Samuel Taylor Coleridge called metaphor “an act of the imagination,” whereas he relegated simile to “an act of fancy.” Photo from National Portrait Gallery, 1795. Public Domain Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

"Narcissus" by Caravaggio (c. 1598). Source: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain What is an allegory? An allegory (Greek, "a speaking about something else") is a complete and cohesive narrative, for ...

This lesson is as fun as recess! Join Ms. Randi House as she talks about similes and metaphors and how they make reading a lot more interesting. Rise and Shine is available to stream on pbs.org and ...

Jan. 14-20 is Idiom Week, and today we thought we’d have a heart-to-heart about some strange phrases we use. Idioms, metaphors and similes are all types of figurative language. According to ...

Source: Francesco Bini/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 The most famous of all allegories is the Allegory of the Cave, in which Plato compares unphilosophical people to prisoners who, having spent their ...

No matter if you're in school or well past your days in English class, figures of speech are used every day in our lives. From songs and television shows to conversations and advertisements, we often ...

Marble bust of Aristotle. Public domain. Metaphors are not user-friendly. They are hard to find and hard to use well. Unfortunately, metaphor is a mainstay of good lyric writing; indeed, of most ...

Metaphors fill our lives, and we often have no trouble recognizing their symbolic nature. We know that when captains shout, “All hands on deck,” they want more than their crews’ hands. Clear skies can ...

The study confirms the fundamental assumption in conceptual metaphor theory that metaphors are enduring linguistic and cognitive structures, not merely rhetorical figures. Using complex systems tools, ...