50 Fun Facts About Figurative Language

Which breakfast cereal's mascots Snap, Crackle and Pop take their names from onomatopoeia in a radio ad?

Rice Krispies briefly had a fourth elf in the 1950s named Pow. The original trio were drawn in the early 1930s as elderly gnomes with large noses, ears and hats.

Which character from a London pronunciation book 'picked a peck of pickled peppers' in a classic alliteration?

Peter Piper may have been a real person: some authors identify him as Pierre Poivre, an 18th-century administrator of Mauritius who studied growing spices in the Seychelles.

Which boxer's two-simile motto, coined by cornerman Bundini Brown, was 'Float like a butterfly, sting like a bee'?

Muhammad Ali's motto came from a poem by Drew Bundini Brown, his assistant trainer, and it went on: 'rumble, young man, rumble.'

Which personification of death, named in English since the 1800s, is usually shown as a robed skeleton with a scythe?

The Grim Reaper is younger than he looks: the earliest known use of the name in English is in an 1847 book, although a skeletal Death with a scythe goes back to the late Middle Ages.

Which idiom do actors say before a show because wishing 'good luck' aloud is thought to bring bad luck?

Break a leg has a ballet rival: professional dancers do not say it, and wish each other 'merde' instead, a habit some theatre people have picked up too.

Which farm animals fly in an English idiom, said to come from a Scottish proverb, for something that will never happen?

Pigs fly in an adynaton, a hyperbole pushed so far that it describes an impossibility. Romanian has the same idiom, plus another that puts things off until 'horses' Easter'.

Which tradesman completes the simile 'as mad as a…', a phrase often linked to mercury poisoning in his trade?

Hatter came long before Wonderland: the phrase was in print by 1829, decades before Lewis Carroll's Alice's Adventures in Wonderland. Its true origin is still uncertain.

Which film's title character sits at a bus stop quoting the simile 'life was like a box of chocolates'?

Forrest Gump finishes the comparison with 'you never know what you're gonna get', a line ranked 40th on the American Film Institute's list of 100 movie quotes.

The English idiom 'kick the bucket', which Polish speakers render as 'kick the calendar', means to do what?

To die is also what Italians mean by 'pulling the leathers', which shows why an idiom rarely survives a word-for-word translation.

Which seafood phrase is often cited as an oxymoron because its first word seems to contradict its second?

Jumbo shrimp is a common example, and the word 'oxymoron' is one itself: it joins the Greek for 'sharp' and 'dull', as if to say 'pointedly foolish'.

Which of these everyday phrases is a simile, a device whose name comes from the Latin word for 'like'?

Poor as a church mouse spells out its comparison with 'as'. Drop the linking word, as in 'Odysseus is a weasel', and the same kind of idea becomes a metaphor.

Which of these remarks about a suitcase is hyperbole, a device that rhetoric also calls auxesis?

It weighs a ton is not meant to be believed: in casual speech hyperbole simply works as an intensifier, a vivid way of saying 'extremely heavy'.

Which of these body words is an onomatopoeia, coined in the 1500s to imitate the sound it names?

Hiccup was spelled 'hickop' by the 1570s, after the earlier 'hicket', each a word meant to mimic the jolt itself. The spelling 'hiccough' came later, from a mistaken link with 'cough'.

The joke 'I wondered why the ball was getting bigger, then it hit me' depends on which kind of wordplay?

A pun works here because 'it hit me' means both 'I realised' and 'the ball struck me'. The formal name for the habit is paronomasia.

Saying a worker was 'let go' rather than 'fired' is which device, whose Greek name means 'words of good omen'?

Euphemism was once a euphemism itself: the ancient Greeks used the term to mean keeping a holy silence, speaking well by not speaking at all.

In Carl Sandburg's much-taught metaphor, written as an 'American haiku', what 'comes on little cat feet'?

The fog caught Sandburg's eye over Chicago harbor on his way to interview a judge. Kept waiting forty minutes, he wrote the poem on a piece of newsprint.

