50 Fun Facts About ELA

Which device compares two unlike things using 'like' or 'as'?

'As brave as a lion' is the classic school example. Drop the linking word and it becomes a different device entirely.

Which device makes a direct comparison without announcing it with a linking word?

'The classroom was a zoo' states the comparison rather than signposting it. The version with 'like' or 'as' has a different name.

What is it called when an inanimate object is given human traits?

'The wind whispered' is the standard example. It applies to objects and non-animal organisms alike.

Which figure of speech uses deliberate exaggeration for effect?

'I've told you a million times' is not a lie, it is a device. The effect can be dramatic or persuasive.

What is a two-word paradox built from opposites called?

'Deafening silence' and 'bittersweet' are the standard examples. The words fight each other on purpose.

What is the repetition of the same initial consonant sound across several words called?

'Peter Piper picked a peck' is the schoolyard version. Advertisers use it constantly.

Which device uses words that imitate sounds?

Buzz, hiss and clang are all examples. Comic books are built almost entirely out of it.

What is the difference between a trope and a scheme?

Tropes deviate from ordinary or literal usage. Schemes vary the usual expected sequence of words.

How many parts of speech is English traditionally said to have?

The list usually runs noun, verb, adjective, adverb, pronoun, preposition, conjunction and interjection. Some lists add the article or determiner.

Which part of speech names a person, place, thing or idea?

They can be concrete like 'house' or abstract like 'happiness'. Proper ones take a capital letter.

Which part of speech denotes an action, occurrence or state of being?

'Walk', 'happen' and 'be' are the textbook examples. Every complete sentence needs one.

What does an adjective modify?

'Big' and 'brave' are typical examples. Words that modify verbs have a different name.

Which part of speech can modify a verb, an adjective, a sentence or another of its own kind?

'Very' and 'quite' are examples. Not all of them end in -ly.

Which part of speech substitutes for a noun or noun phrase?

'Them' and 'he' stand in for names already mentioned. It stops sentences from repeating themselves.

Which part of speech relates words to each other in a phrase, like 'in' and 'of'?

They aid syntactic context. Ending a sentence with one is a rule nobody has ever successfully enforced.

Which part of speech links words, phrases or clauses?

'And' and 'but' are the obvious examples. They are the joints of a sentence.

What is a word like 'Alas' or 'Huzzah' called?

They express emotion or greeting rather than doing grammatical work. They often stand alone with punctuation.

Where were the oldest known punctuation marks found?

They date from the 9th century BC and consist of points between words and strokes between sections. Punctuation was not standardised until printing arrived.

What forced the standardisation of punctuation in the 14th and 15th centuries?

Printers needed rules they could apply consistently. Before that, marks varied from scribe to scribe.

Where is the serial comma used far more often?

It is also called the Oxford comma, confusingly enough. It goes before the 'and' in a list.

According to Cecil Hartley's old rhyme, how long a pause does a colon require?

A semicolon, in the same verse, is worth two. Punctuation was once taught as a system of timed pauses.

What happened to dashes and apostrophes in the typewriter era?

Curved quotation marks became two straight characters, and dashes became one hyphen, sometimes repeated. Word processors have been undoing it ever since.

How many lines does a sonnet traditionally have?

The rhyme scheme is fixed as well. Both the Italian and English versions keep the same length.

What are the two parts of a typical Italian sonnet called?

The first poses a problem, the second proposes a resolution. The switch usually happens at line nine.

What is the turn in a sonnet called?

It typically starts at the ninth line. Everything before it sets a problem, everything after answers it.

What is the rhyme scheme of a Shakespearean sonnet?

That is three alternately rhymed quatrains and a closing couplet. It became the favourite in Elizabethan times.

Which rhyme pattern did Petrarch typically use for his opening eight lines?

The final six lines then ran CDECDE or CDCCDC. The English version rearranged the whole thing.

How many morae does a traditional Japanese haiku contain?

They fall into three phrases of five, seven and five. English writers usually count syllables instead.

What is a kigo in a haiku?

It anchors the poem in a particular time of year. Cherry blossom, snow and cicadas all do the job.

What is a kireji?

It typically appears at the end of one of the three phrases. English versions often use a dash instead.

Which 17th-century poet is most associated with elevating the haiku form?

He lived from 1644 to 1694. His frog-and-pond poem is the most translated in the language.

What did the Haiku Society of America identify as the norm for English writers in 1973?

Japanese counts morae rather than syllables, so the two are not equivalent. Many modern poets write shorter.

Which narrative point of view uses the pronouns 'I' and 'me'?

It creates a close relationship between narrator and reader. It is also where unreliable narrators usually live.

Which point of view addresses the reader as 'you'?

It is rare in novels and often ironic. The narrator is usually recounting their own experience at a distance.

What does an omniscient narrator know?

The perspective is overarching rather than tied to a person. The alternative is a narrator confined to one character.

What do we call a storyteller whose account cannot be trusted?

Working out what really happened is the reader's job.

What is an iamb?

The word 'above' is the standard example. Five of them in a row make the most common metre in English poetry.

How many metrical feet are there in a line of pentameter?

Since each foot has two syllables, the line usually runs to ten. It is a form of decasyllabic verse.

Which poets are named as famous users of iambic pentameter?

Milton used it in Paradise Lost and Wordsworth in The Prelude. It is the most common metre in the language.

Which poetic form uses unrhymed iambic pentameter?

Shakespeare's plays are largely written in it. Rhymed pairs of the same metre are called something else.

Dylan Thomas's 'Do not go gentle into that good night' is a famous example of which form?

The form runs nineteen lines, five tercets and a quatrain, with two refrains; its modern shape comes from a 1606 poem by Jean Passerat.

What is the strict rhyme scheme of a limerick?

The New English Dictionary first records the word for this kind of poem in England in 1898, though an 1880 New Brunswick newspaper beat it.

Which Victorian writer popularised the limerick with A Book of Nonsense (1846)?

He wrote 212 of them without ever using the word 'limerick', and his final lines usually echoed the first line's end word.

Mrs. Malaprop, who gave her name to the malapropism, appears in which 1775 play?

Sheridan built her name from the French 'mal à propos'; Shakespeare's Dogberry had been mangling words two centuries earlier.

Spoonerisms are named for a warden of which Oxford institution?

Most lines credited to him are apocryphal; Spooner himself admitted only to 'The Kinquering Congs Their Titles Take'.

Which Russian playwright's letters warn that a rifle hung on the wall in act one must later go off?

The principle, now known by his name, says every element of a story should be necessary and the rest cut.

Saying 'wheels' for a car or 'boots' for soldiers uses which figure of speech?

It is a type of metonymy: a part stands for the whole or the whole for a part. 'The crown' for the monarch is metonymy but not this, since a crown is not part of a monarch.

The 19-letter Finnish word saippuakivikauppias is the longest everyday example of what?

It means soapstone vendor. The English term was introduced by Henry Peacham in 1638, though the Sator Square shows the idea is nearly 2,000 years old.

Which company used 'The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog' to test its Telex equipment?

The 35-letter sentence is the best-known English pangram and now shows off typefaces in font-preview software.

Who worded the 'euphemism treadmill', where polite terms turn taboo and get replaced?

Linguist Sharon Henderson Taylor had described the cycle in 1974; 'toilet' itself began as a genteel substitute.