Definition:
The various rhetorical uses of language (such as metaphor, idiom, and chiasmus) that depart from customary construction, order, or significance. Attempts to draw strict distinctions between figures and tropes have largely been abandoned. See also:
- Top 20 Figures of Speech
- The Value of the Figures of Speech
- Figurative Language
- Figures & Tropes
- Tool Kit for Rhetorical Analysis
- Monty Python's "Announcement for People Who Like Figures of Speech"
Examples and Observations:
- The vast pool of terms for verbal ornamentation has acted like a gene pool for the rhetorical imagination, stimulating us to look at language in another way. . . . The figures have worked historically to teach a way of seeing."
(Richard Lanham, A Handlist of Rhetorical Terms, Univ. of California Press, 1991) - "The most excellent ornaments, exornations, lightes, flowers, and formes of speech, commonly called the figures of rhetorike. By which the singular partes of mans mind, are most aptly expressed, and the sundrie affections of his heart most effectuallie uttered."
(Henry Peacham, The Garden of Eloquence, 1593) - "The figurings of speech reveal to us the apparently limitless plasticity of language itself. We are confronted, inescapably, with the intoxicating possibility that we can make language do for us almost anything we want. Or at least a Shakespeare can."
(Arthur Quinn, Figures of Speech, 1982) - "The Greeks called them 'schemes,' a better word than 'figures,' because they serve as persuasive tricks and rules of thumb. While Shakespeare had to memorize more than 200 of them in grammar school, the basic ones aren't hard to learn. . . .
"Figures of speech change ordinary language through repetition, substitution, sound, and wordplay. They mess around with words--skipping them, swapping them, and making them sound different."
(Jay Heinrichs, Thank You for Arguing, 2007)
Pronunciation: FIG-yur uv SPEECH
Also Known As: figurative language, figures of rhetoric, figures, figures of style, rhetorical figures, schemes
