Communicating with Metaphors, page 9

Types of Metaphors, continued

You will also find that a Google search for the term “Trojan horse” yields more “hits” related to viruses and anti-virus software than it does to the Trojan War or ancient history.

Here’s another example that uses the Trojan horse metaphor from the essay “Books in Bed” by Jonathan Franzen :

When I was a teenager, novels were Trojan horses by means of which titillation could sometimes be smuggled into my sheltered life.

Click here to practice using a root metaphor.

Submerged Metaphors

A submerged metaphor is one in which the vehicle is implicit. The reader deduces the nature of the vehicle from some aspect of the description of the tenor. For example, “my winged thought” is a submerged metaphor comparing my thought to a bird (because birds have wings).

Metaphor On!

I bet you never knew there were so many different kinds of metaphors! (And this isn’t even a complete list.)

Metaphors are great fun! And, in the words of Aristotle, “The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.” Learning about the different kinds of metaphors is helpful when you employ metaphors in your own writing.

Working through the exercises at the end of this chapter will help you differentiate between the various metaphorical beasts out there, as well as to better employ them in your writing.

Like anything powerful, metaphors can be used for good purposes—or not. Misused metaphors can be highly comic. This is often unintentional. Metaphors can also be used to obfuscate on purpose.

Knowing about the different kinds of metaphors will help you achieve clarity about how and why you are using them.

Figures of Speech

I’d like to step back for a second and examine the question of where metaphors fit in the general framework of writing.

A metaphor is a figure of speech, also called a rhetorical trope, or trope for short. A figure of speech is a method used to compare dissimilar items to achieve an understanding that transcends the literal meaning of the items.

Continued next page

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