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An apostrophe is an exclamatory figure of speech. [1] It occurs when 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 absent from the scene. Often the addressee is a personified abstract quality or inanimate object.
The apostrophe (’, ' ) is a punctuation mark, and sometimes a diacritical mark, in languages that use the Latin alphabet and some other alphabets. In English, the apostrophe is used for three basic purposes:
Adianoeta – a phrase carrying two meanings: an obvious meaning and a second, more subtle and ingenious one (more commonly known as double entendre). Alliteration – the use of a series of two or more words beginning with the same letter. Amphiboly – a sentence that may be interpreted in more than one way due to ambiguous structure.
Little punctuation marks—like a comma, question mark, or an apostrophe—can make or break the flow or meaning of a sentence. In fact, this is how confusing life would be without proper punctuation.
Poetic contractions are contractions of words found in poetry but not commonly used in everyday modern English. Also known as elision or syncope, these contractions are usually used to lower the number of syllables in a particular word in order to adhere to the meter of a composition. [1]
This is an accepted version of this page This is the latest accepted revision, reviewed on 26 October 2024. Poem by Walt Whitman on the death of Abraham Lincoln "Oh Captain, My Captain" redirects here. For the Grimm episode, see Oh Captain, My Captain (Grimm). For the Shameless episode, see O Captain, My Captain (Shameless). O Captain! My Captain! by Walt Whitman Printed copy of "O Captain! My ...
Stichic: a poem composed of lines of the same approximate meter and length, not broken into stanzas. Syllabic: a poem whose meter is determined by the total number of syllables per line, rather than the number of stresses. Tanka: a Japanese form of five lines with 5, 7, 5, 7, and 7 syllables—31 in all.
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.