2
Read the sentences and explain what the metaphors compare, and why.
A. My dad is a bear in the morning before he drinks his coffee!
is being compared to
because
B. The wind was an angry witch, howling across the night sky.
is being compared to
because
C.
When it was her turn to dance, Meena was a graceful butterfly, flitting across the stage.
is being compared to
because
Answers
A metaphor is a figure of speech that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another.[1] It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two ideas. Metaphors are often compared with other types of figurative language, such as antithesis, hyperbole, metonymy and simile.[2] One of the most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in English literature comes from the "All the world's a stage" monologue from As You Like It:
All the world's a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances ...
—William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2/7[3]
This quotation expresses a metaphor because the world is not literally a stage. By asserting that the world is a stage, Shakespeare uses points of comparison between the world and a stage to convey an understanding about the mechanics of the world and the behavior of the people within it.
According to the linguist Anatoly Liberman, "the use of metaphors is relatively late in the modern European languages; it is, in principle, a post-Renaissance phenomenon".[4] In contrast, in the ancient Hebrew psalms (around 1000 B.C.), one finds already vivid and poetic examples of metaphor [the following example given is that of a simile, rather than the intended metaphor]such as, "...He is like a tree planted by streams of water, yielding its fruit in season, whose leaf does not wither." At the other extreme, some recent linguistic theories view all language in essence as metaphorical.[5]
Metaphors are most frequently compared with similes. It is said, for instance, that a metaphor is 'a condensed analogy' or 'analogical fusion' or that they 'operate in a similar fashion' or are 'based on the same mental process' or yet that 'the basic processes of analogy are at work in metaphor'. It is also pointed out that 'a border between metaphor and analogy is fuzzy' and 'the difference between them might be described (metaphorically) as the distance between things being compared'. A metaphor asserts the objects in the comparison are identical on the point of comparison, while a simile merely asserts a similarity through use of words such as "like" or "as". For this reason a common-type metaphor is generally considered more forceful than a simile.[12][13]
The metaphor category contains these specialized types:
Allegory: An extended metaphor wherein a story illustrates an important attribute of the subject.
Antithesis: A rhetorical contrast of ideas by means of parallel arrangements of words, clauses, or sentences.[14]
Catachresis: A mixed metaphor, sometimes used by design and sometimes by accident (a rhetorical fault).
Hyperbole: Excessive exaggeration to illustrate a point.[15]
Parable: An extended metaphor told as an anecdote to illustrate or teach a moral or spiritual lesson, such as in Aesop's fables or Jesus' teaching method as told in the Bible.
Pun: A verbal device by which multiple definitions of a word or its homophones are used to give a sentence multiple valid readings, typically to humorous effect.
Similitude: An extended simile or metaphor that has a picture part (Bildhälfte), a reality part (Sachhälfte), and a point of comparison (teritium comparationis).[16] Similitudes are found in the parables of Jesus.