Imagine telling someone how to get to your home, but without using the name of your street, or any other street within ten miles. Could you do it? We take street names for granted, but these words are useful for far more, like applying for a job or...
Stevie Wonder’s 1976 hit “As” includes a long list of adynatons, those fanciful statements about impossible events that are used for rhetorical effect. This is part of a complete episode. Transcript of “Adynatons from Stevie...
In English, if we want to say that something will never occur, we say it’ll happen when pigs fly or when hell freezes over. In Spanish, you can express this idea by saying it will happen “when cows fly,” or el día que las vacas...
Two examples of adynaton, the rhetorical term for playful exaggeration suggesting that something will never happen, involve animals’ tails. One German expression translates as “It’ll happen when the hounds start barking with their...
H. Auden’s poem “As I Walked Out One Evening” contains some lovely examples of the rhetorical device called adynaton, which are impossible things, including: I’ll love you, dear, I’ll love you / Till China and Africa...