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Also apophthegm. A terse, pithy saying, akin to a proverb, maxim, or aphorism. aposiopesis A rhetorical device in which speech is broken off abruptly and the sentence is left unfinished. apostrophe A figure of speech in which a speaker breaks off from addressing the audience (e.g., in a play) and directs speech to a third party such as an opposing litigant or some other individual, sometimes ...
An easy example in theater or film is "breaking the fourth wall," when characters suspend the progress of the story to speak directly to the audience. When the aesthetic distance is deliberately violated in theater, it is known as the distancing effect , or Verfremdungseffekt , a concept coined by playwright Bertolt Brecht .
Oxymorons in the narrow sense are a rhetorical device used deliberately by the speaker and intended to be understood as such by the listener. In a more extended sense, the term "oxymoron" has also been applied to inadvertent or incidental contradictions, as in the case of "dead metaphors" ("barely clothed" or "terribly good").
The dictionary definition of contranym at Wiktionary; The dictionary definition of Appendix:English contranyms at Wiktionary; Contronyms by language in Wiktionary; Autoantonyms page on fun-with-words.com; List of English examples at LingerAndLook.com
A diamante poem is a poem that makes the shape of a diamond. The poem can be used in two ways, either comparing and contrasting two different subjects, or naming synonyms at the beginning of the poem and then antonyms for the second half for a subject. In the poems, the subject is named in one word in the first line.
Owing to its origin in ancient Greece and Rome, English rhetorical theory frequently employs Greek and Latin words as terms of art. This page explains commonly used rhetorical terms in alphabetical order. The brief definitions here are intended to serve as a quick reference rather than an in-depth discussion. For more information, click the terms.
When the antiphrasal use is very common, the word can become an auto-antonym, [3] having opposite meanings depending on context. For example, Spanish dichoso [ 4 ] originally meant "fortunate, blissful" as in tierra dichosa , "fortunate land", but it acquired the ironic and colloquial meaning of "infortunate, bothersome" as in ¡Dichosas moscas ...
Antonyms are words with opposite or nearly opposite meanings. For example: hot ↔ cold, large ↔ small, thick ↔ thin, synonym ↔ antonym; Hypernyms and hyponyms are words that refer to, respectively, a general category and a specific instance of that category. For example, vehicle is a hypernym of car, and car is a hyponym of vehicle.