Definition:
A figure of speech in which an implied comparison is made between two unlike things that actually have something in common. Adjective: metaphorical.
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. (In cognitive linguistics, the terms target and source are roughly equivalent to tenor and vehicle.)
For a discussion of the differences between metaphors and similes, see Simile ("Observations").
Types of Metaphors: absolute, burlesque, catachretic, complex, conceptual, conduit, conventional, creative, dead, extended, grammatical, mixed, ontological, personification, primary, root, structural, submerged, therapeutic, visual
See also:
- What Is a Metaphor?
- Figurative Meaning
- "House" Calls: The Metaphors of Dr. Gregory House
- Humaphors: The Top 10 Metaphors of Stephen Colbert
- Love Is a Metaphor: 99 Metaphors of Love
- Metaphorical Cluster
- The Power and Pleasure of Metaphor
- Teaching the Figures of Speech in Movies
- Thirteen Types of Metaphors
- Time Metaphors
- The Top 20 Figures of Speech
- Using Similes and Metaphors to Enrich Our Writing
Etymology:
From the Greek, "carry 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") - "I can mingle with the stars, and throw a party on Mars;
I am a prisoner locked up behind Xanax bars."
(Lil Wayne, "I Feel Like Dying") - "Love is an alchemist that can transmute poison into food--and a spaniel that prefers even punishment from one hand to caresses from another."
(Charles Colton, Lacon) - "Men's words are bullets, that their enemies take up and make use of against them."
(George Savile, Maxims) - "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) - "Language is a road map of a culture. It tells you where its people come from and where they are going."
(Rita Mae Brown) - "Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth, upon this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty, and dedicated to the proposition that all men are created equal."
(Abraham Lincoln, The Gettysburg Address, 1863) - 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.
(The Simpsons) - "Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food."
(Austin O'Malley, Keystones of Thought) - "Ice formed on the butler's upper slopes."
(P.G. Wodehouse, The Color of the Woosters, 1938) - "Time is a dressmaker specializing in alterations."
(Faith Baldwin, Face Toward the Spring, 1956) - "But silk has nothing to do with tobacco. It’s a metaphor, a metaphor that means something like, 'smooth as silk.' Somebody in an advertising agency dreamt up the name 'Silk Cut' to suggest a cigarette that wouldn’t give you a sore throat or a hacking cough or lung cancer."
(David Lodge, Nice Work. Viking, 1988) - "From its Dutch beginnings in the 17th century, New York was distinguished among the European colonies by its diversity. Conceptually, the melting pot as a metaphor for mixing disparate cultures can be traced at least as far back as 1782 to a naturalized New Yorker from France . . . later to DeWitt Clinton and Ralph Waldo Emerson."
(Sam Roberts, "The Melting Metaphor." Only in New York. St. Martin's, 2009) - "The river runs through the language, and we speak of its influence in every conceivable context. It is employed to characterise life and death, time and destiny; it is used as a metaphor for continuity and dissolution, for intimacy and transitoriness, for art and history, for poetry itself. In The Principles of Psychology (1890) William James first coined the phrase 'stream of consciousness' in which 'every definite image of the mind is steeped . . . in the free water that flows around it.' Thus 'it flows' like the river itself. Yet the river is also a token of the unconscious, with its suggestion of depth and invisible life."
(Peter Ackroyd, Thames: The Biography. Doubleday, 2007) - "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) - "Metaphor is a device for seeing something in terms of something else. It brings out the thisness of a that, or the thatness of a this."
(Kenneth Burke, A Grammar of Motives, 1945) - "Poetry begins in trivial metaphors, pretty metaphors, 'grace' metaphors, and goes on to the profoundest thinking that we have. Poetry provides the one permissible way of saying one thing and meaning another. People say, 'Why don’t you say what you mean?' We never do that, do we, being all of us too much poets. We like to talk in parables and in hints and in indirections--whether from diffidence or some other instinct.
"I have wanted in late years to go further and further in making metaphor the whole of thinking. I find some one now and then to agree with me that all thinking, except mathematical thinking, is metaphorical, or all thinking except scientific thinking. The mathematical might be difficult for me to bring in, but the scientific is easy enough."
(Robert Frost, "Education by Poetry." Amherst Graduates' Quarterly, Feb. 1931) - "Plucky moved two checkers simultaneously. The baboon didn't seem to notice the excess. 'You know what interests John Paul most about Jesus? That he was called the light of the world.'
"'But that's just a metaphor,' I protested.
"'To an artist a metaphor is as real as a dollar,' said the Pluck."
(Tom Robbins, Another Roadside Attraction. Doubleday, 1971) - "For we are all swimmers ephemerally buoyed by what will engulf us at the last; still dreaming of islands though the mainland has been lost; swept remorselessly out to sea while we spread our arms to the beautiful shore."
(Peter De Vries, Peckham's Marbles, 1986)
Pronunciation: MET-ah-for
Also Known As: lexical metaphor
