Entertainment / Literature / Anthimeria: Artfully using a different part of speech to act as another in violation of the normal rules of grammar. This switch might involve treating a verb like a noun, or a noun like a verb, or an adjective like a verb, and so on. Thus, in 1960s pop culture, Nancy Sinatra's song 'These Boots Are Made for Walkin'' has a speaker who tells the implied audience, 'You keep lying when you ought to be truthing. . . . You keep saming when you ought to be changing.' In a more literary vein, e. E. Cummings might speak of how 'he sang his didn't, he danced his did.' A television advertisement might exhort its listeners to 'Gift him with Sports Illustrated magazine for Christmas' (as opposed to give him Sports Illustrated for Christmas). Rabelais might state, 'I am going in search of the great perhaps' and when the priest Angelo is doing an effective job of controlling the city, we hear that 'Lord Angelo dukes it well' in Shakespeare's Measure for Measure (III, iii), and so on. Anthimeria allows poets to step into an extra-verbal realm to suggest and hint at that which cannot be put easily in words without a loss of verbal magic. Linguists more generally call this device 'form shift.'
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Entertainment / Literature / Catachresis: (Grk. 'misuse') A completely impossible figure of speech or an implied metaphor that results from combining other extreme figures of speech such as anthimeria, hyperbole, synaesthesia, and metonymy. T MORE
Entertainment / Literature / Functional Shift: The linguistic equivalent of poetic anthimeria, in which one part of grammatical speech becomes another. An especially common type of functional shift in everyday grammar is taking a noun and treating MORE