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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 ...
An elegy is a poem of serious reflection, and in English literature usually a lament for the dead. However, according to The Oxford Handbook of the Elegy, "for all of its pervasiveness ... the 'elegy' remains remarkably ill defined: sometimes used as a catch-all to denominate texts of a somber or pessimistic tone, sometimes as a marker for textual monumentalizing, and sometimes strictly as a ...
Starting in the 14th century, a gloze in the English language was a marginal note or explanation, borrowed from French glose, which comes from medieval Latin glōsa, classical glōssa, meaning an obsolete or foreign word that needs explanation. [1] Later, it came to mean the explanation itself.
In languages like French, elision removes the end syllable of a word that ends with a vowel sound when the next begins with a vowel sound, in order to avoid hiatus, or retain a consonant-vowel-consonant-vowel rhythm. [2] These poetic contractions originate from archaic English. By the end of the 18th century, contractions were generally looked ...
The term anacoluthon is used primarily within an academic context. It is most likely to appear in a study of rhetoric or poetry. For example, the 3rd edition of The King's English, a style guide written by H. W. Fowler and F. G. Fowler, mentions it as a major grammatical mistake: [6]
Polyptoton / ˌ p ɒ l ɪ p ˈ t oʊ t ɒ n / is the stylistic scheme in which different words derived from the same root (such as "strong" and "strength") are used together. A related stylistic device is antanaclasis, in which the same word is repeated, but each time with a different sense. [1]
Replacing an expected word with another, half rhyming (or a partly sound-alike) word, with an entirely different meaning from what one would expect (cf malapropism, Spoonerism, aphasia). [5] I'm ravished! for "I'm ravenous!" or for "I'm famished!" "They build a horse" instead of they build a house. The strained use of an already existing word ...
Relative clauses are often used for circumlocution in English. [4] For example, [Firefighters] are the people who you call when your house is on fire. A [spider] is an arachnid that catches insects in its web. Synonyms and simile are two other common circumlocution strategies. [4] A pomegranate could be described using these techniques as follows: