The sentence you are reading at this very moment is an example of prose (the word comes from the Latin prosa, meaning “straightforward”). Prose is the language people generally use to transmit information and express ideas. Closely resembling the patterns of everyday speech, prose is the kind of writing typically found in books, newspapers, and magazines. These are examples:
Prose and poetry are two methods
people can use to express ideas.
A committee is a questionable mechanism
for making decisions or solving problems.
Adolescence is a time of great turmoil.
Every now and then, though, prose is spiced up and becomes more fanciful:
Prose is to poetry as walking is to dancing.
A committee is a cul-de-sac down which ideas are lured and then quietly strangled.
Adolescence is a kind of emotional seasickness.
In the first set of observations, the prose is straightforward but prosaic, meaning it lacks imagination and even borders on dull. In the second set, the prose is enhanced by analogies, metaphors, and similes, a trio of extremely valuable tools at the disposal of writers, orators, and poets. With the assistance of these three stylistic devices, ordinary language is elevated, often to an extraordinary degree. This is undoubtedly what the nineteenth-century American journalist and poet William Cullen Bryant had in mind when he wrote:
Eloquence is the poetry of prose.
This book will celebrate history’s most spectacular examples of poetic prose—all constructed by the use of analogies, metaphors, and similes. Let’s begin by meeting the key players.
ANALOGY
From the dawn of civilization, human beings have tried to understand one thing by relating it to something else. This approach—called analogical thinking—has been extremely helpful as people try to make sense out of a world that can often seem confusing or even incomprehensible.
Formally, an analogy is an attempt to state a relationship between two things that don’t initially appear to have much in common (the word derives from the Greek word analogia, formally meaning a “proportionate” relationship between two pairs of things). In what may be the oldest analogy ever recorded, from around 1350 B.C., the Egyptian pharaoh Akhenaton was said to have observed:
As the moon retains her nature,
though darkness spread itself before her face as a curtain,
so the Soul remains perfect
even in the bosom of the fool.
In this ancient observation, the pharaoh was drawing an analogy between the moon hidden behind a curtain of darkness and a soul hidden behind a curtain of foolishness. Both continue to exist, he maintains, even when they cannot be seen. For many centuries, analogies have been used to instruct people and to dispense moral lessons. In this case, the ethical principle embedded in the analogy might be expressed this way: don’t be too quick to shun or reject people, for behind all foolish or inappropriate actions there exists a perfect soul within.
While analogical thinking goes back to the oldest days of antiquity, people thinking about analogies these days are likely to recall those peculiar and often perplexing constructions that have long been a staple of intelligence tests and scholastic aptitude tests. The format will probably be familiar to you:
illness : life :: (blank) : iron
a. steel b. blade c. forge d. rust
Following a convention going back to ancient times, the analogy is read this way:
“Illness is to life as (blank) is to iron.”
The task here is to figure out which one of the four multiple-choice options bears the same relationship to iron as illness does to life. After a moment’s thought, the answer is easily reasoned out. Just as illness can threaten or end a life, rust can threaten or destroy iron.
In the fourth century B.C., the Greek philosopher Antisthenes found another aspect of the human experience that was analogous to iron and rust:
As iron is eaten away by rust,
so the envious are consumed by their own passion.
Rather than simply assert that envy is a destructive passion, Antisthenes begins by taking a phenomenon that is well known—the damaging effect of rust on iron—and relates it to something not so familiar—the damaging effect of envy on people. By expressing his thought in an analogy, he made it very easy for people to forge a mental picture of the slow, corrosive process whereby one thing gradually eats away and eventually destroys something else.
People who say “Let me offer an analogy” are trying to explain one thing by relating it to something else. The entry on analogy in The Concise Oxford Dictionary of Literary Terms explains it this way:
Illustration of an idea by means of a more familiar idea that is similar or parallel to it, and thus said to be analogous to it.
