Giving human qualities, emotions, or characteristics to non-human things like animals, objects, or ideas.
From Latin 'personificatio,' combining 'persona' (mask, character, person) and 'facere' (to make). The Romans used this literary technique to make abstract ideas more relatable and vivid in their writing.
Personification is why we say 'the wind whispered' or 'justice is blind'—our brains are so wired to understand other humans that we automatically describe everything else through human behavior, and writers weaponize this to make us feel emotions about inanimate things.
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