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What is the Difference Between Metaphor and Simile?

By Maeve

The terms metaphor and simile are slung around as if they meant exactly the same thing.

A simile is a metaphor, but not all metaphors are similes.

Metaphor is the broader term. In a literary sense metaphor is a rhetorical device that transfers the sense or aspects of one word to another. For example:

The moon was a ghostly galleon tossed upon cloudy seas. — “The Highwayman,” Alfred Noyes

Here the moon is being compared to a sailing ship. The clouds are being compared to ocean waves. This is an apt comparison because sometimes banks of clouds shuttling past the moon cause the moon to appear to be moving and roiling clouds resemble churning water.

A simile is a type of metaphor in which the comparison is made with the use of the word like or its equivalent:

My love is like a red, red rose. — Robert Burns

This simile conveys some of the attributes of a rose to a woman: ruddy complexion, velvety skin, and fragrant scent.

She sat like Patience on a Monument, smiling at Grief. — Twelfth Night William Shakespeare

Here a woman is being compared to the allegorical statue on a tomb. The comparison evokes unhappiness, immobility, and gracefulness of posture and dress.

Some metaphors are apt. Some are not. The conscientious writer strives to come up with fresh metaphors.

A common fault of writing is to mix metaphors.

Before Uncle Jesse (Dukes of Hazzard) did it, some WWII general is reputed to have mixed the metaphor Don’t burn your bridges, meaning “Don’t alienate people who have been useful to you,” with Don’t cross that bridge before you come to it, meaning “Don’t worry about what might happen until it happens” to create the mixed metaphor: Don’t burn your bridges before you come to them.

Many metaphors are used so often that they have become cliché. We use them in speech, but the careful writer avoids them: hungry as a horse, as big as a house, hard as nails, as good as gold.

Some metaphors have been used so frequently as to lose their metaphorical qualities altogether. These are “dead metaphors.”

In our own time we have seen the word war slip into the state of a dead metaphor: the war on drugs, the war on poverty, the war on AIDS. In these uses the word means little more than “efforts to get rid of” and not, as the OED has it:

Hostile contention by means of armed forces, carried on between nations, states, or rulers, or between parties in the same nation or state; the employment of armed forces against a foreign power, or against an opposing party in the state.

In a sense, all language is metaphor because words are simply labels for things that exist in the world. We call something “a table” because we have to call it something, but the word is not the thing it names.

A simile is only one of dozens of specific types of metaphor. For a long and entertaining list of them, see the Wikipedia article on “Figure of Speech.”

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Full post as published by Daily Writing Tips on February 11, 2008 (boomark / email).