Using Rhetorical/Poetical FIGURES for Powerful, Impactful, and Memorable Writing Style: Part Three — Other Common Tropes

There are other useful tropes on top of the common TROPES OF COMPARISON that were overviewed in my last posting. These I am simply going to term “Others.” I’m not trying to do an exhaustively complete overview of any of these figures. Heinrich Lausberg’s DICTIONARY OF LITERARY RHETORIC and Richard Lanham’s A HANDLIST OF RHETORICAL TERMS give, in the former a life’s work compendium of all of the 900+ rhetorical devices described by the ancients and supplemented through the Middle Ages (it will help if you know both Latin and Classical Greek to delve into that huge tome), the latter—that I greatly encourage you to get ahold of if you’re serious about studying rhetorical devices and terminology—is far easier to work with.

So, on with a short list of a few other useful TROPES. Remember that Tropes are truly “figurative” language—they don’t mean literally what they say.

• SYNECDOCHE—A synecdoche uses the part to mean the whole, or—more rarely—the whole to mean the part. “All hands on deck” is a synecdoche. The ludicrous image of a bunch of dismembered hands flopping around on the deck of the ship would be a literal interpretation. What is meant, of course is that all of the “ships HANDS”—the sailors who do the manual labor of running the vessel (note MANUAL and it’s Latin connection with “hand”) should come to the deck of the ship. They’re being called up for work. Same with “hired hand,” “farm hand,” etc. To say that, during the Michael Jordan era(s) “Chicago won six NBA championships” is not literally true. The NBA franchise that plays its home games in Chicago and which, likely, comprises only a few hundred individuals at most won those six titles—NOT the entire city of Chicago.
• SYNAESTHESIA—Greek for the “mixing/blending/confusion of the senses” [And, by the way, if these rhetorical germs are “all Greek to you,” it’s because they ARE. In both Rhetoric and Poetics the language is Greek, just as legal jargon is almost all Latin]. To say “I love the green smell of the springtime” is to use a synaesthesia. “Green smell?” Clearly the blending of a visual adjective with an olfactory sensation. “Feast your eyes upon that!” is a confusion of taste and vision.
• PUN—often folks quote Samuel Johnson’s famous “The pun is the lowest form of wit.” This can be true with those rhyming “plays on words” that (IMHO) are both fun and which can be rhetorically effective such as: “If you break an egg, the yolk’s on you.” or “That wasn’t really very punny, was it?” Or as with the illustration above, based upon Russell Crowe’s character’s line in MASTER AND COMMANDER to the young ensign that, in a race between two weevils that had invested the ship’s bread supply, “One must always choose the lesser of two weevils.” :-) Yet puns can be used seriously. Shakespeare in HAMLET has the title character reply to his mother: “A little more than kin and less than kind” with “kind” meaning BOTH “not a kind thing to do” and “this new husband, my uncle, is not my kind of man.” When he responds to his mother’s “cast thy nighted color off,” he says, “Nay mother. I am too much in the sun.” Clearly a pun upon SON and SUN. “I am my father’s son, but not a son to this man.” And also: “I see the light.” “I understand what’s happening here.”
• OXYMORON—from the Greek (“sharp-dull”) is usually still taught in English classes. It is the juxtaposition of two words or two parts of a word that, at first, don’t seem to belong together or seem to be contrary in sense. “Deafening silence,” “bittersweet,” and some would throw in “military intelligence” and “free verse” are (or are viewed by some as) oxymorons.
• LITOTES—[ly-tote-eez] There are various types as Lausberg and others define it, but, essentially, it occurs when a word or phrase is used in an intentionally ambiguous way. “He leaned upon the podium and his stale jokes.” Leaned works with two meanings: he both pysically leaned upon the podium AND figuratively “depended upon” (or hoped to) his stale jokes.
• PARADOX—similar to oxymoron, but different. A paradox is a full statement, a sentence that seems to state an impossibility, but which, nevertheless, has an element of truth. Dr. King’s “He finds himself an exile in his own land” is a paradox. Literally, of course, when one is exiled, one has been cast out of one’s own land. G. K. Chesterton was the master of the paradox. He defined it as “the Truth standing on its head in an effort to be noticed.”

I’ll shift over to discussing some useful SCHEMES in the next posting. Remember that Schemes are literal. They mean exactly what they say, but they are simply interesting “ways with words” that add distinctiveness and effectiveness to STYLE.