Structurally, analogies are often constructed in the A is to B as C is to D format:
|
Reading is to the mind, |
As cold waters to a thirsty soul, |
|
As soap is to the body, |
What garlic is to salad, |
Sometimes the format is varied slightly, and the intention shifts from the serious to the humorous:
The murals in restaurants are
on a par with the food in museums.
And sometimes an additional explanation is appended after the formal analogy, just to make sure the point is understood:
Doing business without advertising is like winking at a girl in the dark.
You know what you are doing, but nobody else does.
Al Capone was to crime what J. P. Morgan was to Wall Street,
the first man to exert national influence over his trade.
Analogies form the basis for much of the thinking people do about life. When we encounter something new and unfamiliar—or try to make sense out of something that is not well understood—we often benefit from relating it to something else we know well. Sigmund Freud expressed it nicely:
Analogies, it is true, decide nothing,
but they can make one feel more at home.
In 2006, seventy-eight-year-old Harry Whittington was accidentally shot in the face by Vice President Dick Cheney in a celebrated hunting accident. When it became apparent that Whittington’s wounds were not life threatening—and that he was expected to fully recover—countless jokes from comedians and late-night talk-show hosts filled the airwaves. I’m sure you recall some of them.
Whittington, it was soon learned, was an Austin attorney, a successful real-estate investor, and a long-time member of the Texas Republican party. Early in his career, when LBJ and the Democrats were in control of the Lone Star State, Whittington was the only Republican serving on the board of the Texas Department of Corrections. As he learned more about the grim reality of incarceration, he made an unsettling discovery. Yes, prisons get criminals off the street, but they do a miserable job of rehabilitation and, ironically, may even stimulate further criminal behavior. He began to express his view this way:
Prisons are to crime what greenhouses are to plants.
In his analogy between prison life and the world of horticulture, Whittington made a compelling point—as greenhouses foster the growth of budding plants, prisons are excellent breeding grounds for future criminal behavior.
Whittington’s observation illustrates an important point about analogies—when they are well-crafted, they have a ring of truth to them. As a result, analogies have long been considered one of the best ways to communicate profound ideas. Henry David Thoreau was thinking along these lines when he wrote:
All perception of truth is the perception of an analogy.
Analogies have enjoyed a long and honored history in philosophical and political discourse, but they have also been favored by orators, writers, artists, actors, and humorists. When comedic actor Harvey Korman turned seventy-seven in 2004, he was asked if he was using the erectile dysfunction drug Viagra. He replied:
The idea of using Viagra at my age is like erecting
a brand-new flag pole in front of a condemned building.
Similarly, out of all the complaints of bloated government spending and the questionable competence of our elected leaders, few can match the inspired analogy of P. J. O’Rourke in his 1991 classic, Parliament of Whores:
Giving money and power to government
is like giving whiskey and car keys to teenage boys.
Analogical phrasing is only one tool available to people interested in more eloquently expressing their ideas. Another device—and a close cousin to the analogy—is the metaphor.
METAPHOR
If an analogy can be formatted as A is to B as C is to D, a metaphor is the flat assertion that A is B. Even though analogies and metaphors are constructed slightly differently, they share one essential feature—they try to capture a key aspect of one thing by relating it to something else. In one of his many collections of aphorisms, the American writer Mason Cooley wrote:
A skyscraper is a boast in glass and steel.
Notice that Cooley does not suggest that a skyscraper is like a boast—which would make it a simile—he maintains that it is a boast, fulfilling the A is B requirement and making it a metaphor. To demonstrate the close relationship between metaphors and analogies, notice how easy it is to transform the observation into an analogy:
A skyscraper is in architecture as a boast is in interpersonal relations.
I came across Cooley’s observation some years ago, and now rarely visit a major American city without having it come to mind. This happens routinely with metaphors—the best ones take up permanent residence in our minds.
There is one other thing about the Cooley metaphor that may not be apparent. A skyscraper is a building, not a boast, so the statement is not literally true. All metaphors are violations of logic in the sense that they assert that two different things are the same. In the fascinating world of human discourse, we make allowances for such flights of fancy by calling them figuratively true. Like leaps of faith in religion, when people believe things that cannot be proved, we make leaps of logic when we use metaphors—we say something is true, even when we know it is literally untrue or logically false. This shows up the following observations, which also—it should be noted—help us see familiar things in new ways:
Worry is interest paid on trouble before it falls due.
