Pointe

A surprising, witty turn of phrase, comparable to the English ‘conceit’. It often involves the ostentatious use of rhetorical figures, puns, antitheses, and startling or extended metaphors, a well-known example being Pyrrhus's line in Andromaque referring at once to the fires of love and the burning of Troy: ‘Brûlé de plus de feux que je n'en allumai.’ Belonging to a baroque art of verbal creativity, the theory of which was written by the Italian Emanuele Tesauro and the Spaniard Baltasar Gracián, it came under fierce attack in mid-17th-c. France as childish and affected. Its most remarkable French exponent was Cyrano de Bergerac in his letters and Entretiens pointus.

[Peter France]