship) that links them together. Thus, we can say that metaphor and metonymy represent
the two basic principles of human thought. For instance, the logic of dreams uses metaphorical and
metonymical identifications: a lion may appear in your dream because you are dreaming about someone
with hair like a lion’s mane (metaphorical connection, similarity), or because you are dreaming about
someone you saw in the zoo beside the lion’s cage (metonymical connection). When you dream of a long
staircase, the hidden thought behind the image might be something that is connected to stairs (connection,
metonymy) or a desire to rise in your profession or in society (here, the staircase metaphorically stands for
the ambition of rising).
Another, even more obvious example of the importance of these two kinds of logic is found in magical
practices.
J. G. Frazer, the famous Scottish anthropologist at the end of the 19th century, described many myths and
magical practices in his book The Golden Bough (Az aranyág). Here, he distinguished between two kinds of
magical practices on the basis of two different kinds of logic.
Homeopathic magic (“utánzó mágia”) is based on similarity, on the principle of “similar things will
generate similar things”. For instance, in some tribes, in times of draught, people “make water” (that is,
urinate) in order to bring about rain. Another example: shamans, when healing their patients, usually pretend
that they remove something from the body of the patient (a piece of stone, a mouse, an insect, anything).
The idea is that the physical removal of an object will bring about the removal of the disease (and of course
also that it is easier to believe in the success of the cure if you have actually seen the illness depart from
your body).
Contagious magic (“átviteli mágia”) is based on connection between things, or rather on the belief that
connection between things can be used for magical practices. For instance, to gain power over someone you
hate, it is enough to procure an object belonging to this person (e.g. a piece of clothing), or part of his body
(nails, hair), and thus you can have power over the person, because the connection between the person and
his possessions will allow the magical energy to pass from one to the other.
Black magic (magic used in order to harm someone) usually combines the two kinds: practitioners usually
make a wax figure (or, more recently, a photograph) of the hated person and stick pins into various parts of
this figure or likeness, thus hoping to bring about pain in the same parts of the body of the hated person (this
is clearly homeopathic magic, based on similarity, likeness). However, in order to make the magic curse
really effective, the other kind of logic is often also applied: a piece of the clothing, or a tuft of hair, or a
shred of the nail of the hated person is also cursed (this is contagious magic, based on logical connection,
part-and-whole relationship).
The importance of these two  metaphorical and metonymical  principles in our thinking is indicated by
the following passage from David Lodge’s 1988 novel Nice Work, where one of the protagonists, Robyn
Penrose, a lecturer in English literature, has to visit a factory. She cannot help applying her literary
education to speaking about the factory. In this passage, she is discussing her perspective on the factory with
her boyfriend.
“You could represent the factory realistically by a set of metonymies  dirt, noise, heat and so on. But you
can only grasp the meaning of the factory by metaphor. The place is like hell. The trouble with Wilcox he
is the manager of the factory is that he can’t see that. He has no metaphorical vision.
 And what about Danny Ram? he is an Indian worker in the factory
 Oh, poor old Danny Ram, I don’t suppose he has any metaphorical vision either, otherwise he couldn’s
stick it. The factory to him is just another set of metonymies and synecdoches: a lever he pulls, a pair of
greasy overalls he wears, a weekly wage packet. That’s the truth of his existence, but not the meaning of it.”
In the passage, Robyn reinforces the dichotomy of metaphorical and metonymical principles and extends
them into the two basic principles of representation and of our relationship to the world in general. She
obviously prefers metaphor to metonymy in the true Romantic tradition referred to above, because
metaphor involves the power of the imagination, the bringing together of distant things (industry and
religious language in this case), some unexpected insight, whereas, in her view, metonymy and
synecdoche, because they are based on logical connections, are simply too obvious and commonplace, not
allowing the kind of totalising vision from which meaning  as opposed to truth  would emerge. Thus, a
metonymical view of the world  according to Robyn  does not allow us to rise above our situation and
see it from above, whereas a metaphorical imagination does just that. Her approach is criticised in the rest
of the novel (it is ironical that neither the manager nor the factory worker have an adequate vision of their
place of work, whereas she thinks she is able to transcend their limited view after a single visit to the
factory, without understanding the first thing about its workings), but what she says here illustrates clearly
the way in which metaphor and metonymy can be extended into principles of vision and representation.
