The Mirror Effect: Twenty-Seven Figures of Speech

Ella Baron, staff cartoonist for The Times Literary Supplement, produced an illustration cataloguing twenty-seven figures of speech. It is a genuinely clever piece of work, translating abstract rhetorical devices into a single visual joke apiece, and it deserves more attention than a passing scroll. It also, inadvertently, exposes a gap in modern education that ought to embarrass anyone who fancies themselves persuasive.

Some Numbers to Frame the Scale of What Has Been Lost

Marcus Fabius Quintilianus, the Roman rhetorician better known as Quintilian, catalogued well over two hundred distinct figures of speech in his Institutio Oratoria, a training manual for orators written in the first century CE and still studied in serious rhetoric courses today. Aristotle’s Rhetorike, written roughly four centuries earlier, laid the theoretical foundation these devices still operate on. For over two thousand years, rhetoric sat alongside grammar and logic as one of the three foundational liberal arts, the trivium, considered essential education for anyone expected to persuade, argue, or lead. Most graduates today could not name five figures of speech if their next promotion depended on it, and in a sense, it does.

A Brief Refresher on Some of the Devices

Anaphora, the repetition of a phrase at the start of successive clauses, is the engine behind Martin Luther King Jr.’s I Have a Dream speech, delivered on 28^th August 1963 at the Lincoln Memorial, where the repeated phrase itself carries the emotional weight that the content alone could not achieve. Chiasmus, the reversal of grammatical structure across a phrase, gave John Fitzgerald Kennedy his most quoted line: “Ask not what your country can do for you, ask what you can do for your country”, delivered at his 1961 inaugural address. Litotes, understatement through negation, is the dry, self-deprecating device the British have practically trademarked, and Sir Winston Leonard Spencer Churchill deployed it constantly, describing the Battle of Britain's stakes with characteristic restraint rather than melodrama, letting the understatement do more work than hyperbole ever could. None of this is decoration. Each device exists because it demonstrably changes how an audience receives and retains information, which is why advertising agencies, political speechwriters, and hostage negotiators all study rhetoric with far more seriousness than the average business school graduate ever will.

Contemporary business communication has replaced rhetoric with jargon, and jargon is what happens when people want to sound persuasive without doing the work rhetoric actually requires. “Synergy”, “leverage”, “circle back”, and “move the needle” are not figures of speech. They are the absence of one, verbal filler masquerading as insight, deployed by people who have never encountered the concept of a well-placed anaphora and would not recognise a zeugma if it bit them during a quarterly review. LinkedIn alone has turned corporate communication into a genre of self-parody so consistent that entire accounts exist purely to mock it, and the mockery lands precisely because everyone recognises the emptiness underneath the confident delivery.

The irony is that genuine rhetorical skill remains as commercially valuable today as it was in Quintilian’s Rome. Studies on public speaking consistently find that structure and device, not raw content volume, determine what an audience remembers days later. A pitch built on a genuine rhetorical spine, a well-placed antithesis, a controlled anaphora, a chiasmus that lands the closing line, will outperform a content-dense, device-free monologue every time, and yet almost nobody in the boardroom is trained to build one deliberately.

Ella Baron’s illustration is not a curiosity for language nerds. It is a reminder that an entire discipline capable of making your argument more persuasive, your speech more memorable, and your writing considerably less forgettable than the average LinkedIn post has been sitting, largely unused, in classical texts for two thousand years, waiting for someone to bother opening them again.

Terence Nunis, DTM | Division Advisor, District 80 Division M | Club Advisor, AIA Toastmasters | Past President & Founder, Awesome Toastmasters