Literary Terms: A Pop Quiz

Question: Which of the following is not an element of virtually all Old English poetry?

Answer: Virtually all Old English poetry is written in a single metre, a four-stress line with a syntactical break, or caesura, between the second and third stresses and with alliteration linking the two halves of the line; this pattern is occasionally varied by six-stress lines. The poetry is formulaic, drawing on a common set of stock phrases and phrase patterns, applying standard epithets to various classes of characters, and depicting scenery with recurring images. Other standard devices of this poetry are the kenning, a metaphorical name for a thing, usually expressed in a compound noun (e.g., “swan-road” used to name the sea), and variation, the repeating of a single idea in different words, with each repetition adding a new level of meaning.

Question: What figure of speech, common in love poetry, is an intentional exaggeration for emphasis or comic effect?

Answer: Hyperbole is common in love poetry, in which it is used to convey the lover’s intense admiration for his beloved. Other examples of hyperbole occur in sagas recounting the heroic deeds of legendary kings and warriors, tall tales, Greek and Roman mythology, and, in a broader sense, in political rhetoric and advertising slogans.

Question: What term refers to specialized types of language cultivated and maintained by certain professions?

Answer: Jargon is the technical terminology or characteristic idiom of a special profession. Part of the function of the particular style and vocabulary of legal language, for example, is the avoidance, so far as may be possible, of all ambiguity and the explicit statement of all necessary distinctions. This is why legal texts, when read out of their context, can seem so absurdly pedantic. Similar provision for detail and clarity characterizes the specialist jargons of medicine and of the sciences in general and also of philosophy.

Question: What is the term for the comic light verse quatrain having lines of varying length rhyming aabb and usually dealing with a person named in the initial rhyme?

Answer: The clerihew verse form is a light verse quatrain in lines usually of varying length, rhyming aabb, and usually dealing with a person named in the initial rhyme. It was invented by Edmund Clerihew Bentley, who introduced it in Biography for Beginners (1905). What humour the form purports to possess lies in its purposefully flat-footed inadequacy: in addition to clumsy rhythm and rhyme, the verse’s treatment of the subject is either off the mark or totally beside the point, as though it were the work of a reluctant schoolchild.