Playing with Words and their Meanings



AP Terminology. Help!!!

Playing with Words and their Meanings

Tropes (using words in non-literal ways)

Simile- Her breath hit me in the face like a freight train.

Metaphor- Her breath was a freight train that hit me in the face.

Allegory- a sustained metaphor

Conceit- a sustained metaphor

Synecdoche- All hands on deck! (calling something by one of its parts)

Metonymy- The boss brought in a hired gun. (associate something with a feature)

Idioms- It’s raining cats and dogs. (expressions that don’t translate)

Hyperbole- I could eat 1000 tacos. (extreme exaggeration)

Irony- I love to go to my minimum-wage job. (saying opposite of what you mean)

Litotes- I think it is dead. (after spider is shot with a canon) (deliberate understatement for effect)

Apostrophe- “Oh, sin; you are a powerful foe.” (talking to something/one not there)

Periphrasis- Our fearless leader will see you now. (trade a descriptive phrase for a noun)

Personification- The wind whispered to me. (non-human/human quality)

Pathetic fallacy- The clouds wept. (giving human emotion to inanimate objects)

Rhetorical Question- What is wrong with you? (don’t answer that)

Synaesthesia- I tasted sweet victory. (using senses in non-standard way)

Paralipsis- I’m not going to talk about Serang. He is such a jerk. (but your pair of lips is still moving)

Allusion- She had the patience of Job. (reference to something famous)

Schemes (changing word order or pattern from standard usage)

Anaphora (parallelism)- I will fight. I will struggle. I will live. I will win. (repeat phrasing)

Zeugma- He refreshed his drink and his courage. (one verb for two things)

Chiasmus- He lives to sleep, he sleeps to live. (reverse order idea/words)

Playing with Sound

Alliteration- Repeating a sound

Assonance- Ava always swayed me away from danger.

Consonance- Slithery snakes slid slowly south.

Onomatopoeia- Words that resemble sounds. (Crash, boom, bang)

Remembering ‘thos things

Rhetorical triangle

Pathos- appeal to emotion (audience)

Ethos- appeal based on credibility (writer)

Logos- appeal based on logic (message)

Logical fallacy- problem with logic; a + b does not = c

Bathos- I am here to talk about human rights and dignity. Wow, look at those legs. (lofty-low)

The Greek Shall Inherit the Earth

In medias res- in the middle of things (story that starts in the middle)

Deus ex machina- God in the machine (God/s enter story to save hero; also miraculous event)

Technique:

Verisimilitude- making it seem real (The old Smith Family Hardware Store on South Main by the courthouse, rather than the hardware store)

Juxtaposition- placing two things side-by-side for effect (usually to show dramatic or ironic differences)

Asyndeton- phrasing a series of things without conjunctions (I like popcorn shrimp, shrimp burgers, shrimp scampi. Fried shrimp, boiled shrimp, Baked shrimp. I like it all. Shrimp kabobs, shrimp salad, shrimp cocktail.)

Polysyndeton- using too many conjunctions in series (I like fried shrimp and boiled shrimp and popcorn shrimp and I like

shrimp burgers and shrimp kabobs and shrimp salad.)

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