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It maintains a consistent meaning regardless of the context, [5] with the intended meaning of a phrase corresponding exactly to the meaning of its individual words. [6] On the other hand, figurative use of language (a later offshoot being the term figure of speech [citation needed]) is the use of words or phrases with a meaning that does make ...
Tropes (from Greek trepein, 'to turn') change the general meaning of words. An example of a trope is irony, which is the use of words to convey the opposite of their usual meaning ("For Brutus is an honorable man; / So are they all, all honorable men"). During the Renaissance, scholars meticulously enumerated and classified figures of speech.
An idiom is a common word or phrase with a figurative, non-literal meaning that is understood culturally and differs from what its composite words' denotations would suggest; i.e. the words together have a meaning that is different from the dictionary definitions of the individual words (although some idioms do retain their literal meanings – see the example "kick the bucket" below).
The first known use of the word literally was in the 15th century, [2] or the 1530s. [3] [2] The use of the word as an intensifier emerged later, at the latest by 1769, [4] [5] when Frances Brooke wrote the following sentence: [4] He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among ...
Synecdoche is a rhetorical trope and a kind of metonymy—a figure of speech using a term to denote one thing to refer to a related thing. [9] [10]Synecdoche (and thus metonymy) is distinct from metaphor, [11] although in the past, it was considered a sub-species of metaphor, intending metaphor as a type of conceptual substitution (as Quintilian does in Institutio oratoria Book VIII).
In other words, Isocrates proposes here that metaphor is a distinctive feature of poetic language because it conveys the experience of the world afresh and provides a kind of defamiliarisation in the way the citizens perceive the world. [32] Democritus described metonymy by saying, "Metonymy, that is the fact that words and meaning change."
In other words, one should be in a position to understand the whole if one understands the meanings of each of the parts that make up the whole. For example, if the phrase "Fred kicked the bucket" is understood compositionally, it means that Fred has literally kicked an actual, physical bucket. The idiomatic reading, however, is non ...
The easiest stylistic device to identify is a simile, signaled by the use of the words "like" or "as". A simile is a comparison used to attract the reader's attention and describe something in descriptive terms. Example: "From up here on the fourteenth floor, my brother Charley looks like an insect scurrying among other insects." (from "Sweet ...