Metaphor

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

A metaphor very often uses the verb "to be": "love is war", for example, not that the writer sees "love as war (this is the 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 the metaphor, from "spam", the 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 the Monty Python skit (funny scene). When we use the metaphor very often and people forget the old meaning, or forget the two meanings are connected, this is the "dead metaphor".

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