Linguistics and Literature Reference library
International Encyclopedia of Linguistics (2 ed.)
...certain poetic texts, they must be taken at face value, i.e. literally. The criteria to determine which texts require or allow their metaphors to be taken literally cannot be specified in advance, but depend on the sense that a reader develops of what type of construal yields the most explanatory metaphysical outlook. Thus, when we read the Psalms , and come across The little hills rejoice , we might choose to understand the phrase not as a figurative way of suggesting that the hills are verdant, glistening, in bloom, or vari-colored, but rather as a claim...
Metaphor Reference library
Encyclopedia of Rhetoric
...“genetic code,” which describes a biological process in terms of information theory, for instance, is a catachrēsis . It is a heuristic tool, because it allows for analogical extensions in expressions like genetic “message,” “transcription,” or “translation” ( Halloran and Bradford , 1984 , p. 188). Didactic discourse, on the other hand, employs illustrative metaphors in the interests of perspicuity. [ See also Figures of speech ; Style ; and Tacit dimension, the .] BIBLIOGRAPHY Black, Max . Models and Metaphors . Ithaca, N.Y., 1962. Blumenberg, Hans...
Literature Quick reference
The Oxford Companion to the English Language (2 ed.)
...that communication is impossible without artifice, yet there is a difference between the colloquial simile that someone is ‘as bold as brass’ and T. S. Eliot ’s simile for the young man in The Waste Land ( 1922 ): ‘One of the low on whom assurance sits / As a silk hat on a Bradford millionaire.’ The difference lies not only in the originality and unexpected juxtaposition but in the appropriateness of image to context, in the austere tone of the whole poem, in the evocation of a snobbish post- 1918 attitude to men who had become rich through government...
