Literary Devices

Question: What is the device exemplified by Eliza Doolittle’s use of the word “abso-bloomin’-lutely”?

Answer: The word tmesis is derived from a Greek word meaning ’to cut.’

Question: A particular kind of understatement as exemplified in the sentence “I was not unhappy with the outcome” is called what?

Answer: The device is called litotes. You can also find it in the final lines of Marianne Moore’s poem “Silence”: “Nor was he insincere in saying ‘Make my house your inn.’ Inns are not residences.”

Question: Which of these pairs is not a pair of opposites?

Answer: Connotation and denotation form the only pair that does not more-or-less represent opposite meanings.

Question: What figure of speech is represented in the sentence “He was sweating like a racehorse.”

Answer: Similes compare two unlike entities explicitly using the word like or as.

Question: What literary device does the Rodgers and Hammerstein song “Do I love you because you’re beautiful? Or are you beautiful because I love you?” illustrate?

Answer: The rhetorical device known as chiasmus is demonstrated in an inverted relationship between the syntactic elements of parallel phrases. Another example is “Never let a fool kiss you or a kiss fool you.”

Question: What figure of speech is contained in this phrase from the Flanders & Swann song “Have Some Madeira, M’Dear”: “And he said as he hastened to put out the cat, the wine, his cigar, and the lamps”?

Answer: Zeugma (or syllepsis, a term with which it sometimes overlaps)—the use of a word to modify or govern two or more words usually in such a manner that it applies to each in a different sense, or makes sense with only one—can often startle or amuse. There are several more examples in the noted Flanders & Swann song.

Question: When a word’s vocalization imitates a natural sound, as can be heard in the words murmur, buzz, and pop, what do we call that device?

Answer: Onomatopoeia is a delicious device, much used in poetry, as in Alfred, Lord Tennyson’s “Come Down, O Maid,” which ends with the lines “The moan of doves in immemorial elms, And murmuring of innumerable bees.”