Art is the sex of the imagination.
America is an enormous frosted cupcake in the middle of millions of starving people.
In some metaphorical observations, the formal metaphor is not obvious:
Art washes away from the soul the dust of everyday life.
Here, the formal A is B assertion is not explicitly stated. But it is clearly suggested—art (is a liquid that) washes. The observation also illustrates the difference between literal and figurative truth. In real life, art cannot wash anything. And a soul doesn’t literally accumulate dust. But by imbuing art with the cleansing properties of water, Picasso offers a memorable metaphor. If you examine the observation closely, you can also discern the underlying analogy—as water is a cleanser for the body, art is a cleanser for the soul.
All the observations we have just seen are examples of prose, but none are prosaic. Some even rise to the level of eloquence described earlier as the poetry of prose. And they all meet the definition of a metaphor, according to the American Heritage Dictionary:
A figure of speech in which a word or phrase that ordinarily designates one thing is used to designate another, thus making an implicit comparison, as in “a sea of troubles” or “All the world’s a stage.”
The word metaphor made its first appearance in English in 1533. It derives from two Greek roots: meta, meaning “over, beyond” and pheiren, meaning “to carry, transfer.” The root sense of the word is to carry a word over and beyond its original meaning by applying it to something else (Aristotle said a metaphor was giving a thing a name that belonged to something else). And that is exactly what Shakespeare does in his famous passage from As You Like It:
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players.
They have their exits and entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts….
Shakespeare might have expressed the thought in a formal analogy (people are to the world as actors are to a stage), but he went with a metaphor instead. He goes on to describe people as actors and then—true to the root sense of the word—carried the metaphor further by referring to exits, entrances, and the many parts played in a lifetime. In the rest of the passage, he went on to describe the seven ages of man, but he could have pursued the metaphor in many other ways. He might have talked about people being well suited—or miscast—for their roles. He might have contrasted lead actors with those in supporting roles. He might have compared award-winning performances with forgettable ones. Once world is metaphorically transformed into stage, then all of the attributes of the target domain (stage) can be applied back to the original source domain (world). Notice how Richard Lederer leaps from one conceptual domain to another in this metaphorical gem from Get Thee to a Punnery (1988):
Puns are a three-way circus of words:
words clowning, words teetering on tightropes,
words swinging from tent-tops,
words thrusting their heads into the mouths of lions.
A metaphor is a kind of magical mental changing room—where one thing, for a moment, becomes another, and in that moment is seen in a whole new way. It’s like watching a man imitating a woman. We often learn more about the man in the few moments he acts like a woman than we can after years of observing him behave as a man. As soon as something old is seen in a new way, it stimulates a torrent of new thoughts and associations, almost as if a mental floodgate has been lifted. Bernard Malamud put it this way:
I love metaphor.
It provides two loaves where there seems to be one.
Sometimes it throws in a whole load of fish.
Throughout history, certain rare individuals have demonstrated a special ability to discern a relationship between things that initially seem quite alien to each other. The talent was recognized nearly 2,500 years ago by Aristotle, who observed in Poetics:
The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor.
This alone cannot be imparted by another; it is the mark of genius,
for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblance.
While I disagree that a command of metaphor cannot be imparted by the right teacher, I agree that there is a certain talent—even a kind of genius—involved in finding something in common between very different domains of life. Robert Frost said it well:
An idea is a feat of association,
and the height of it is a good metaphor.
A keen eye for resemblance, to use Aristotle’s phrase, is a rare gift, but it may also be an essential skill for a person who is trying to express a powerful idea in an original way. And once people make a connection between two different domains, they often take the initial metaphor and tweak it with an additional thought, leaving us with truly memorable observations:
The world is a book,
and those who do not travel read only one page.
