The Depersonification

Depersonification is (yeah, you guessed it!) the opposite of personification : giving a human the qualities of an inanimate or non living object. Be careful with this one, though, because you don't want to get it mixed up with a Metaphor. Though the two are closely related, they do have differences. See the examples below.


example 1:
the man's stony hands caused him to drop the plate he was holding.

note, that if you were to say "the man's hands were stone,", you would be using a metaphor. The statement above more closely exhibits depersonification, in that it uses the object (stone) as an adjective for the man's hands, rather than a noun.