First, the idea
A figure of speech is a word or a phrase that is not meant exactly as written. Here is one, whole.
Her hands were her voice.
Hands are not voices. Nobody who reads that sentence thinks they are. The reader takes something else from it: that her hands did the work a voice does. The words say one thing, the reader understands another, and the writer and the reader both know it. That is figurative language. The test does not ask you to take it out of a sentence. It asks you to read it.
Look at the drawing above. It is by Walter Heubach, a German painter of animals, and it shows two parts of an orangutan: on the left a hand, and on the right a foot. The foot has a thumb. It closes around a branch the way a hand closes around a rail. Naturalists once called the apes four-handed, and the name lasted because it told the truth about what the feet do, even though a foot is not a hand.
Hands do not talk, either. The run of quizzes you are in is called Talking Hands, and the name is a figure of speech. The word talking belongs to voices, and it has been lent to hands, because a hand that points, cups, grips, or stitches on these pages is saying something about how to read. The whole series is called Talking Figures, and that name is a figure twice over. A figure is a body seen from a little way off, and on these pages it can be a hand, an eye, a face, or a voice. A figure of speech is a borrowed word. Every page here carries one of each, and this is the page where the series says so.
A figure of speech is a borrowed word. The word belongs to one thing, its owner, and is lent to another, the borrower. The loan works because the two have something in common, and that shared thing is what the figure means. Talking belongs to voices; lent to a gorilla's hands, it says that the hands do a voice's work. To read a figure, find the owner, find the borrower, and say in plain words what the one lends the other.
The first check tells a figure from a plain statement, and it is a question: could it be true as written? Read the sentence once, exactly as it stands, and ask whether the world could contain it. If it could not, you are holding a figure. If it could, you may be holding a plain statement, even one with like or as in it.
Three sentences show what the check does.
The 6 train was packed like a can of sardines.
Could it be true as written? People are not small fish laid in oil. It could not. This is a figure, and the check found it.
The new mixer is as tall as Daniela.
Could it be true as written? A mixer can be five and a half feet tall. It could. This is a plain comparison, a measurement, and the as in it does not make it a figure. Not every like or as is a loan.
After the meeting, my supervisor threw me under the bus.
Could it be true as written? Buses exist, and a person can be pushed. It could, just barely. So the first check does not settle this one, and the sentence around it has to. There was a meeting, not a street, and the writer walked away to tell the story. It is a figure. The first check sorts most sentences; when it cannot, the second check does the reading.
The second check reads the figure, and it is also a question: who is the owner, who is the borrower, and what is lent? The owner is the thing the word really belongs to. The borrower is the thing in the sentence that has taken it. What is lent is the one quality the two share, and that quality, said in plain words, is what the figure means.
Run it on the bus. The owner is the act of throwing someone under a bus: a sudden harm, done by a person who was standing beside you, in front of everyone. The borrower is whatever the supervisor did in that meeting. What is lent is the sudden harm from someone at your side. Said plainly: the supervisor blamed me in front of the others to protect themselves. That plain sentence is the reading, and on the test one of the four choices will match it.
Here is the question the test would ask, with three answers, so you can see what the second check does with each.
What does the writer mean by my supervisor threw me under the bus?
The supervisor blamed the writer in front of the others.
That is the loan, said plainly. The check passes it, and it is the answer.
The supervisor pushed the writer into the street.
That is the sentence read as written, with the loan refused. The check catches it. This quiz calls an answer like this the literal twin: it wears the figure's own words and means none of what the figure means. There is one on nearly every question about a figure.
The supervisor called the meeting after lunch.
That may be true. It is still not the answer, because it says nothing about the figure; it is a fact from nearby, standing in the line. True is not best. On the language trail the rule is that a grammatical version is not always the one the test wants; here, a true statement is not always the one the question asked for.
Figures come in a few kinds, and the kinds have names. A simile compares two things with like, as, or the way: packed like a can of sardines. A metaphor makes the loan with no like or as at all; it says the borrower is the owner, or simply uses the owner's word: her hands were her voice. Personification lends a person's actions to a thing that is not a person: the boiler complained all night. An idiom is a whole phrase the city says, whose meaning is not in its words: the repair cost an arm and a leg. Hyperbole is exaggeration that no one is meant to count: I have told you a million times. The names are worth knowing because each one tells you where to look for the owner. But the test's questions about figures usually ask what the author means by a phrase, or why the author chose it, and the two checks answer both.
None of this is a mistake to fix. The whole city speaks in figures: that line was crazy, I'm dead, the rent is killing me. Every English you speak is full of them. Reading a figure on the test is the same skill you use every day, when a friend says the bus was a sauna and you do not ask about the steam. Quiz 57 is where the Englishes you already own become a named strength.
