50 Fun Facts About Figures of Speech

Which figure of speech takes its name from a Greek verb that literally means to strip off the flesh?

Sarcasm comes from the Greek sarkazein, to strip off the flesh as dogs do, which came to mean sneering. English borrowed the word in the 1570s in its Latin form, sarcasmus.

Which Canadian singer's hit 'Ironic' set off a long debate over whether its unlucky scenes are irony at all?

Alanis Morissette later said she and co-writer Glen Ballard never checked that every line was technically ironic. Comedian Ed Byrne joked that the only ironic thing about the song is its title.

Which figure of speech has a Greek name meaning 'sharp-dull', so that the word itself is an example of the device?

Oxymoron joins the Greek oxys, sharp, and moros, dull or foolish, so the term contradicts itself just as 'bittersweet' and 'jumbo shrimp' do.

Shakespeare's "All the world's a stage" speech in As You Like It is a much-cited example of which figure of speech?

Metaphor is itself one: the word comes from a Greek term for carrying something across. The speech goes on to call men and women 'merely players' with their exits and entrances.

Which figure of speech flashed on screen as 'Pow!' and 'Biff!' during fight scenes in the 1960s Batman TV series?

Onomatopoeia means 'name-making' in Greek, and covers words such as bang, beep and zoom that imitate the sounds they name. Cartoonist Roy Crane pioneered such sound effects in comics.

Which Madonna hit, also the title track of one of her albums, has a simile for its title?

Like a Virgin is a simile because it compares using the word 'like' instead of calling one thing another. The term comes from the Latin similis, meaning similar.

Which literary device turns the United States into Uncle Sam, England into John Bull and France into Marianne?

Personification gives a nation, a season or an idea a human face. John Bull began as a character in a 1712 satire by John Arbuthnot before political cartoonists made him famous.

Which figure of speech did a British Airways pilot use by announcing 'a small problem' after all four engines failed?

Understatement made Captain Eric Moody's 1982 announcement famous: volcanic ash had stopped the engines of his Boeing 747, and he signed off, 'I trust you are not in too much distress.'

Which verbal blunder is named after an Oxford don said to have toasted 'our queer old dean' in front of Queen Victoria?

Spoonerism honours William Archibald Spooner, Warden of New College, Oxford, who was allegedly prone to swapping the opening sounds of words. 'The Lord is a shoving leopard' is also pinned on him.

Which figure of speech, from Greek words for 'throwing beyond', is at work when someone says 'the bag weighed a ton'?

Hyperbole is exaggeration for effect, never meant to be taken literally. American tall tales lean on it to inflate the feats of the lumberjack Paul Bunyan.

Which figure of speech, named from the Latin for 'letter', runs through 'Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers'?

Alliteration was coined in the 15th century by the Italian humanist Giovanni Pontano, who built it on the Latin littera. It repeats the opening sound of neighbouring words.

Which term describes a phrase like 'kick the bucket', which becomes 'kick the calendar' in Polish?

Idiom is the word for a phrase whose meaning cannot be read off its parts, so translators swap in a local one: the French 'break one's pipe' and Italians 'pull the leathers' when they die.

In Romeo and Juliet, the dying Mercutio's promise that tomorrow he will be 'a grave man' is which figure of speech?

Pun is the plain word for what rhetoricians call paronomasia: 'grave' means both serious and bound for the tomb. Shakespeare is estimated to have worked more than 3,000 of them into his plays.

Which figure of speech, named from the Greek for 'words of good omen', turns 'firing you' into 'letting you go'?

Euphemism swaps a blunt word for a gentler one, most often around death, sex and bodily functions. Minced oaths such as 'darn' and 'oh my gosh' are the swearing version.

Shylock's 'If you prick us, do we not bleed?' in The Merchant of Venice is a famous example of which device?

Rhetorical question is the name for a question asked to make a point, not to get a reply. Shylock piles up several, among them 'If you poison us, do we not die?'

Robert Burns opens a famous song with the simile that his love is like which 'red, red' flower, newly sprung in June?

Rose is the flower: 'My luve's like a red, red rose, that's newly sprung in June.' Burns adds a second simile straight away, likening her to a melody 'sweetly play'd in tune'.

Which Star Wars character's speech is a popular example of anastrophe, the inversion of normal word order?

Yoda flips his sentences, as in 'Powerful you have become, the dark side I sense in you.' Anastrophe comes from a Greek word for a turning back.

