English (and probably every other language) is rich in figurative speech, like “raining cats and dogs.” But suppose there was an airlift of stray animals and the door opened by accident and a lot of the critters fell from the sky. News reporters would say, “It’s raining cats and dogs out there!”
The example above is a fanciful phrase that would never really be expected to happen literally. Another flavor of this is a figurative phrase that has its origins in a literal phrase, such as, “having an ace in the hole.” Happens all the time; I can imagine an ESPN commentator saying, “He had ace in the hole” when covering poker.
I am looking for a synonym for “a normally figurative phrase used literally” that might be jargon used by English professors or other literary pros.
I know this isn’t what you’re looking for but in the good ol’ days we would have said “it’s literally raining cats and dogs”, now days stupid people say that when it’s just raining really really heavily. Stupid people have taken away our ability to say “literally” and have other’s know what we mean.
It’s funny as hell when you can use a figurative phrase literally. One time when my wife’s daughter (previous marriage) saw her two cats fighting, she said in an appalled voice “Mother, the fur is flying!”
Yeah, not to join in with this ridiculous hijack, but in reality it’s very difficult to even deliberately come up with examples that are actually ambiguous.
Wouldn’t it be a sort of pun? You’re playing with the words, after all, since you’re using a phrase that is commonly accepted to mean one thing to mean another.
When my wife and I were first married, we were not in the best of shape financially, and she was stressing about it. She went to prepare dinner, took an open half gallon carton of milk out of the refrigerator, and the slippery carton fell out of her hands onto the floor, where the milk spilled out of it. She burst into tears at the waste and knowing we’d have to buy more out of what money we had left.
I rushed out to comfort her, and said the first thing that came to my mind: “Honey, don’t cry. There’s no use crying over spi…”
Thought of one: In Rambo 2, his main parachute snags and he has to cut himself loose and go down on his reserve chute, putting him miles off course. When he finally meets his contact on the ground and she asks him why he’s so late, he says, “I got hung up”.
Reminds me of a time my mom and I needed some building materials and were looking through various scrapyards. As we sat in my car, Mom got a bit apprehensive when she spotted an unleashed doberman a few hundred yards away.