Which Shakespeare comedy gives the melancholy Jaques the much-quoted metaphor 'All the world's a stage'?

As You Like It has Jaques stretch the idea across a whole speech, comparing life to a play and cataloguing the seven ages of man.

Which Shakespeare tragedy has a lovesick hero reel off oxymorons like 'loving hate', 'cold fire' and 'sick health'?

Romeo and Juliet has Romeo string together thirteen in a row in the opening scene, among them 'heavy lightness', 'bright smoke' and 'feather of lead'.

Which American poet personified Death as a gentleman caller with a carriage who 'kindly stopped for me'?

Emily Dickinson never authorised the poem for print: it appeared in 1890, after she had died, under the title 'The Chariot'.

Which monster-slaying hero gives his name to an Old English epic of 3,182 lines bound together by alliteration?

Beowulf's poet tied the two halves of every line together with matching initial sounds, the usual verse form of Old English, where a pause splits each line in two.

The idiom 'spill the beans', said to recall an ancient way of voting with beans in jars, means to do what?

Reveal a secret is the meaning, first attested in 1919. In the old story, knocking over a jar of voting beans gave the result away too early.

In A Christmas Carol, Charles Dickens begins by declaring old Marley 'as dead as' which piece of ironmongery?

A door-nail puzzles even the narrator, who admits he would have called a coffin-nail 'the deadest piece of ironmongery in the trade'. Langland used the same simile in the 1300s.

Which animal in the Aesop fable behind the idiom 'sour grapes' decides the fruit it cannot reach is not worth having?

Fox logic has travelled well: similar expressions exist in other languages of Europe and Asia, sometimes with a different fruit hanging out of reach.

Which Greek hero's heel names a person's one fatal weak spot, a figure of speech in English only since the 1800s?

Achilles lent his heel to English surprisingly late: as an expression for a vulnerable spot it dates only to 1840, although Coleridge had hinted at it in 1810.

Which salad ingredient completes the simile 'as cool as a…', used since the 1700s for someone calm under pressure?

Cucumber has kept its cool for three centuries: the comparison was in print by 1731, in a volume of Miscellanies issued by Jonathan Swift and Alexander Pope.

The word 'metaphor', which is itself a metaphor, comes from a Greek verb with which literal meaning?

To carry over is the sense of the Greek 'metapherō': a metaphor moves a label from one thing to another, and the Greek noun behind it literally means 'transference'.

Which reptile's 'tears' mean a fake show of grief, from an old belief that it weeps while eating its prey?

Crocodile eyes do water, typically to stay moist after a long time out of the water. Doctors borrowed the legend to name a syndrome in which patients shed tears while eating.

Which smoked fish names a misleading clue, after William Cobbett's tale of using one to pull hounds off a scent?

Herring cured until reddish-brown smelled strong enough to distract a pack, or so Cobbett claimed in 1807. His tale was probably invented, yet it likely gave English the idiom.

Which bird's flight names the most direct route between two points, in an idiom Dickens used in Oliver Twist?

Crow flight is not really that direct: the birds cross open country alone but often circle above their nests.

In the Christmas poem 'A Visit from St. Nicholas', a simile compares St. Nick's nose to which fruit?

A cherry for the nose, roses for the cheeks and a beard 'as white as the snow': the similes pile up in a poem first published anonymously in a Troy, New York newspaper.

Which statesman's speech in Fulton, Missouri, made the metaphor of an 'iron curtain' across Europe famous?

Winston Churchill delivered the line at Westminster College with President Truman in the audience: 'an iron curtain has descended across the Continent.'

Which Scottish poet compared his love to 'a red, red rose' in a simile written as a song in the 1790s?

Robert Burns wrote it in Scots in 1794, during years spent collecting and preserving more than 300 traditional songs, 'Auld Lang Syne' among them.

Marianne, shown in a red Phrygian cap in town halls and on stamps, is the national personification of which country?

France has used Marianne as an emblem of liberty and reason since the Revolution, and her profile also appears on the official government logo and on the country's euro coins.

