Metaphor

to describe something by transferring attributes from a source thing to a described thing; from the Greek metapherein, meaning to 'carry over'

Examples

Shakespeare

the dogs of war
a tower of strength
all the world's a stage
night's candles are burnt out
if music be the food of love, play on

Everyday

a heart of gold
it's a slippery slope
a lame duck president
it costs an arm and a leg
the elephant in the room

Steven Pinker

Any adversary who is unscrupulous enough to give the least charitable reading to an unhedged statement will find an opening to attack the writer in a thicket of hedged ones anyway.

G.B. Shaw

The schoolmaster is the person who takes the children off the parents' hands for a consideration. That is to say, he establishes a child prison, engages a number of employee schoolmasters as turnkeys, and covers up the essential cruelty and unnaturalness of the situation by torturing the children if they do not learn, and calling this process, which is within the capacity of any fool or blackguard, by the sacred name of Teaching.

Purpose

Conceptualizing & Simplifying

Metaphors are persuasive and commonplace. They describe complex things simply by attaching lifelike qualities, animations and feelings to the things they describe. Like the superordinate category of analogy, metaphors help humans easily conceptualize and remember things.

Aristotle

By far the greatest thing is to be master of metaphor. It is the one thing that cannot be learned from others. It is a sign of genius, for a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of similarity among dissimilars.

Quintilian

Kenneth Burke

[Metaphor fulfills] the supremely difficult task of providing a name for everything.

It is precisely through metaphor that our perspectives, or analogical extensions, are made - a world without metaphor would be a world without purpose.

Good Usage

Metaphors are common and powerful, but we must try to use vivid and fresh ones. Avoid using tired or dead metaphors or your prose will shuffle and stink like a corpse.

Vividness & Affect

We use metaphor to describe and evaluate, to paint things vividly and produce audience effects. Compare:

Non-Metaphorical

It's a delicious beer.
I like listening to your voice.
He has trained extensively for the race.
She's been causing me great difficulties at work.
The integrity of our conduct has been questioned.

Metaphorical

It's the king of beers.
Your voice is pure music.
He's at the peak of physical fitness.
She's been a throbbing pain in my neck.
They're attacking the honour of our institution.

Mastering Metaphor

Craft a metaphor carefully. Ask yourself: 'What image am I trying to create?' Then choose an effective metaphor or other figure of speech to artfully convey that image. Good communicators master metaphor.

Jon Stewart

In South Carolina, the roads that black people drive on are named for Confederate generals who fought to keep black people from being able to drive freely on those roads. That's insanity. That's racial wallpaper.

P.G. Wodehouse

The heart of Pongo Twistleton had always been an open door with 'Welcome' clearly inscribed on the mat, and you never knew what would walk in next.

The lunches of some fifty-seven years had caused his chest to slip down into the mezzanine floor.

Metaphors often feature in great speeches. Notice the abundant and effective use of metaphor and extended metaphor in these extracts of Martin Luther King's 'I have a dream speech' delivered in 1963.

"Five score years ago a great American in whose symbolic shadow we stand today signed the Emancipation Proclamation. This momentous decree came as a great beacon light of hope to millions of Negro slaves who had been seared in the flames of withering injustice. It came as a joyous daybreak to end the long night of their captivity.

But one hundred years later the Negro still is not free. One hundred years later the life of the Negro is still sadly crippled by the manacles of segregation and the chains of discrimination. One hundred years later the Negro lives on a lonely island of poverty in the midst of a vast ocean of material prosperity."

"In a sense we have come to our nation's capital to cash a check. When the architects of our republic wrote the magnificent words of the Constitution and the declaration of Independence, they were signing a promissory note to which every American was to fall heir. This note was a promise that all men – yes, black men as well as white men – would be guaranteed the inalienable rights of life, liberty, and the pursuit of happiness.

It is obvious today that America has defaulted on this promissory note insofar as her citizens of color are concerned. Instead of honoring this sacred obligation, America has given the Negro people a bad check – a check which has come back marked 'insufficient funds.'

But we refuse to believe that the bank of justice is bankrupt. We refuse to believe that there are insufficient funds in the great vaults of opportunity of this nation. So we have come to cash this check – a check that will give us upon demand the riches of freedom and the security of justice. We have also come to this hallowed spot to remind America of the fierce urgency of now. This is no time to engage in the luxury of cooling off or to take the tranquilizing drug of gradualism. Now is the time to make real the promises of democracy. Now is the time to rise from the dark and desolate valley of segregation to the sunlit path of racial justice. Now is the time to lift our nation from the quicksands of racial injustice to the solid rock of brotherhood. Now is the time."