Medicine is my lawful wife and literature my mistress;
when I tire of one, I spend the night with the other.
Art at its most significant is a Distant Early Warning System
that can always be relied on
to tell the old culture what is beginning to happen to it.
Observations like these—and many, many more to be found later—may help you appreciate another observation from Aristotle, this from his classic Rhetoric:
It is metaphor above all else that gives
clearness, charm, and distinction to the style.
So far, we’ve examined analogies and metaphors. But when it comes to making connections between dissimilar things, there’s a third major player in the drama.
SIMILE
Webster’s New World Dictionary defines simile this way:
A figure of speech in which one thing is likened to another, dissimilar thing by the use of “like,” “as,” etc. (“a heart as big as a whale,” “her tears flowed like wine”).
Simile and the related word similar derive from the Latin similis, meaning “like.” The word has an even longer history in English than metaphor, making its first written appearance in English in 1393 in William Langland’s Piers Plowman. Similes share with analogies and metaphors the goal of relating one thing to another, but they do it in a slightly different way. Look at these quotations:
Books are like imprisoned souls
till someone takes them down from a shelf and frees them.
Books…are like lobster shells,
we surround ourselves with ’em,
then we grow out of ’em and leave ’em behind,
as evidence of our earlier stage of development.
No furniture is so charming as books.
These observations help us see books—among our most familiar possessions—in new ways. And because of the words like and as, they are classified as similes.
In many observations, the presence or absence of only one word separates a simile from a metaphor. An ancient Chinese proverb—written when many books were available in smaller editions—once offered the lovely idea that a book was like a portable garden we could take with us in our travels. The proverb, as usually presented, is a perfect simile, but by deleting one word it is transformed from one figure of speech into another:
Simile: A book is like a garden carried in the pocket.
Metaphor: A book is a garden carried in the pocket.
In a simile, there is an explicit comparison—one thing is said to be like something else. In a metaphor, there is no comparison because the two things are treated as identical (an implicit comparison, it is often said). Similes are similar to—but distinctly different from—metaphors, and they can be equally impressive:
Writers, like teeth, are divided into incisors and grinders.
Justice is like a train that’s nearly always late.
While some people make a big deal out of the difference between similes and metaphors, there is a great deal of truth in a joke that has long been popular among teachers of English:
A simile is like a metaphor.
In his 1955 book on style, the poet and critic F. L. Lucas put it this way: “The simile sets two ideas side by side; in the metaphor they become superimposed.” Here’s a quick structural overview:
An analogy says that A is to B as C is to D.
A metaphor says that A is B, or substitutes B for A.
A simile says that A is like B.
In addition to like or as, several other words and expressions indicate the presence of a simile. A common one is than, as in “faster than a speeding bullet” or “sharper than a serpent’s tooth,” as in this classic line from Shakespeare’s King Lear:
How sharper than a serpent’s tooth
It is to have a thankless child.
Here are some more expressions that signal the use of a simile:
|
is similar to |
may be compared to |
is akin to |
|
is comparable to |
puts one in mind of |
is a kind of |
|
as though |
can be likened to |
is the same as |
|
is not unlike |
is not dissimilar to |
may be seen as |
In the world of figurative language, similes have long taken a back seat to the more glamorous metaphor. Aristotle preferred metaphors over similes, and language snobs have slavishly followed his example for centuries. But what similes lack in prestige they make up for in frequency. Here is just a sampling of similes that are a staple of everyday speech:
|
busy as a bee |
hard as a rock |
thin as a rail |
|
dry as a bone |
sharper than a tack |
happy as a clam |
|
selling like hotcakes |
fit as a fiddle |
proud as a peacock |
|
stubborn as a mule |
soft as a pillow |
cuter than a button |
|
light as a feather |
smooth as silk |
higher than a kite |
|
slow as molasses |
spread like wildfire |
shaking like a leaf |
|
sly as a fox |
smart as a whip |
fresh as a daisy |
Expressions like these are often the first things that come to mind when people are asked to provide a simile. And while they may have been quite original when first employed, they’ve now become clichés. It is likely that these stale, trite, and hackneyed expressions are responsible for diminishing the reputation of similes in the minds of so many people.
