metaphor

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. (In cognitive linguistics, the terms target and source are roughly equivalent to tenor and vehicle.) Adjective: metaphorical.

Types of Metaphors: absolute, complex, conceptual, conventional, creative, dead, extended, grammatical, mixed, primary, root, submerged, therapeutic, visual

See also:

• What Is a Metaphor?
• Time Metaphors
• 13 Types of Metaphors

Etymology:

From the Greek, "carrying over"



Examples:

• "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."
  (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.
  (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)