Metaphor

From Simple English Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia

Metaphor is language we use to compare things, but without using "like" or "as" - metaphor is not a simile. Another sort of metaphor is a "conceptual metaphor".

A metaphor very often uses the verb "to be": "love is war", for example, not that a writer sees "love as war (this is a simile). Poetry includes much metaphor, usually more than prose.

Idioms use metaphors, or are metaphors: for example, the English phrase to kick the bucket means to die.

Spam is an example that any email user knows about - this word was originally a metaphor, from "spam", a tinned meat people do not usually like. Servers putting unwanted email in your inbox was similar to waiters putting unwanted spam in your food. This was originally suggested by a Monty Python skit (funny scene). When we use a metaphor very often and people forget the old meaning, or forget the two meanings are connected, this is a "dead metaphor".

Originally metaphor was a Greek word for "transfer". It came from meta ("change") and pherein ("carry"). So the word metaphor in English was a metaphor, too. Today in Greek, metaphor is a trolley (a thing you push, to carry shopping or bags).