Sensory Language
"At my own place, I love a spicy boudin noir that squirts blood in your mouth; the braised fennel the way my sous-chef makes it; scraps from duck confit; and fresh cockles steamed with greasy Portuguese sausage."
-Anthony Bourdain, The New Yorker
What is taste
Repeated consonant sounds at the beginning of several words in a phrase ("Peter Piper picked a peck of pickled peppers...")
What is alliteration
Making an inanimate object or animal act like a person ("lightning danced across the sky")
What is personification
The most common letter in the English language
What is "e"
Often mistaken for a vegetable, and becoming trendy on toast, this food is actually a fruit
What is avocado
“So when the blue smoke of brittle leaves was in the air and the wind blew the wet laundry stiff on the line I decided to come back home.”
― F. Scott Fitzgerald, The Great Gatsby
What is sight, touch
An extreme exaggeration ("I slept like a rock last night")
What is hyperbole
A comparison of two unlike things that suggests a similarity between the two items ("love is a rose")
What is a metaphor
The shortest complete sentence in English
What is "I am"
The only part of the human body that cannot heal itself
What are teeth
“For lunch, we drove into the hills and parked in the dappled shade of a big sycamore, its powdery white bark like a woman's body against the uncanny blue sky.”
― Janet Fitch, White Oleander
What is sight
A comparison using "like" or "as" ("She sings like an angel")
What is a simile
A form of word play that exploits multiple meanings of a term, or of similar-sounding words, for an intended humorous or rhetorical effect
What is a pun
In chess, this word comes from the Persian phrase "Shah Mat" meaning "the king is helpless".
What is "Checkmate"
This tiny crustacean carries it's heart in it's head
What is a shrimp
“A wine shop was open and I went in for some coffee. It smelled of early morning, of swept dust, spoons in coffee-glasses and the wet circles left by wine glasses.”
― Ernest Hemingway, A Farewell to Arms
What is sight, smell
The opposite of what is meant (describing someone who says foolish things a “genius” or stating during a thunderstorm, “beautiful weather we’re having”)
What is irony
The name for words that sound like what they are (POP! BAM! Slosh)
What is onomatopoeia
A word, phrase, or sequence that reads the same backward as forward
What is a palindrome
There’s only one letter that doesn’t appear in any American state name
What is "Q"
“I would wake with her weight tilting our mattress, her Shalimar settling over me when she leaned to kiss me and pull up the chenille bedspread, which had a nubble like Braille under my hands…I could feel through the bedspread the faint heat of her body as she sat a few inches from where I lay, that heat was all I needed.”
-"The Liars' Club" by Mary Karr
What is touch
A phrase that people say that is commonly accepted as having a different meaning then what is literally said ("that Minecraft game cost an arm and a leg")
What is an idiom
The use of symbols to express or represent ideas or qualities in literature, art etc.
What is symbolism
Two or more words having the same pronunciation but different meanings, origins, or spelling, for example new and knew.
What are homophones
This city established America's first public beach and built America's first subway!
What is Boston