As a final example, consider a typical problem with which many films are faced: how to represent the
sexual act?
In most films, the sexual act itself, the union of the two bodies, is not represented; instead, films resort to
various strategies of suggesting that sex is taking place. One frequent solution is ellipsis (omission  see
below), representing the actions that lead up to the sexual intercourse: we might have the kiss, or an
embrace, followed by a discreet cut to the morning after when the lovers wake up one beside the other.
This is a metonymical representation of the sexual act, where the sexual act is figuratively referred to by
what precedes it (temporal and causal metonymy). Another possibility is to have shots of various
discarded garments and underclothes, again instead of the “real thing”: this is spatial metonymy. We
might also have shots of parts of the sexual act instead of the whole: shots of clasping hands, a hand
stroking a back, close-up shots of skin, and the face of the lovers. These are typical instances of
synecdochic representation, showing the part instead of the whole. (The instances mentioned here are
also examples of understatement, that is, saying less than what the case is  see below). It is also
possible that, instead of representing the sexual act, the film shows us images of waves breaking on the
shore, or there might be a storm raging outside while the lovers are together, or we might have images of
fire, indicating the emotional intensity of the union. Such shots are clear examples of metaphor: passion
is like burning fire, the strength of passion is like that of the raging sea, etc (such images are also
examples of hyperbole, that is, exaggeration (see below).
ALLEGORY AND SYMBOL
Allegory and symbol are both tropes in their primary meaning, and both connect abstract notions and
concrete physical things. Both have a structure that is vertical (connecting the physical world and the
world of abstract ideas and values). Because of this basic similarity, they are best discussed together.
*ALLEGORY
Allegory: allos (other, beside) – agoreuo (speak in public); thus, “allegory” originally meant “to speak in
public about something else”, coding your message
Allegory is used in three senses:
(1) a trope: personification allegory; an abstract concept embodied in a concrete physical shape (Vanity,
Charity usually represented as a young woman feeding children, Peace, Liberty, Justice, the Seven
Deadly Sins or Vices a hét halálos bűn, etc.); e.g. Delacroix’s famous painting “Liberty leading the
people”, where Liberty is represented as a young woman  not because Liberty is in any sense “like” a
young woman, but because the young woman is given the name “Liberty”. Thus, in allegory, the
relationship between the concrete and the abstract levels is based neither on similarity, nor on logical
connection, but on an arbitrary decision or on convention (e.g. Justice Justitia is usually represented as
a blindfolded woman holding a scales). Thus, because the relationship between the concrete and the
abstract is not obvious and not supported by similarity or logical connection, allegories are like rebuses,
puzzles, and their meaning can only be found out if we know what it is from the title or from the
allegorical tradition (for instance, without knowing that, in the medieval tradition, strawberry leaves
represented the Holy Trinity, the lion stood for the evangelist Mark, or that the lily-of-the-valley
gyöngyvirág stood for the Virgin Mary, they remain meaningless details of old paintings for us). An
allegory without its title can be very difficult to interpret (even the meaning of Delacroix’s painting would
not be so clear if we did not know its title). For instance, a famous painting by Titian (Tiziano) represents
two young women, one naked and the other fully dressed, sitting on two sides of a stone well. The title by
which the painting is known is “Sacred and profane love” (“Égi és földi szerelem”), but because we do
not know the intentions of the painter, it is impossible to say which woman is which.
Thus, in allegory we have two vertical levels of meaning: an abstract idea is represented in a physical
body. The abstract meaning dominates, and the physical details are almost “transparent”, we immediately
see through them, looking at the abstract idea. This also means that an allegory starts with the abstract
idea and is looking for something in which it could be embodied. As a result of the dominance of the
abstract level and the rebus-like nature of allegories, allegories have only one meaning, an obligatory
meaning: there is no variation (if a character is called “Despair”, there is not much place for the reader to
wonder about the character; we see through the figure, straight to the abstract notion that is embodied in
it). This also means that in order to know the meaning of an allegory, we simply have to remember its
title.
