Over 400 years ago, an English curate named Henry Peacham characterized the figures of speech as "wisdom speaking eloquently." Through the play of language, he said, "the singular partes of mans mind are most aptly expressed, and the sundrie affections of his heart most effectuallie uttered."
In The Garden of Eloquence (1577, revised 1593), Peacham defined and illustrated 184 figures of speech, many of which also appear in our Tool Kit for Rhetorical Analysis. But whereas Peacham's favorite sources were Cicero and the Bible, we've plucked our examples of eloquence from more contemporary gardens. For instance . . .
- Anaphora is illustrated by Kinky Friedman in his novel When the Cat's Away (1988):
I'm not afraid to die. I'm not afraid to live. I'm not afraid to fail. I'm not afraid to succeed. I'm not afraid to fall in love. I'm not afraid to be alone. I'm just afraid I might have to stop talking about myself for five minutes.
- Chiasmus by a commercial jingle:
I am stuck on Band-Aid, and Band-Aid's stuck on me.
- Epanalepsis by the character of Phil Leotardo in The Sopranos:
Next time there won't be a next time.
- Gradatio by Joaquin Phoenix's character in the movie Gladiator (2000):
They call for you: the general who became a slave; the slave who became a gladiator; the gladiator who defied an emperor. Striking story.
- Hyperbole by critic John Simon in a review of Barbra Streisand:
O for the gift of Rostand's Cyrano to invoke the vastness of that nose alone as it cleaves the giant screen from east to west, bisects it from north to south. It zigzags across our horizon like a bolt of fleshy lightning.
- Hypophora by Bert Lahr's Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (1939):
What makes a king out of a slave? Courage! What makes the flag on the mast to wave? Courage! What makes the elephant charge his tusk in the misty mist, or the dusky dusk? What makes the muskrat guard his musk? Courage!
- Metaphor by Lenny Leonard and Carl Carlson in The Simpsons:
Carl: According to the map, the cabin should be right here.
Lenny: Hey, maybe there is no cabin. Maybe it's one of them metaphorical things.
Carl: Oh yeah, yeah. Like maybe the cabin is the place inside each of us, created by our goodwill and teamwork.
Lenny: Nah, they said there would be sandwiches. - Polyptoton by poet Robert Frost:
Love is an irresistible desire to be irresistibly desired.
- Personification by Homer Simpson:
The only monster here is the gambling monster that has enslaved your mother! I call him Gamblor, and it's time to snatch your mother from his neon claws!
- Simile by hard-boiled novelist Raymond Chandler:
He looked about as inconspicuous as a tarantula on a slice of angel food.
- Tapinosis by movie critic Rex Reed:
Charlie Kaufman. Oy vay. I have hated every incomprehensible bucket of pretentious, idiot swill ever written by this cinematic drawbridge troll.
- And understatement by the Black Knight, after having both arms cut off, in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (1975):
It's just a flesh wound.
Before examining some of the rarer specimens in our garden, you may want to visit the Top 20 Figures of Speech. No, there wasn't a contest, and as far as I know these 20 figures haven't won any medals at the Chelsea Flower Show. But the figures remain fresh, and (to mix metaphors) you may still hear "wisdom speaking eloquently."
More About the Figures of Speech:
- Top 20 Figures of Speech
- Tool Kit for Rhetorical Analysis
- Homer Simpson's Figures of Speech
- Monty Python's "Announcement for People Who Like Figures of Speech": The Annotated Edition
Images: American singer, novelist, and politician Kinky Friedman; Bert Lahr (1895-1967) as the Cowardly Lion in The Wizard of Oz (Metro-Goldwyn-Mayer, 1939); Homer Simpson (TM and © FOX and its related entities); John Cleese as the Black Knight in Monty Python and the Holy Grail (EMI, Fox Video, and Sony Pictures, 1975)
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