Metaphors and Similes

[pdlloyd]

I've been thinking about metaphors and similes today.

Writer Justine Larbalestier has been answering writing questions on her blog this month and one of the questions she answered several days ago was about finding "great similes to create good imagery." Normally, I like her humorous approach, but I felt she was so focused on clichéd or over-the-

Comments

[core_opsis]

Interesting post. I didn't perceive you as using metaphors at all (I was only counting what you yourself said and not the quotes of the other people--which certainly contained metaphors--"their wanton fancies climbing up...."), but I've also considered this at length, and am aware that most of our language IS metaphorical in nature. Okay...maybe "prose SPEAKING", "FRESH similes"...

George Lakoff has an interesting book called Metaphors We Live By. I've only read a few chapters, but they're pointing in that same direction too....

[pdlloyd]

Well, as I said, I wasn't deliberately using metaphors. In fact, it was only as I neared the end of the post that I thought of putting up the poll.

I think there were more than just the two you found, though. For instance, I believe my use of the phrase "focused on" counts as a cliché.

[lnhammer]

The fact that metaphoric uses settle into extended meanings and then established denotations makes the line blurry. Yes, "fresh simile" was at one point a metaphor, comparing the subject of the adjective to food, but it isn't now -- that's part of the standard meaning of "fresh". The tricky bit is deciding when that line has been crossed from metaphor to definition.

Insisting that a once-metaphoric use is still a metaphor is akin to insisting that Chinese characters mean their pictographic roots, without acknowledging (as we do with our Phoenician-descended alphabetic letters) that uses drift beyond their origins. Or insisting that Latin-derived words only be used in their original Latin meaning. Or that "fax" is an abbreviation and so banned from Scrabble.

---L.

[asakiyume]

Yeah, the only metaphors I could find were "fresh simile" and "prose speak"--but as you say, can we even consider those metaphors, if we use them without even thinking about it?

[core_opsis]

I wonder if we really would want to make "thinking about it" be part of the criteria for something "being a metaphor." Making metaphors seems to me more like something our brains do, as we strive to communicate. Yet I certainly do appreciate Inhammer's comment about metaphors moving from "extended meanings" to "established denotations."

[pdlloyd]

At the moment, I'm finding I want a more liberal view of metaphor than otherwise. Just because we use a metaphor so frequently that the metaphor becomes embedded and in the process forms a new meaning for a word does not, in my opinion (at least, not tonight) invalidate its metephorality.

See that? I've coined the new word, "metaphorality." To paraphrase something I read somewhere else recently: I'm a writer, I can do that. ;>

[asakiyume]

Interesting!

Tangentially, this has got me thinking about what I call the Commutative Property of Similes. Maybe there's just time for me to write it up as a quick second entry for the day...

[pdlloyd]

*dashes over to check journal*

What a wonderful principle. What a great post. How fabulous the poetry your prose inspired. :-D

And I absolutely adore your icon. :)

[asakiyume]

The icon is from I_am_Sarah, who made the "Nevermore" icon, too :-) She makes really great icons!

[pdlloyd]

Thank you! I love the background on her journal page, although I suspect from the dearth of visible posts I can see that much of her journal is friends-locked. :)