Although allegory was most popular in earlier literature and painting, it is still often used and can be very
effective. Here is an example from Martin Amis’s 1984 novel Money:
“Fear walks tall on this planet. Fear walks big and fat and fine ... One of these days, I’m going to walk
right up to fear. Someone’s got to do it ... Fear, I suspect, is really incredibly brave. Fear will lead me
straight through the door, will prop me up in the alley among the crates and the empties, and show me
who’s the boss ... When it comes to fighting, I’m brave  or reckless or indifferent or just unjust. But fear
really scares me.”
In this example, Fear appears as a character, and this character has no meaning other than that of
embodying fear. The logic of the passage leads to the absurd and funny sentence at the end: “fear really
scares me.”
(2) a chain of metaphors (e.g. in Ludovico Ariosto’s Renaissance verse romance called Orlando Furioso
(Őrjöngő Lóránt), Time is represented as a naked old man (Father Time), throwing lost things into the
river (the river is an allegorical embodiment of Oblivion, Forgetting); on Nicolas Poussin’s famous
painting, Dance to the Music of Time, Time is similarly represented as a naked old man, playing the lyre.
Consider the famous image from Shakespeare’s Troilus and Criseyde: “Zsákot hord az idő a hátán,
alamizsnát koldul a feledésnek”. A famous Hungarian instance is the “álom-allegória” in Arany’s Toldi.
(3) a narrative genre. As a genre, allegory is a narrative (in prose or verse or in narrative painting, or in
film) that is dominated by allegorical tropes and chains of metaphors. In such narratives, allegory does not
simply appear every now and then, but the entire represented world is allegorical, including setting,
characters, objects and events. The genre was very popular in medieval literature and painting (e.g. in
dream visions, morality plays). Famous instances include John Bunyan’s religious allegory The Pilgrim’s
Progress (A zarándok útja 1678, the most widely read book in English after the Bible), and George
Orwell’s 1945 political satire called Animal Farm, in which animals represent certain political ideas and
politicians (the pig called Napoleon is said to be Stalin, Snowball is Trotsky, etc.). Excellent allegorical
films are Ingmar Bergman’s A hetedik pecsét or Jim Jarmusch’s The Dead Man.
*SYMBOL
First of all, the literary/artistic notion of symbol should not be confused with Peirce’s semiotic notion of
symbol (icon/index/symbol: see lecture handouts), or with the everyday semiotic sense of the word: e.g.
the lion is the symbol of Britain. It is only with the aesthetic/artistic notion of the symbol that we are
concerned here.
In the most general sense, a symbol in art is an object/landscape/creature/act/figure/event that means
“more” than what meets the eye, containing a surplus of meaning.
Symbol is like allegory in the sense that it also connects that abstract and the concrete, representing an
abstract notion (or emotion) in something visible. Yet, the logic of the symbol is in many senses the
opposite of the logic of allegory. This is indicated by its etymology: syn (together) – ballein (throw).
Symbols start with the physical, sensual level: as it were, they start from below, whereas allegories start
from above, from the abstract level. As an example, let’s take a frequent image in painting, film, fiction
and poetry: when the moon appears in the night sky and it is reflected in the water of a lake. This image
does not have one obligatory meaning but remains ambiguous. Several meanings are possible: e.g. the
moon might stand for femininity and the character looking into the water might think of his beloved, but
the reflected image might also suggest the transitoriness, ephemerality of love/life. The moon also has
mythological connotations (Selene was the name of the moon goddess), it might suggest a light that is
inferior to the clarity of sunlight (the moon’s light is not her own, but the reflected light of the sun, the
true source of light); the image might also suggest something about the state of mind of the character
seeing it, and there are many more possibilities, depending on the context, and even on the mood of the
reader/spectator. The point is that in the case of symbols, we always start out from the visible scene, and
finding the meaning of the symbolic scene does not make it less physical, less tangible: the fact that we
have found a symbolic meaning in the image of the reflected moonlight does not make the scene less
physical, less “real.” In symbols, the higher (abstract or emotional) meaning does not make the concrete
object disappear: concreteness, sensuality is preserved, the symbolic thing both remains itself and refers
to something else. Symbols have several meanings, they cannot be reduced to a one-to-one reference, or
to a single correct interpretation: they are vague, mysterious, ambiguous (consider, for instance, the
several possible meanings of the man-size dummy wearing an army shirt in Renaissance Man).