Extended Metaphor

Sometimes we can extend a metaphor through longer stretches of text. This is challenging but 'extended metaphors' create and sustain vivid mental pictures to aid comprehension, stimulate affect and cohere texts, as M.L. King does above.

Shakespeare

              All the world's a stage,
              And all the men and women merely players;
              They have their exits and their entrances,
              And one man in his time plays many parts,
              His acts being seven ages.

D.H. Lawrence

Up scrambles the car, on all its four legs, like a black beetle straddling past the schoolhouse and the store down below, up the bare rock and over the changeless boulders, with a surge and a sickening lurch to the skybrim, where stands the foolish church.

Steven Pinker

Helen Sword

Helen Sword calls nominalizations zombie nouns because they lumber across the scene without a conscious agent directing their motion. They can turn prose into a night of the living dead.

Stylish academic writers are craftspeople who regard their texts as intricate, labour-intensive structures that must be carefully planned and meticulously built, from the pouring of the foundation and the sourcing of the materials to the final polishing of the banisters – not to mention those rare but wrenching occasions when the wrecking ball must be called in.

Winston Churchill

[A politician] is asked to stand, he wants to sit and is expected to lie.
(Churchill combines the position metaphor with double-meanings.)

Metaphor that extends throughout a long text may produce allegory or fable.

Bad Usage

Dead Metaphors

George Orwell
Never use a metaphor, simile or other figure of speech which you are used to seeing in print.

'Dead metaphors' are like stale chewing gum. Their repeated chewing exhausts their minty freshness. Avoid using stale metaphors that have lost their creative meaning.

a loose canon
a fly on the wall
a game changer
under the weather

over the top
blue sky thinking
thinking out of the box
moving up in the world

to broaden my horizons
Draw a line in the sand.
Start with a clean sheet.
The U.S. is a melting pot.

Dead metaphors like these are so common they are no longer metaphorical. Some even become workplace 'jargon.' See more examples here.

Competitive Metaphors

Competitive metaphors abound in competitive fields like politics, business and sport. Examples like the following are unfresh, but are common in communities and professions and perhaps required to demonstrate community membership. Some competitive metaphors are jargonistic, others idiomatic.

Common Metaphors in Politics, Business and Sport

below par
game-plan
carry the ball
out of the ballpark
in a league of their own
three strikes and you're out

stalemate
touch base
home base
take a rain check
cover all the bases
getting to first base

a big hit
a big hitter
tough-going
neck and neck
right off the bat
level playing field

a low blow
saved by the bell
the gloves are off
down but not out
step up to the plate
let down your guard

Avoid using metaphorical jargon with people outside your field. It sounds like gobbledegook and invites ridicule.

Robin Walker, MP, on the BBC Today Programme

For a CEO coming in to a listed business, the first hundred days is actually quite a short period in the corporate cycle in which they'll be keeping their head down, they'll be dealing with those people who perhaps wanted the job and didn't get it and making sure that they've kept them on board and they won't necessarily be going out to the public until the end of that period to set out their stall.

In other words: Incoming CEOs quietly observe and cooperatively engage with colleagues before outlining new plans.

Mixed Metaphors

Good metaphors successfully carry over information from one domain to another. This fails when 'mixed metaphors' draw from incompatible domains. An extended metaphor is more effective. Compare:

Mixed Metaphor

The president will put the ship of state safely on its feet.
(Ships have no 'feet.')

Does your life have to be on the rocks before you will turn over a new leaf?

Extended Metaphor

The president will steer the ship of state safely into its home port.
(Ships do berth in ports.)

Why not close this chapter of your life and begin a new one?

See also the complementarity rule of synesthesia.

Metaphorical Comedy

Effective metaphors require congruous domains but we can subvert domains for comic effects. See also theories and effects of laughter.

Comical and Incongruous Metaphors

Jeremy Taylor
Love is friendship, set on fire.

Oscar Wilde
True friends stab you in the front.

George Carlin 
Fighting for peace is like screwing for virginity.

G.B. Shaw
If you cannot get rid of the family skeleton, you may as well make it dance.