Which Roman general's boast 'Veni, vidi, vici' is a famous asyndeton, a list with its conjunctions left out?

Julius Caesar reported a quick win over Pharnaces II of Pontus in three words meaning 'I came, I saw, I conquered'. Leaving out every 'and' hurries the rhythm.

Which Joseph Heller novel gave English a name for a no-win paradox created by contradictory rules?

Catch-22 is the rule that traps Heller's wartime pilots: asking to be grounded for insanity proves a man sane enough to keep flying. The army surgeon Doc Daneeka explains it.

Which author's essay 'Politics and the English Language' bans any figure of speech writers are used to seeing in print?

George Orwell made it the first of his six rules for clear writing in 1946, singling out stale phrases such as 'Achilles' heel', 'swan song' and 'hotbed'.

Which term, from Greek words for 'the same' and 'saying', covers phrases such as 'free gift' and 'PIN number'?

Tautology says one thing twice: a gift is free by definition, and the N in PIN already stands for number. Saying 'free gift' anyway can stress that there are no strings attached.

Which error is named after a Sheridan character who says 'she's as headstrong as an allegory on the banks of the Nile'?

Malapropism comes from Mrs Malaprop in The Rivals (1775), who meant 'alligator'. Sheridan built her name on the French mal à propos, 'poorly placed'.

Patrick Henry's cry 'Give me liberty or give me death!' at the Second Virginia Convention is a model of which device?

Antithesis balances opposites in matching phrases, here liberty against death. The opening of A Tale of Two Cities, 'It was the best of times, it was the worst of times', works the same way.

Which sitcom is known for extended similes such as 'as cunning as a fox who's just been appointed Professor of Cunning'?

Blackadder usually gives these put-downs to its title character, here mocking yet another plan from his servant Baldrick. British comedy has long favoured the negative simile, as in 'daft as a brush'.

Which French phrase for a remark with a risqué second meaning has not been used in French itself for centuries?

Double entendre once meant 'double meaning' in French, but modern French would find the phrase ungrammatical. It took on its suggestive English sense after John Dryden used it in 1673.

Which term names a descriptive tag like 'the Great' in Alexander the Great or 'the Lionheart' in Richard the Lionheart?

Epithet covers royal bynames and Homer's stock phrases alike. When James Joyce wrote of 'the snot-green sea', he was playing on Homer's familiar 'wine-dark sea'.

Which figure of speech lets 'Hollywood' stand for American filmmaking and 'the crown' for a monarchy?

Metonymy names a thing by something closely linked to it. Perhaps the oldest example is 'Pharaoh', which meant the Egyptian king's residence before it came to mean the king himself.

Which figure of speech, named like a punctuation mark, is Juliet using when she addresses a weapon as 'O happy dagger!'?

Apostrophe turns away from the audience to address someone absent or something that cannot answer, often opening with 'O'. St Paul does the same in 'O death, where is thy sting?'

Which device, from the Greek for 'carrying back', did Martin Luther King Jr. use by repeating 'I have a dream'?

Anaphora repeats words at the start of neighbouring clauses, and King returned to the phrase eight times in the speech. Orators favour the device because it stirs an audience's emotions.

Which figure of speech gives a Charlie Kaufman film its title, a play on the New York city of Schenectady?

Synecdoche lets a part stand for the whole, as in 'suits' for businessmen, 'wheels' for a car and 'boots' for soldiers. Much of Kaufman's 2008 film is set in Schenectady.

In the Gettysburg Address, Lincoln's 'of the people, by the people, for the people' is a famous example of which device?

Epistrophe ends successive phrases on the same word, throwing the stress onto it. Its Greek name means 'a turning about', and St Paul uses it in 'I spoke as a child, I understood as a child'.

Which figure of speech, from the Greek for 'simplicity', turns 'good' into 'not bad' and 'like' into 'not unlike'?

Litotes makes a point by denying its opposite, so 'not bad' can mean excellent. 'We are not amused', the rebuke attributed to Queen Victoria, is a famous case.

Which novelist's character Sam Weller gave his name to the Wellerism, a proverb undercut by a comic 'as the man said'?

Charles Dickens gave Sam dozens of them in The Pickwick Papers, such as 'Out vith it, as the father said to his child, when he swallowed a farden.'

Which comedian's line 'I've had a perfectly wonderful evening, but this wasn't it' is a classic paraprosdokian?