Also, because of their ambiguity, symbols are “untranslatable”: their meaning cannot be defined in
ordinary language. Translating, paraphrasing a symbol means “killing” its rich ambiguity of meaning.
For instance, telling in abstract terms the meaning of the scene with the reflected moonlight would reduce
it to one meaning and take away the possibility of other meanings. The meaning of an allegory is clearly
defined, whereas symbols only suggest meanings.
In Romanticism and for long after, symbol meant good art (because it is mysterious, ambiguous, related
to the faculty of the imagination, attaining the unity of the sensual and the spiritual levels), whereas
allegory was often considered synonymous with bad art (because it has one obligatory meaning which
depends not on the imagination but on a remembered correspondence). This sharp and simplistic contrast
has often been questioned, and most literary critics and art historians see the problem as much more
complex, but the contrast, and the preference for symbol over allegory, continues to influence our views
about poetry and painting.
OTHER FIGURES OF SPEECH
Other figures of speech
apostrophe: a figure of speech in which the speaker addresses a dead person, a thing, an abstract idea, as if
it were alive and present and able to hear the speaker. E.g. the opening of Shelley’s “Ode to the West
Wind”: “O wild West Wind, thou breath of Autumn’s being”
oxymoron: a figure of speech in which two words with opposite meanings are brought together. E.g.
“sweet pain”, “death in life”, Kosztolányi’s “Boldog, szomorú dal”
paradox: a figure of speech. A statement that looks absurd or self-contradictory but, if we read it carefully,
we find that it contains some more profound truth. For instance, the party slogans in George Orwell’s 1984:
“War is peace”; “Freedom is slavery”; “Ignorance is strength”. All these statements  like the famous “2 + 2
make 5”  make sense within the perverse logic of the totalitarian state.
a simile: a figure of speech: the comparison of two things using the word “like” or “as” (e.g. “his hair is as
white as snow”). Metaphor is often seen as condensed simile, and simile as an extended metaphor.
pun: a play on words; often it exploits the fact that words have several meanings. A famous pun is included
in Mercutio’s last joke, just before he dies, in Romeo and Juliet: “Ask for me tomorrow and you shall find
me a grave man”.
ellipsis (omission): as a figure of speech, it means the omission of a word or several words from the text for
greater effect. Ellipsis also means omission of details or events from a narrative text (e.g. ballads are usually
elliptic). Faced with elliptic language, the reader has to invest extra work but the extra effort pays off,
because finding out a missing word is very different from simply finding it in the text.
hyperbole (overstatement, exaggeration): a figure of speech in which you say more than what you mean:
For instance, when you say “I haven’t seen you for ages”, or “I have told you a thousand times”.
understatement or euphemism: a figure of speech in which you say less than what you mean. For instance,
to say “he passed away” or “he is gone” instead of “he died” is an understatement. A special, very English,
type of understatement is called litotes: in litotes, you assert something by denying its opposite. E.g. you say
“not bad” when you mean “excellent”. George Orwell, who was annoyed by the frequent use of such
structures in English, offered the following sentence as a kind of deterrent: “A not unblack dog was chasing
a not unsmall rabbit across a not ungreen field”.
synaesthesia: a figure of speech in which the different senses are mixed up. For instance, “sweet voice”
mixes taste (“sweet”) with sound (“voice”). A famous example from Hungarian poetry is Tóth Árpád’s “lila
dalra kelt a nyakkendő” in his poem “Körúti hajnal”. Another famous instance occurs in Babits’s translation
of Dante’s Inferno: “Most minden fénytől néma helyhez értem”
malapropism: the word derives from the character called Mrs. Malaprop in the 18th-century writer Richard
Brinsley Sheridan’s play called The Rivals; the character has a telling name, since the word comes from
mal- (meaning wrong, bad in Latin) and proper, appropriate. Malapropism is the incorrect (inappropriate)
use of  usually long, polysyllabic, and foreign  words. For instance: “I detest those creepy-crawly reptiles
like crocodiles and navigators” (the latter word used, of course, instead of “alligators”). It is usually used to
expose and ridicule the ignorance of snobbish characters in fiction, drama and film.