So, when you meet a figure on the test, stop. Say the owner and the borrower to yourself. Then say the loan in plain words. Look for that plain sentence among the four choices, and look out for its literal twin.
Worked example — thinking out loud
A line from a letter by the tenants of 148 Grove Street to their new management company, Harbor Management, the company from Quizzes 8 and 8A. Here it is, whole.
Since March, Harbor Management has been a ghost.
Read it aloud once. Could it be true as written? A company is not a ghost, so this is a figure, and the first check is done in a breath. The owner is a ghost. The borrower is the management company since March. What is lent is the question.
The tempting path takes the biggest thing a ghost has: a ghost is dead. So the reading would be that the company is gone.
Harbor Management has gone out of business.
Run the second check on that. Does the letter treat the company as gone? Its next sentence says the tenants have called the number on the lobby notice eleven times. Nobody calls a company that no longer exists eleven times. The letter is not about a death.
Why it fails, in one sentence: a figure lends one quality, not everything the owner is, and the sentence around it tells you which quality.
The right path asks what a ghost is in every story about one. It is in the house. You cannot see it or get hold of it. You speak to it and it does not answer. That is the quality the tenants have borrowed.
Since March, Harbor Management has not answered the tenants.
Owner: a ghost, present and unreachable. Borrower: the company. Loan: unreachable. The check passes.
It holds because it reads the loan the letter actually made, and the next sentence confirms it. Two other answers would have stood in the line. The building is haunted is the literal twin, and the first check rules it out before the second begins. Harbor Management took over the building in March is true, because the sentence says since March, and it is still not the answer, because it says nothing about the ghost. True is not best.
Part A · The skill by itself
Three sentences on their own. For each one, run the first check aloud: could it be true as written? Then, if it is a figure, name the owner and the borrower before you look at the choices.
1. Which sentence is meant exactly as written?
2. Mr. Okafor told the crew that the new delivery schedule went over like a lead balloon. What does he mean?
3. A tenant’s letter calls the building’s old boiler a dragon in the basement. Which quality of a dragon is the writer lending to the boiler?
Part B · The skill in the wild
A short history, written for this quiz, of two apes who were said to talk. Twenty numbered sentences. Read it once straight through before you look at the items. Then, for each item, go back to the sentence it names, and say the owner and the borrower aloud before you choose.
TALKING HANDS
1In June 1966, a ten-month-old chimpanzee named Washoe arrived at the home of two psychologists in Reno, Nevada, Allen and Beatrix Gardner, who meant to teach her to talk with her hands. 2Chimpanzees cannot make the sounds of human speech; earlier scientists had raised chimps in their homes for years and gotten a few grunted words at most. 3The Gardners tried American Sign Language instead, the language of deaf Americans, and they used it around Washoe all day, the way parents talk around a baby. 4Her first signs came the way a child’s first words do: one at a time, months apart, and then in a rush. 5By the time she was three she had more than a hundred signs, and her hands had become her voice. 6She asked for tickles and drinks, she named the dog and her toothbrush, and one day, seeing a swan on a pond, she signed “water” and then “bird.” 7Reporters could not get enough of her, and a photograph of a chimpanzee signing “drink” ran in newspapers across the country.
8In 1972 a graduate student at Stanford, Francine Patterson, began the same work with a year-old gorilla named Koko, borrowed from the San Francisco Zoo. 9Koko learned hundreds of signs, and Patterson said she understood far more spoken English than she signed. 10A French director filmed the two of them together and called his film Koko: A Talking Gorilla. 11Koko never spoke a word in her life. 12The title takes the word “talking” from mouths and lends it to hands, and everyone who saw the poster understood the loan.
13Not everyone bought the larger claim, that the apes had learned a language. 14In 1979 a psychologist at Columbia University, Herbert Terrace, published the results of his own project with a chimpanzee he had named Nim Chimpsky, and his conclusion pulled the rug out from under the whole field. 15Nim, he said, was mostly copying his teachers, signing what they had just signed to him, and his strings of signs had no grammar in them at all. 16If Nim was not talking, the critics asked, was Washoe? 17Was Koko? 18The people who had raised those two answered that Nim had been handed from teacher to teacher, many of them, and that a child raised that way would have struggled too. 19The argument has never gone quiet. 20Washoe died in 2007 and Koko in 2018, and the question they left behind is a question about a word as much as about an ape: what does it take to say that someone is talking?
1. In sentence 4, the author compares Washoe’s first signs to a child’s first words. What does the comparison show about her signs?
2. In sentence 5, the author writes that Washoe’s hands had become her voice. What does the author mean?
3. As used in sentence 13, bought most nearly means
4. In sentence 14, Terrace’s conclusion pulled the rug out from under the whole field. What does the author mean?
5. In sentence 8, Koko was borrowed from the San Francisco Zoo. In sentence 12, the title lends the word “talking” to hands. Which statement about the two words is true?