METAPHOR. In RHETORIC, a figure with two senses, both originating with Aristotle in the 4c BC: (1) All FIGURES OF SPEECH that achieve their effect through association, comparison, and resemblance. Figures like ANTITHESIS, HYPERBOLE, METONYMY, SIMILE are all species of metaphor. Although this sense is not current, it lies behind the use of metaphorical and figurative as ANTONYMS of literal. (2) A figure of speech which concisely compares two things by saying that one is the other. A warrior compared to a lion becomes a lion: Achilles was a lion in the fight. In such usages, the perception of something held in common brings together words and images from different fields: warriors and lions share bravery and strength, and so the warrior is a lion among men and the lion is a warrior among beasts.

Description

When introducing students to the idea of metaphor, teachers have generally adopted the approach of the Roman rhetorician Quintilian (1C AD), using the simpler figure simile (He fought like a lion) as a way in to the more complex metaphor (He was a lion in the fight). A typical definition on this principle is:‘A metaphor is like a simile condensed. In a simile the comparison is explicitly stated with the help of some such word as like or as, whilst in a metaphor the comparison is implied by an identification of the two things compared’ ( Ronald Ridout & Clifford Witting, The Facts of English, 1964). Such descriptions have helped generations of students recognize metaphors, but do not comment on the creative process at work. Aristotle provided a formula for creating metaphors which pointed to something inherent in all kinds of comparison. He proposed a ratio (análogon) of the type A is to B, as X is to Y, exemplified as Life is to old age, as day is to evening. This ratio demonstrated that life and day can come together because of a third shared factor, time. He then switched the second terms to get A is to Y, as X is to B, producing: Life is to evening, as day is to old age. Such a cross-over creates such phrases as the evening of life and day's old age (Poetics, 31. 11). Here, terms from distinct contexts are first aligned, then spliced, demonstrating the close relationship between metaphor and ANALOGY. In 1936, the English critic I. A. Richards provided labels for the three aspects of metaphor implied by Aristotle: the original context or idea is the tenor of the metaphor, the borrowed idea is the vehicle, and the shared element the ground. In Aristotle's example, life is the tenor, day the vehicle, time the ground. Commentators, however, are not usually precise about where the metaphor proper resides: it is sometimes defined as the vehicle alone, sometimes as the combination of tenor and vehicle, and sometimes as tenor, vehicle, and ground together.

Metaphor is often used in naming and in extending the senses of words. Its capacity to name was exemplified in the US in 1966, when a group of black activists adopted the name Black Panther. At about the same time, people who disliked the police began calling them pigs. As a result, the sentence Black Panthers hate pigs could occur and be suitably interpreted in a context far removed from ‘real’ black panthers and pigs. In George ORWELL'S Animal Farm (1945), pigs stand for Communist Party members, dogs for the police, and humans for the Russian ancien régime. Because of the meanings given to pig and man, the story's close is particularly potent as a comment on the fate of revolutions:
Twelve voices were shouting in anger, and they were all alike. No question, now, what had happened to the faces of the pigs. The creatures outside looked from pig to man, and from man to pig, and from pig to man again; but already it was impossible to say which was which.

Extended metaphors

Orwell's tale is an ALLEGORY, based on the master metaphor ‘farm is to state as animals are to citizens’, and its plot runs parallel to real life. The result of its use throughout a text is an extended metaphor, a device which can operate at many levels of speech and writing. The same imagery may run through a text, as a writer develops an analogy between the topic of immediate interest and another topic considered relevant and informative:
The architect delivers a number of completely impersonal plan drawings and typewritten specifications. They must be so unequivocal that there will be no doubt about the construction. He composes the music which others will play. Furthermore, in order to understand architecture fully, it must be remembered that the people who play it are not sensitive musicians interpreting another's score…. On the contrary, they are a multitude of ordinary people ( S. E. Rasmussen, Experiencing Architecture, 1959).

Here, the writer splices architecture and music, so that tenor and vehicle run together through the whole paragraph.

Metaphoric networks

In addition to this extension of a theme through a single discourse, networks of metaphor criss-cross language at large, especially in the form of IDIOMS and sayings. In PROVERBS, similar advice may be proffered through different images: A stitch in time saves nine, Look before you leap, Don't count your chickens before they're hatched, Don't cross your bridges before you come to them. Idioms all drawn from the same source may reflect a significant element in a society and culture: for example BrE cricketing expressions, used to talk about arguments, contests, and life itself. A politician might go in to bat in the House of Commons, intent on knocking the Opposition for six, only to be clean-bowled, stumped, or caught out by an opponent. If people do things off their own bat, they do them without help from anyone else, and if they live to be a hundred, they knock up their century, in which case they have had a (jolly) good innings. The master metaphor animating such usages can be compactly expressed as: Life is a Game of Cricket.

The universality of metaphor

Because metaphor is so pervasive in linguistic and cultural terms, it is often seen as central to thought and ordinary, non-literary language. In such speculation, the broader Aristotelian interpretation of metaphor is evoked. Language is seen as a system of SYMBOLS running parallel to reality, its purpose to blend form and meaning. All models of existence are associative make-believe: ‘Existence is like X or Y’, ‘It is as if there were a Heavenly Father’, or as T. R. Wright has put it: ‘If narrative is the way we construct our sense of identity, metaphor is how we think, especially in areas in which we need to build our knowledge of the unknown by comparison with the known’ (Theology and Literature, 1988). He adds that theology ‘has always been irredeemably riddled with metaphor’. The Christian Gospels ‘make Jesus repeatedly risk and often suffer the misunderstanding of the literal-minded’, so that in Matthew (16: 6–7) the disciples say that they have no bread when Jesus warns them against accepting the leaven of the Pharisees, while in John (3: 4) Nicodemus wonders how a man can enter his mother's womb a second time so as to be ‘born again’. Most religions and ideologies are imaginative in the shapes they lend reality, asserting the virtues of Image X over Picture Y or Model Z. Wright considers that it is not so important to replace one metaphor with another (‘addressing God continually as Mother instead of Father, She rather than He’) as to understand the processes involved in concretizing infinity and ‘recognize the metaphorical status of all these terms’.

Dead metaphors

Whether such a status is recognized or not, metaphors and models tend to have a time of vigour, after which they may ‘fade’ and ‘die’. Traditionally, those that have lost their force have been called dead metaphors; as such, they may still continue in service as CLICHÉS and hackneyed expressions. Many venerable metaphors have been literalized into everyday items of language: a clock has a face (unlike human or animal face), and on that face are hands (unlike biological hands); only in terms of clocks can hands be located on a face. Again, decide began as a metaphor, where Latin decidere meant to cut through something in order to achieve a conclusion or a solution. In their turn, conclusion and solution were once metaphorical (Latin concludere to shut up, and solvere to unfasten). The deadness of a metaphor and its status as a cliché are relative matters. Hearing for the first time that ‘life is no bed of roses’, someone might be quite swept away by its aptness and vigour. See FIGURATIVE LANGUAGE, MIXED METAPHOR, PERSONIFICATION.