Chapter 24-Figures of Speech

Figures of Speech are such a part of our daily language that we often don’t even realize that we are using them. Whenever we call someone an animal of some kind, an ass, a dog, a snake, we are using a metaphor. Whenever we refer to something as it’s defining characteristic, like a blonde, a redhead, a hired gun, a hired hand, a sweetheart, we are using synecdoche. Whenever we use hyperbole to describe something – it is flooding outside,  this is killing me, I’m dying of hunger – we are using overstatement. We say these things and hear these things and not think twice about them, but those are figures of speech, which is essentially when we describe something by referring to something else. This chapter goes through and describes the most-used categories of figures of speech, but linguists have identified countless different versions of this phenomenon in our use of language. Read the chapter carefully and learn how to identify these figures of speech in poetry where they are used constantly. There are a couple of things I wanted to point out about metaphors, however.