blind alley - (figurative) a course of action that is unproductive and offers no hope of improvement; "all the clues led the police into blind alleys"; "so far every road that we've been down has turned out to be a blind alley"

lens - (metaphor) a channel through which something can be seen or understood; "the writer is the lens through which history can be seen"

rhetorical device - a use of language that creates a literary effect (but often without regard for literal significance)

irony - a trope that involves incongruity between what is expected and what occurs

exaggeration, hyperbole - extravagant exaggeration

kenning - conventional metaphoric name for something, used especially in Old English and Old Norse poetry

metaphor - a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity

metonymy - substituting the name of an attribute or feature for the name of the thing itself (as in `they counted heads')

oxymoron - conjoining contradictory terms (as in `deafening silence')

prosopopoeia, personification - representing an abstract quality or idea as a person or creature

simile - a figure of speech that expresses a resemblance between things of different kinds (usually formed with `like' or `as')

synecdoche - substituting a more inclusive term for a less inclusive one or vice versa

zeugma - use of a word to govern two or more words though appropriate to only one; "`Mr. Pickwick took his hat and his leave' is an example of zeugma"