February 2007

Talking about words: Figures of Speech

By Richard W. Bailey

Back when teaching persuasion was an important part of school, young people learned lots of "figures of speech" in which the normal uses of words are twisted out of the usual way of their use. (The arts of persuasion were then called rhetoric, and figures of speech based on twisting were called tropes.)

Now that part of the curriculum is mostly gone. Students come from high school to Michigan knowing a metaphor: "gallantly streaming" from our national anthem is a metaphor since flags cannot be gallant; they can only flap. And they know a special kind of metaphor: "I love you like crazy cakes" (from a book of that title by Rose Lewis).  Here like (or sometimes as) is the give-away word for the kind of metaphor called a simile.

In Shakespeare's day, youngsters learned all sorts of names for figures of speech, and part of their delight when they grew up was finding them. Most of the names for these figures were from classical Greek and Latin, and the English turns of phrase based upon them were designed to mimic the great poets in those two languages.

The names of the figures are mostly forgotten, but the tropes endure. Here's one called hysteron-proteron: "Hurry up and put on your shoes and socks!"  Nobody pays any attention to the trick in this familiar phrase. But, of course, one puts on socks first and then shoes. So shoes and socks are in the wrong order: hysteron-proteron (translated into English to make it easier for children to remember, it was called "the-cart-before-the-horse"). We encounter figures like this every day. "Then away she ran to the garden" (from "Chicken-Little).

A similar figure is tmesis. Here a word is cut into pieces and another word is stuck in the middle: "I'm a murderer! I'm a MUR-DIDDLY-URDERER!!!!!!!" That's Ned Flanders from "The Simpsons," a character much given to tmesis and the people who write his lines know exactly what they're doing. Fortunately they don't expect us to say what a Renaissance critic might exclaim: "What a pretty tmesis!"

Here's a link to a wonderfully comprehensive list of rhetorical figures. Most of their names came into English in Shakespeare's lifetime, so it is no wonder that his plays are full of them.

Here's one from Hamlet, in which Polonius gives his diagnosis of Hamlet's mental health to Hamlet's mother:

Madam, I swear I use no art at all.
That he's mad, 'tis true, 'tis true 'tis pity,
And pity 'tis 'tis true -- a foolish figure,
But farewell it, for I will use no art.

This figure—true:pity::pity:true—is an example of chiasmus. It comes from Greek: "crossing, diagonal arrangement." The pompous Polonius denies using the art of rhetoric, but he, and we, know what he's doing even if we've never heard the term chiasmus. We think, rightly, that he is a pedant and a foolish figure himself.

Twisting words is what we do every day. Consider these in which a verb is followed by the and a noun: bite the bullet "dare"; kick the bucket "die"; pass the buck "shift blame"; pop the question "propose marriage"; shoot the breeze "chat". As far as I know, there's no rhetorical term to encompass these things. They are all metaphors, to be sure, but there's something special about them: buy the farm "die"; hit the hay "go to bed"; jump the gun "make a false start"; spill the beans "blurt out a hidden truth"; toe the line "conform."

Here is a cluster of figures that offer what those in the development business would call a naming opportunity.

Richard W. Bailey is Fred Newton Scott Collegiate Professor of English at the University of Michigan. His latest publication (co-edited with Colette Moore and Marilyn Miller) is an edition of a chronicle of daily life in London written by a merchant in the middle of the sixteenth century. This electronic book incorporates images of the manuscript, a transcript of the writing it contains, and a modernization of the text for easy reading. Thanks to the University of Michigan Library and the University Press, the work is freely available to all: http://www.hti.umich.edu/m/machyn/