Metalepsis (from , ) is a figure of speech in which a word or a phrase from figurative speech is used in a new context. Ancient Roman academic Quintilian described metalepsis as an "intermediate step" to the original phrase, and its meaning depends upon its connection to the idiom from which it derives. Harold Bloom called metalepsis a "metonymy of a metonymy" because it uses part of an established trope to refer to the whole.
Metalepsis (from , ) is a figure of speech in which a word or a phrase from figurative speech is used in a new context. Ancient Roman academic Quintilian described metalepsis as an "intermediate step" to the original phrase, and its meaning depends upon its connection to the idiom from which it derives. Harold Bloom called metalepsis a "metonymy of a metonymy" because it uses part of an established trope to refer to the whole.
==Examples== "I've got to catch the worm tomorrow." "The early bird catches the worm" is a common maxim, advising an early start on the day to achieve success. The subject, by referring to this maxim, is compared to the bird; tomorrow, the speaker will awaken early in order to achieve success. "He's been rescued from the rabbit hole." The adage "fall down the rabbit hole" refers to being deeply invested in a specific topic. In this example, being rescued from the rabbit hole adapts the original meaning to convey that someone has stopped being deeply invested in a specific topic. The phrase All singing, all dancing was originally literally about movie musicals, later an idiom meaning "full of vitality", and more recently, "full-featured".
Discovered by embedding cosine similarity (sentence-transformers MiniLM, 384-dim).