Figurative Language Anchor Text: Fahrenheit 451 RL.12.4 I can determine the meaning of words and phrases as they are used in the text including figurative language.

Literal versus Figurative Words functions exactly as they are stated The dog is brown. The house is brick. The meaning of words is often concealed, requires inference I got your back. He was fast as lightning.

Simile A simile is the comparison of two things using “like” or “as” He ran as fast as lightning. She swims like a fish.

Metaphor A Metaphor is the comparison of two things without using “like” or “as” All the world is a stage. Time is money. He is a night owl.

Personification Giving human characteristics/traits to objects or ideas The ocean waves slapped the shore. The sunlight danced across the field.

Hyperbole A hyperbole is an exaggeration to show strong feeling I live a million miles away. You are slower than a snail. I will love you forever.

Understatement An understatement is an under-exaggeration, almost sarcastic (opposite of hyperbole) I’ll be there in a second It has been a little rainy. (It’s actually been really rainy.)

Let’s Practice!

Simile “The bombers crossed the sky and crossed the sky over the house gasping, murmuring, whistling like an immense, invisible fan, circling in emptiness.”

“Titles glittered their golden eyes, falling, gone.” Personification “Titles glittered their golden eyes, falling, gone.”

“Her face was slender and milk-white” Metaphor “Her face was slender and milk-white”

“The bell in the ceiling kicked itself two hundred times.” Personification “The bell in the ceiling kicked itself two hundred times.”

“He felt his chest chopped down and split apart.” Hyperbole “He felt his chest chopped down and split apart.”

Simile “She was beginning to shriek now, sitting there like a wax doll melting in its own heat.”

Metaphor “’Kerosene,’ he said, because the silence had lengthened, ‘is nothing but perfume to me.”’

Metaphor “Each page becomes a black butterfly. Beautiful, eh? Light the third page from the second and so on, chain smoking, chapter by chapter…There sat Beatty, perspiring gently, the floor littered with swarms of black moths that had died in a single storm.”

Personification “And his eyes were beginning to feel hunger, as if they must look at something, anything, everything.”

Simile or Personification “He stared at the parlor that was dead and gray as the waters of an ocean that might teem with life if they switched on the electronic sun.”