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Polysemy – the capacity of a word or phrase to render more than one meaning. Polysyndeton – the repeated use of conjunctions within a sentence, particularly where they do not necessarily have to be used. Postmodernism – a field of inquiry concerned with the ideological underpinnings of commonly held assumptions.
Pleonasm can serve as a redundancy check; if a word is unknown, misunderstood, misheard, or if the medium of communication is poor—a static-filled radio transmission or sloppy handwriting—pleonastic phrases can help ensure that the meaning is communicated even if some of the words are lost.
If a word with a strong negative semantic prosody (e.g. onslaught) co-occurs with a positive word (e.g. hospitality) instead of an expected negative word (e.g. an onslaught of hospitality), a range of effects are possible as a result of such a collocational clash: [5] irony, expression of a subtle hidden meaning, often negative evaluation,
The post 30 Fancy Words That Will Make You Sound Smarter appeared first on Reader's Digest. With these fancy words, you can take your vocabulary to a whole new level and impress everyone.
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 ...
many figurative senses derived from baseball, e.g. off one's base (crazy), to get to first base (esp. in neg. constr., to get a first important result); more recently (slang), a metaphor for one of three different stages in making out (q.v.) – see baseball metaphors for sex; more s.v. home run
Oxymorons are words that communicate contradictions. An oxymoron (plurals: oxymorons and oxymora) is a figure of speech that juxtaposes concepts with opposite meanings within a word or in a phrase that is a self-contradiction. As a rhetorical device, an oxymoron illustrates a point to communicate and reveal a paradox.
Its first printed use came as early as 1991 in William G. Hawkeswood's "One of the Children: An Ethnography of Identity and Gay Black Men," wherein one of the subjects used the word "tea" to mean ...