FIGURES OF SPEEC
(bouvier) | FIGURES OF SPEECH. By figures of speech is meant that manner of speaking or
writing, which has for its object to give to our sentiments and, thoughts a
greater force, more vivacity and agreeableness.
2. This subject belongs more particularly to grammar and rhetoric, but
the law has its figures also. Sometimes fictions come in aid of language,
when found insufficient by the law; language, in its turn, by means of
tropes and figures, sometimes lends to fictions a veil behind which they are
hidden; sometimes the same denominations are preserved to things which have
ceased to be the same, and which have been changed; at other times they lend
to things denominations which supposed them to have been modified.
3. In this immense subject, it will not be expected that examples
should be here given of every kind of figures; the principal only will be
noticed. The law is loaded with abstract ideas; abstract in itself, it has
often recourse to metaphors, which, as it were, touch our senses. The
inventory is faithful, a defect is covered, an account is liquidated, a
right is open or closed, an obligation is extinguished, &c. But the law has
metaphors which are properly its own; as civil fruits, &c. The state or
condition of a man who has been deprived by the law of almost all his social
prerogatives or rights, has received the metaphorical name of civil death.
Churches being called the houses of God, formerly were considered an asylum,
because to seize a person in the house of another was considered a wrong.
Mother country, is applied to the country from which people emigrate to a
colony; though this pretended analogy is very different in many points, yet
this external ornament of the idea soon became an integral part of the idea;
and on the faith of this metaphor, this pretended filiation became the
source whence flowed the duties which bound the colonies to the metropolis
or mother country.
4. In public speaking, the use of figures, when natural and properly
selected, is of great force; such Ornaments impress upon the mind of the
bearers the ideas which the speaker desires to convey, fix their attention
and disposes them to consider favorably the subject of inquiry. See 3 Bouv.
Inst. n. 3243.
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