figurative

The Romans pressed the word figura into service for anything formed or shaped. Quintilian, writing his Institutio Oratoria around 95 AD, used figura to describe both a sculptor's finished piece and a rhetorical turn of phrase. To call an argument a figure was to say it had been molded, not found. The Latin root is fingere, meaning to shape with the hands, and it also gave English fiction and feign.

The medieval schoolmen inherited Quintilian's vocabulary wholesale. When 14th-century English writers began borrowing from Old French figuratif, they were picking up a term already thick with rhetorical meaning. Chaucer used it loosely; the grammarians who followed him made it technical. By 1450, a figurative expression was one where words carried more weight than their face value.

The distinction between figurative and literal hardened in the Renaissance, when humanists like Erasmus catalogued tropes and schemes as if classifying plants. What earlier writers had called ornaments became a two-kingdom system: figurative speech and plain speech. The division was useful and has never been entirely undone. Today we still use it, though we know that no speech is ever truly plain.

The deeper irony is that figurative is itself a figurative word. The notion of language shaped is already a metaphor, borrowed from the workshop. A sentence is not clay, but figura said it was. The term carries its own nature inside it, like a mold that was also the thing being made.