Groucho Marx was a master of the paraprosdokian, Greek for 'against expectation': the end of the sentence forces a rethink of its start. Henny Youngman's 'Take my wife—please!' is another.

Which prime minister's 'education, education, education' is a textbook epizeuxis, one word repeated in quick succession?

Tony Blair said his top priority 'was, is and always will be education, education, education'. Estate agents use the same figure in 'Location, location, location'.

Which compound figure of speech from Old English verse renames the sea as the 'whale's road'?

Kenning pairs a base-word with a determinant, so 'road' is the base and 'whale's' narrows it. Modern English builds 'skyscraper' the same way.

Which term for a comic plunge from lofty to trivial did Alexander Pope introduce in 'The Art of Sinking in Poetry'?

Bathos is Greek for 'depth', and Pope's essay Peri Bathous used it to mock poets who reach for the sublime and sink instead. The title parodies Longinus's On the Sublime.

Which Founding Father reportedly said the signers must 'all hang together' or 'all hang separately', an antanaclasis?

Benjamin Franklin is said to have made the joke at the signing of the Declaration of Independence. Antanaclasis repeats a word in a new sense: 'hang' first means stick together, then swing from a rope.

Which Victorian critic coined 'pathetic fallacy' in Modern Painters for writing that gives nature human feelings?

John Ruskin meant the label as a rebuke to the sentimental poetry of the late 18th century, in which clouds seem sullen and leaves dance.

Which device, seen in 'By day the frolic, and the dance by night', is named after an X-shaped Greek letter?

Chiasmus comes from chi, the Greek X, because its terms cross over in an ABBA order: day, frolic, dance, night. The line is from Samuel Johnson's The Vanity of Human Wishes.

Which device, Greek for 'a yoking together', lets Pope's Queen Anne 'sometimes counsel take and sometimes tea'?

Zeugma makes one word govern two others, here 'take' with both counsel and tea. Lewis Carroll's Snark hunters do the same when they pursue it 'with forks and hope'.

Which figure of speech, from the Greek for 'a cutting', splits a word to insert another, as in 'abso-bloody-lutely'?

Tmesis of this kind is known as expletive infixation. The extra word usually lands just before the stressed syllable, which is why nobody says 'ab-bloody-solutely'.

Scholars sort figures of speech into schemes, which vary word order, and what other group that changes word meanings?

Tropes turn words away from their literal sense, and the name comes from the Greek tropos, 'a turn'. Scheme comes from the Greek schēma, meaning form or shape.

Which American writer's story 'After the Storm' is quoted for its polysyndeton, clause after clause joined by 'and'?

Ernest Hemingway used the device for an incantatory rhythm: 'it was dark and there was water standing in the street and no lights and windows broke'.

Which figure of speech, from the Greek for 'a dividing', says 'searched high and low' to mean searched everywhere?

Merism names two contrasting parts and lets them stand for the whole, so 'young and old' means everyone and 'heart and soul' the entire person.

Which figure of speech, Greek for 'one through two', says 'nice and hot' when it means 'nicely hot'?

Hendiadys splits a single idea into two words joined by 'and', so the coffee is hot to a nice degree, not nice as well as hot. English handbooks have also called it the 'figure of twins'.

Which device, Greek for 'becoming silent', breaks a sentence off midway, as in the threat 'Get out, or else—!'?

Aposiopesis leaves the ending to the listener's imagination, which suits a speaker overcome by anger or fear. King Lear gets only as far as 'I will have such revenges on you both, that all the world shall—'.

Which poet's line 'on a proud round cloud in white high night' is a showpiece of assonance, the echo of vowel sounds?

E. E. Cummings packs the line with two runs of matching vowels: proud, round, cloud, then white, high, night. Assonance matters even more in Old French, Spanish and Celtic verse.

Which figure of speech gives us 'the Bard' for Shakespeare, 'the Boss' for Springsteen and 'the Iron Lady' for Thatcher?

Antonomasia swaps a proper name for a descriptive phrase, as medieval writers did when they called Aristotle simply 'the Philosopher'. It also runs in reverse, when a name is used for a general type.

Which president's 'ask what you can do for your country' completes an antimetabole, words repeated in reverse order?

John F. Kennedy delivered the line in his 1961 inaugural address. Antimetabole flips the same words around, so 'your country can do for you' returns as 'you can do for your country'.