Definition:
A figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between two unlike things that actually have something in common. A metaphor expresses the unfamiliar (the tenor) in terms of the familiar (the vehicle). When Neil Young sings, "Love is a rose," "rose" is the vehicle for "love," the tenor. Adjective: metaphorical.
Related terms: catachresis, conceptual metaphor, conventional metaphor, creative metaphor, dead metaphor, extended metaphor, grammatical metaphor, mixed metaphor, visual metaphor.
See also:
Etymology:
From the Greek, "carrying over"Examples and Observations:
- "Between the lower east side tenements
the sky is a snotty handkerchief."
(Marge Piercy, "The Butt of Winter") - "The streets were a furnace, the sun an executioner."
(Cynthia Ozick, "Rosa") - "But my heart is a lonely hunter that hunts on a lonely hill."
(William Sharp, "The Lonely Hunter") - "Men's words are bullets, that their enemies take up and make use of against them."
(George Savile, Maxims of State) - "A man may break a word with you, sir, and words are but wind."
(William Shakespeare, The Comedy of Errors) - "The rain came down in long knitting needles."
(Enid Bagnold, National Velvet) - Lenny: Hey, maybe there is no cabin. Maybe it's one of them metaphorical things.
Carl: Oh yeah, yeah. Like maybe the cabin is the place inside each of us, created by our goodwill and teamwork.
Lenny: Nah, they said there would be sandwiches.
("Mountain of Madness," The Simpsons) - "Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food."
(Austin O'Malley, Keystones of Thought) - "It would be more illuminating . . . to say that the metaphor creates the similarity than to say that it formulates some similarity antecedently existing."
(Max Black, Models and Metaphors, 1962)
Pronunciation: MET-ah-for
Also Known As: lexical metaphor
