Personification
:
From Latin personificatio for 'making' a person, or from Greek prosopopoiia for making a mask, face or person.
Personification is a kind of metaphor, by
which an abstraction or inanimate object
is endowed with personality.
Examples:
Father Time, usually depicted as an old
man with a scythe and hourglass, is
the personification
of time. Uncle Sam, usually depicted
as a
lean man with white hair and whiskers,
wearing
a tall hat, a swallow-tail coat and
striped
trousers, is a personification of the
United
States. John Bull, usually depicted
as a
stout, red-faced farmer in a top hat
and
high boots, is a personification of
England.
In everyday idiom, the world is Mother
Nature
and necessity is the mother of invention.
In spite of religious differences,
it is
interesting that "the symbolism of
a father-like
God is traditional among Christians,
Jews
and Muslims."
Source: The Oxford Companion to the English Language,
copyright Tom McArthur 1992
Example in Literature: In Toni Morrison's novel, Tar Baby, set
in the Caribbean, we witness early
on the
magic of short words that are both
audacious
and hypnotic as the author paints a
landscape
that becomes a personification of the
fates
of the people in the story:
"...Only the champion daisy trees were serene.
After all, they were part of a rain
forest
already two thousand years old and
scheduled
for eternity, so they ignored the men
and
continued to rock the diamondbacks
that slept
in their arms. It took the river to
persuade
them that indeed the world was altered.
That
never again would the rain be equal,
and
by the time they realized it and had
run
their roots deeper, clutching the earth
like
lost boys found, it was too late. The
men
had already folded the earth where
there
had been no fold and hollowed her where
there
had been no hollow, which explains
what happened
to the river. It crested, then lost
its course,
and finally its head. Evicted from
the place
where it had lived, and forced into
unknown
turf, it could not form its pools or
waterfalls,
and ran every which way. The clouds
gathered
together, stood still and watched the
river
scuttle around the forest floor, crash
headlong
into the haunches of hills with no
notion
of where it was going, until exhausted,
ill
and grieving, it slowed to a stop just
twenty
leagues short of the sea.
"The clouds looked at each other, then broke
apart in confusion. Fish heard their
hooves
as they raced off to carry the news
of the
scatterbrained river to the peaks of
hills
and the tops of the champion daisy
trees.
But it was too late. The men had gnawed
through
the daisy trees until, wild-eyed and
yelling,
they broke in two and hit the ground.
In
the huge silence that followed their
fall,
orchids spiraled down to join them.
"When it was over, and houses instead grew
in the hills, those trees that had
been spared
dreamed of their comrades for years
afterward
and their nightmare mutterings annoyed
the
diamondbacks who left them for the
new growth
that came to life in spaces the sun
saw for
the first time. Then the rain changed
and
was no longer equal. Now it rained
not just
for an hour every day at the same time,
but
in seasons, abusing the river even
more.
Poor insulted, brokenhearted river.
Poor
demented stream. Now it sat in one
place
like a grandmother and became a swamp
the
Haitians called Sein de Vieilles. And
witch's
tit it was: a shriveled fogbound oval
seeping
with a thick black substance that even
mosquitoes
could not live near."
Source: Tar Baby, copyright 1981 by Toni Morrison.
Note: According to Bloomsbury Dictionary of English
Literature, personification is a figure
of
speech. Some other figures of speech
include
alliteration, anti-climax, antithesis,
apostrophe,
assonance, climax, euphemism, hyperbole,
innuendo, irony, dramatic irony, malapropism,
metaphor, oxymoron, palindrome, paradox,
play on words, pun, rhyme, and simile. Let's take one of these -- malapropism. Where did it originate? We know what it means: a humorous confusion of words that sound vaguely similar, as in "We have just ended our physical year" instead of "We have just ended our FISCAL YEAR." Mrs. Malaprop, a character in an eighteenth-century British comedy, The Rivals, by Richard Brinsley Sheridan, constantly confuses words. Malapropisms are named after her.
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