Last week we took up these five simple rhetorical devices for attracting and holding the attention of readers or listeners: (1)
repetition; (2)
serial enumeration; (3)
cumulation; (4)
allusion; and (5)
rhetorical questions. This time we will take a quick look into the broader class of rhetorical devices known as
tropes and schemes, which artfully deviate from the usual meanings of words to make persuasion psychologically and emotionally more forceful. They are heightened states of the language that, at their most expressive, take the form of oration and song and the most profound human language of all—poetry.
Let’s start with
TROPES. The most familiar tropes are the simile, metaphor, and hyperbole. The
simile explicitly compares one thing or figuratively equate it to another, as in these song lyrics:
“Your hair streaked with sunlight, /Your lips red as flame, /Your face with a luster that puts gold to shame” ("Camelot," Lerner and Loewe). The
metaphor implies a comparison by directly referring to one thing as another: “Human triceratops are not fit for campuses, only for petrified forests” (this columnist’s writing, once upon a time). The
hyperbole exaggerates for emphasis or effect:
“An hundred years should got to praise /Thine eyes and on thine forehead gaze; /Two hundred to adore each breast, /But thirty thousand to the rest.” (“To His Coy Mistress,” Andrew Marvell).
Three other commonly used tropes are the synecdoche, metonymy, and personification. The
synedoche represents the whole object by naming only a part of it:
“Give us this day our daily bread” (The Lord’s Prayer). The
metonymy refers to something by naming only one of its attributes:
“By the sweat of thy brow thou shalt eat thy bread” ("Genesis," Holy Bible).
Personification refers to abstractions or inanimate objects as though they had human qualities:
“The East, with its languor and mysticism, was my mother” (“I am a Filipino,” essay by Carlos P. Romulo).
Tropes of a different kind are
wordplay and puns, which come in three general categories. The first category is the
antanaclasis, which repeats a word in two different senses; this includes
paronomasia or
punning, which uses words that sound alike but differ in meaning, as in “...culled cash, or cold cash, and then it turned into a gold cache” (
Billy Bathgate, a novel by E.L. Doctorow);
syllepsis or
zeugma, which uses a word differently in relation to two or more words that it modifies, as in “We must all hang together or assuredly we will all hang separately” (Benjamin Franklin); and
onomatopoeia, which uses words that sound corresponding with their semantic value (“Thud!” “Pop!” “Screech!”).
Wordplay and puns likewise come as
substitutions. They include the
anthimeria, which substitutes one part of speech for another: “Lord Angelo dukes it well.” (“Measure for Measure,” Shakespeare); and the
periphrasis, which replaces a proper name with a descriptive word or phrase, or with an attribute associated with that name:
“While memory holds a seat/ In this distracted globe...” (“Hamlet,” Shakespeare).
The last class of wordplay and puns is
overstatement and understatement. Apart from the hyperbole, this class of tropes includes the
auxesis, which arranges words or clauses in a sequence of increasing force:
“I may, I must, I can, I will, I do /Leave following that which it is gain to miss” (“Astrophel and Stella,” Sir Philip Sydney); the
litote, an understatement used deliberately: “It was no minor matter” for “It was a major matter.”; and
meiosis, a variant of the litote that refers to something with a name disproportionately less than its nature, as when Monty Python in the movie says this of his amputated leg: “It’s just a flesh wound.”
We will conclude this discussion next week with a quick survey of
SCHEMES and other forms of wordplay that deviate from normal word arrangements.
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This essay, 2077th of the series, appeared in the column “English Plain and Simple” by Jose A. Carillo in the Campus Press section of the December 23, 2021 Internet edition of The Manila Times,
© 2021 by the Manila Times Publishing Corp. All rights reserved. It is a condensed version of an 822-word exposition entitled “Some simple rhetorical devices” that first appeared in the author's “English Plain and Simple” column in The Manila Times
and that later formed part of his book English Plain and Simple: No-Nonsense Ways to Learn Today's Global Language
(Manila Times Publishing Corp., first edition 2004, and second updated edition 2008). All rights reserved.Read this article online in
The Manila Times:
“Tropes and schemes as deeper rhetorical devices”(Next:
Schemes and other fancier forms of wordplay) December 30, 2021
Visit Jose Carillo’s English Forum, http://josecarilloforum.com. You can follow me on Facebook and Twitter and e-mail me at j8carillo@yahoo.com.
