Tag: figurative speech
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Figurative Speech: Metonymy
This is an interesting one. In many ways, a metonymy is the opposite of a metaphor but they both do the same thing. A metaphor compares a thing to something unrelated by way of implication or suggestion (a brilliant shining diamond bore down in them from the sky) and a simile is a direct comparison…
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Figurative Speech: Portmanteau
What is portmanteau? Doesn’t that sound a little posh to be an English word? What sort of strange airy-fairy linguistics stuff are you presenting us now, Matt, in the name of edutainment? There you go, there’s the first one for you – edutainment. Portmanteau in its original meaning refers to a type of bag that…
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Figurative Speech: Idioms
We love idioms in English and it’s often a peculiarity that confuses non-native speakers when they hear us using them without a second thought for how they confuse people. What do we mean by idioms? It means when we use bywords that are unrelated to what they actually mean; it has figurative meaning but is not…
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Figurative Speech: Alliteration
What is alliteration and how do we use it? It is the use of a sequence of words where the consonant sounds are similar or each word in the sentence begins with the same letter or letters. The words may not sound the same, but by starting with the same letter(s) it feels as if…
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Figurative Speech: Hyperbole and Meiosis
It’s often hard to present the idea that language studies and linguistics can be fun or funny, but when we look at issues like syntactic ambiguity we can see that it can be. I’m starting a new series, sort of, with no promises on how many I will do or how often I will publish posts on…
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