House Passes Bill to Bully Americans Out of Their Rights. Figure of speech. A figure of speech is a way of saying a message.
Many figures of speech are not meant to be understood exactly as they are said: they are not literal, factual statements. Linguists call these figures of speech "tropes" -- a play on words, using words in a way that is different from its accepted literal or normal form. DiYanni wrote: "Rhetoricians have catalogued more than 250 different figures of speech, expressions or ways of using words in a nonliteral sense".[1] Metaphors are very common examples. A common figure of speech is to say that someone "threw down the gauntlet".