Figures of Speech and Thought

The Greeks noticed that powerful speech rarely says things in the flattest possible way. A schema is a deliberate "posture" or turn given to language—balancing one clause against its opposite, repeating a word at the head of successive phrases, asking a question to which no answer is expected, or saying one thing while meaning another. Ancient critics sorted these into figures of diction (patterns of wording and sound) and figures of thought (patterns of meaning and stance), cataloguing them as the ornaments that lift prose and verse above ordinary expression. The system they built became the backbone of how the West has talked about style ever since.