Vernacular Discourse
  • Figures & Schemes
    • Similarity and Difference >
      • Analogy & Simile
      • Antithesis & Chiasmus
      • Fable & Allegory
      • Metaphor
      • Metonymy & Synecdoche
      • Personification
      • Synesthesia
      • Transferred Epithet
    • Expansion & Contraction >
      • Amplification & Depreciation
      • Apposition & Parenthesis
      • Enargia
      • Euphemism & Dysphemism
      • Hyperbole & Litotes
      • Rhetorical Question
    • Music and Repetition >
      • Alliteration & Assonance
      • Anadiplosis & Hyperbaton
      • Anaphora & Epistrophe
      • Asyndeton & Polysyndeton
      • Parallelism & Isocolon
      • Repetition
      • Short & Simple Words & Styles
      • Tricolon
    • Play and Mischief >
      • Irony & Sarcasm
      • Parodox, Oxymoron & Aphorism
      • Parody & Satire
      • Ridicule
      • Wordplay
  • Short Introduction
  • A-Z of Figures
  • Contact



Figures of expansion and contraction create vivid and moving portrayals by emphasizing and deemphasizing.

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Amplification & Depreciation
_ My brother need not be idealized, or enlarged in death beyond what he was in life; to be remembered simply as a good and decent man, who saw wrong and tried to right it, saw suffering and tried to heal it, saw war and tried to stop it - Edward Kennedy

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Apposition & Parenthesis
This was not Aunt Dahlia, my good and kindly aunt, but my Aunt Agatha, the one who chews broken bottles and kills rats with her teeth - P.G. Wodehouse

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Enargia
Have you been down a coal-mine? I was telling you I went down one the other day. We sank down into a pit half a mile deep. We then walked underneath the mountain and we did about three-quarters of a mile with rock and shale above us. The earth seemed to be straining - around us and above us - to crush us in  - David Lloyd George

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Euphemism & Dsyphemism
Political language has to consist largely of euphemism, question-begging and sheer cloudy vagueness - George Orwell

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Hyperbole & Litotes

Whenever I get that sad, depressed feeling, I go out and kill a policeman - P.G. Wodehouse

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Rhetorical Questions
To terrify children with the image of hell, to consider women an inferior creation: Is that good for the world? - Christopher Hitchens

© 2015 Danyal Freeman