No, actually, it’s not. It’s probably an ‘idiom’ as a figure of speech is actually a rhetorical tool. I have no idea how many of my students from last year have kept reading my journal, but they may be interested to know that I’m busily working on the readers for the next semester.
Flipping through a chapter on rhetorical figures and reminding myself of various things such as zeugma and syllepsis (‘he swallowed the whisky and his pride’), my old favourite metonymy (‘she’s a nice skirt’)(actually, some would argue that’s synecdoche, but damned if I can understand the distinction between them – I think synecdoche is a subset of metonymy…) and chiasmus (‘Old King Cole was a merry old soul and a merry old soul was he’), I discovered some I didn’t know, specifically meiosis (the opposite of hyperbole, a good example being the way Jonathan always used to say things were ‘ordinary’ when he meant abominable), dysphemism (the opposite of euphemism, to deliberately use an offensive term to refer to a harmless concept, ‘the old bag’ meaning your mother) and my new favourite tmesis (when you split a word with another word as in ‘abso-fucking-lutely’). I had no idea there was a word for that, but there’s a word for everything, really, and that makes me so very happy.