In Japanese onomatopoeia, which animal says 'wan wan'?

Dog barks are spelled differently in almost every language: Albanian ones go 'ham ham'. A Japanese cat, meanwhile, says 'nyā' and a frog 'kero kero'.

In the phrase 'boots on the ground', a common example of synecdoche, the boots stand for which people?

Soldiers are named here by one thing they wear. Synecdoche swaps a part for the whole, as in 'suits' for businessmen or 'wheels' for a car.

Litotes, as when 'not bad' means 'very good', is a deliberate form of which device, common in Old English poetry?

Understatement by denying the opposite can cut both ways: depending on intonation, 'not bad' may mean anything from mediocre to excellent. The Greek root means 'simplicity'.

In Old English poetry, the kenning 'whale-road' is a compound nickname for which part of the natural world?

The sea was also the 'swan-road' and the 'sail-road' to Old English poets, who called the sun the 'sky-candle'.

Long similes that run for many lines, often comparing warriors to lions, are named after which ancient Greek poet?

Homer filled the Iliad with them, typically in the form 'like a … when it …', which is why the device is also called the epic simile.

The word 'onomatopoeia' comes from an Ancient Greek compound, 'onomatopoiía', that literally means what?

Name-making is the literal sense, from 'ónoma' and 'poiéō'. The labels vary by language: a clock goes 'tick tock' in English but 'kachi kachi' in Japanese.

Which Greek philosopher's Poetics declares that 'the greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor'?

Aristotle also argued in his Rhetoric that metaphors make learning pleasant, since the words we enjoy most are the ones that create knowledge in us.

Speaking to an absent person or thing, often after the cry 'O', is which device, named like a punctuation mark?

Apostrophe lets St Paul taunt death itself with 'O death, where is thy sting?', and lets poets address the Muses, love or time: anything that cannot answer back.

Calling the US film industry 'Hollywood' or the monarchy 'the Crown' is which device, a relative of synecdoche?

Metonymy names a thing by something linked to it, so 'Wall Street' stands for American finance and, in 'the pen is mightier than the sword', a pen stands for writing.

Which Victorian critic coined 'pathetic fallacy' for giving nature human feelings, as in 'the cruel, crawling foam'?

John Ruskin meant it as a rebuke: 'fallacy' to him meant falseness, and he coined the term in Modern Painters to attack the sentimentality of late 18th-century poetry.

I. A. Richards called a metaphor's subject its 'tenor'; what did he call the image that supplies the comparison?

The vehicle in 'All the world's a stage' is the stage, while the world is the tenor. Other writers prefer the plainer pair 'ground' and 'figure'.

'Hyperbole' joins the Greek for 'beyond' to a verb, also the root of 'ballistics', that names which action?

Throwing beyond the mark is the picture behind the word, and geometry's hyperbola is the same Greek term in a different dress.

Martin Luther King Jr. repeating 'I have a dream' eight times to open successive sentences is a case of which device?

Anaphora repeats words at the start of neighbouring clauses. Repeat them at the end instead and the device becomes epistrophe; do both and it is symploce.

'Many are called, but few are chosen' balances opposites in parallel form, a device known by which Greek name?

Antithesis is Greek for 'setting opposite'. Dickens stretched the device across the opening of A Tale of Two Cities: 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.'

Which Edgar Allan Poe poem, called onomatopoeia pushed as far as it can go, popularised the word 'tintinnabulation'?

The Bells was published only after Poe's death in 1849. He did not coin 'tintinnabulation', as is often thought: it builds on the Latin word for a bell.

'She opened the door and her heart to the stray kitten' is which device, named from the Greek for 'a yoking together'?

Zeugma, also called syllepsis, makes one word do double duty. Dickens used it for a character who 'went straight home, in a flood of tears and a sedan-chair'.

Which superhero's 1960s TV series flashed onomatopoeia such as 'Pow!' and 'Wham!' on screen during fight scenes?

Batman's fight captions also included 'Biff!' and 'Crunch!', borrowing the comic-book habit of spelling out every sound effect.