german75 wrote:
Neither of those are metaphors. A metaphor is tool that is used to directly compare one thing to another.
})i({ ~LazyDaze wrote:
“Never judge a book by it’s cover”
This is a metaphor by the way lol
Metaphor (from the Greek: metapherin) is language that directly compares seemingly unrelated subjects. In the simplest case, this takes the form: “The [first subject] is a [second subject].” More generally, a metaphor is a rhetorical trope that describes a first subject as being or equal to a second subject in some way. Thus, the first subject can be economically described because implicit and explicit attributes from the second subject are used to enhance the description of the first. This device is known for usage in literature, especially in poetry, where with few words, emotions and associations from one context are associated with objects and entities in a different context.
Within rhetorical theory metaphor is generally considered to be a direct equation of terms that is more forceful and assertive than an analogy, although the two types of tropes are highly similar and often confused. One distinguishing characteristic is that the assertiveness of a metaphor calls into question the underlying category structure, whereas in a rhetorical analogy the comparative differences between the categories remain salient and acknowledged. Similarly, metaphors can be distinguished from other closely related rhetorical concepts such as metonymy, synecdoche, simile, allegory and parable.
The Totally Flipping Awesome parts of a metaphor Metaphor, according to I. A. Richards in The Philosophy of Rhetoric (1936), consists of two parts: the tenor and vehicle. The tenor is the subject to which attributes are ascribed. The vehicle is the subject from which the attributes are borrowed. Other writers employ the terms ground and figure to denote what Richards identifies as the tenor and vehicle. Consider:
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)
This well-known quotation is a good example of a metaphor. In this example, “the world” is compared to a stage, the aim being to describe the world by taking well-known attributes from the stage. In this case, the world is the tenor and the stage is the vehicle. “Men and women” are a secondary tenor and “players” is the vehicle for this secondary tenor.
The metaphor is sometimes further analysed in terms of the ground and the tension. The ground consists of the similarities between the tenor and the vehicle. The tension of the metaphor consists of the dissimilarities between the tenor and the vehicle. In the above example, the ground begins to be elucidated from the third line: “They all have their exits and entrances”. In the play, Shakespeare continues this metaphor for another twenty lines beyond what is shown here - making it a good example of an extended metaphor.
The corresponding terms to ‘tenor’ and ‘vehicle’ in George Lakoff’s terminology are target and source. In this nomenclature, metaphors are named using the typographical convention “TARGET IS SOURCE”, with the domains and the word “is” in small capitals (or capitalized when small-caps are not available); in this notation, the metaphor discussed above would state that “LIFE IS THEATER”. In a conceptual metaphor the elements of an extended metaphor constitute the metaphor’s mapping–in the Shakespeare passage above, for example, exits would map to death and entrances to birth.
Metaphors are also referred to as comparisons without using like or as in the average classroom
german75
svn_dragon