Definition:
A figure of speech that has lost its force and imaginative effectiveness through frequent use. Contrast with creative metaphor. See also:
Examples and Observations:
- "Kansas City is oven hot, dead metaphor or no dead metaphor."
(Zadie Smith, "On the Road: American Writers and Their Hair," July 2001) - "Many venerable metaphors have been literalized into everyday items of language: a clock has a face (unlike human or animal face), and on that face are hands (unlike biological hands); only in terms of clocks can hands be located on a face. . . . The deadness of a metaphor and its status as a cliché are relative matters. Hearing for the first time that 'life is no bed of roses,' someone might be swept away by its aptness and vigour."
(Tom McArthur, Oxford Companion to the English Language. Oxford Univ. Press, 1992) - "The 'dead metaphor' account misses an important point . . .. The metaphors . . . may be highly conventional and effortlessly used, but this does not mean that they have lost their vigor in thought and that they are dead. On the contrary, they are 'alive' in the most important sense--they govern our thought--they are 'metaphors we live by.'"
(Zoltán Kövecses, Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford Univ. Press, 2002) - "The expression 'dead metaphor'--itself metaphorical--can be understood in at least two ways. On the one hand, a dead metaphor may be like a dead issue or a dead parrot; dead issues are not issues, dead parrots, as we all know, are not parrots. On this construal a dead metaphor is simply not a metaphor. On the other hand, a dead metaphor may be more like a dead key on a piano; dead keys are still keys, albeit weak or dull, and so perhaps a dead metaphor, even if it lacks vivacity, is metaphor nonetheless."
(Samuel Guttenplan, Objects of Metaphor. Oxford Univ. Press, 2005)
Also Known As: frozen metaphor, historical metaphor