Similes do not have to be bland and uninspired, however, and in the hands of gifted writers they can be raised to the level of an art form. John Updike once wrote:
Critics are like pigs at the pastry cart.
The observation illustrates one of the things I love most about metaphorical language. When imaginatively conceived they’re like beautiful word paintings. In Updike’s observation, we can easily visualize a pastry cart piled high with a variety of beautifully presented literary delicacies. Gathering around the cart are a group of swine, clearly out of place in a swanky establishment. The pigs—well known for favoring slop but willing to eat just about anything—are clearly incapable of appreciating the quality of the treats they’re about to devour.
Another unforgettable word picture comes from Stephen King. With grand dreams of ultimately becoming a writer, he took a job teaching high school English after graduating from college. He didn’t last long. Exhausted after planning lessons and correcting students’ papers, he was sapped of any energy he might have devoted to writing. He described the experience vividly:
Teaching school is like
having jumper cables hooked to your brain,
draining all the juice out of you.
While similes are generally contrasted with metaphors, they actually have more in common with analogies. Indeed, when a simile is slightly extended, it has an A is to B as C is to D structure that makes it virtually indistinguishable from an analogy. This has resulted in much confusion. For example, in the American Heritage Dictionary, Shakespeare’s “So are you to my thoughts as food to life” is given as an example of a simile. In my mind, though, I see Shakespeare identifying a proportionate relationship between two sets of things—you to my thoughts and food to life—and view it as an analogy.
Some similes are deliciously entertaining, as when Norman Mailer compared his regular novels with the ones that had been adapted to the film world:
Novels are like wives; you don’t talk about them.
But movies are different; they’re like mistresses, and you can brag a bit.
Some are highly unusual but oddly compelling. In The Book on Writing (2003), Paula La Rocque quotes Roger Angell writing about Barry Bonds:
Bonds…stands in the middle of the Giants’ batting order
like an aneurysm.
Like an aneurysm? Well, think about it for a moment. Whether you love or loathe major league baseball’s all-time home-run champ, Angell’s simile perfectly describes what I have seen for years when Bonds is at the plate—a player who is about to explode.
Some similes are educational as well as entertaining, making us wish that more teachers would make them a part of the instructional process:
A dependent clause is like a dependent child:
incapable of standing on its own but able to cause a lot of trouble.
Having seen numerous accolades delivered to metaphors, I consider it a treat to see kudos occasionally tossed in the direction of this less heralded figure of speech. In 2006, the popular syndicated columnist James J. Kilpatrick wrote of the simile:
It’s the most familiar of all literary enbellishments,
in a class with a wedge of lemon or a sprig of parsley.
It can raise a cupcake to the level of a petit four.
Lovely as Kilpatrick’s thought is, it would be wrong to view the simile as a mere garnish or an ornament to thought. As all language lovers know, similes can be intellectually nourishing as well as tasty. And when similes and metaphors are seamlessly interwoven—as they often are—we are treated to language that is enlivened and ideas that are brought to life:
Society is like a stew.
If you don’t stir it up every once in a while,
then a layer of scum floats to the top.
We can think of history as a kind of layer cake
in which a number of different layers run side by side through time,
each with a dynamic of its own, and yet each from time
to time profoundly penetrating and interacting with others.
Men resemble great deserted palaces:
the owner occupies only a few rooms
and has closed-off wings where he never ventures.
We could go on and on about these three superstars of figurative language, and even explore some of their close relatives—like personification, allegory, fable, and parable—but it’s time to bring this introductory chapter to a close. Before we do, let’s review where we’ve come so far. We began by talking about how the prose we read and hear on a regular basis is stale, dull, and uninspired. However, when writers and orators consciously employ a variety of linguistic tools that have been well known for three thousand years, prose can be elevated to such a degree it rivals the grace and beauty of poetry. Of the many stylistic devices that are available, we have focused on the Big Three—analogies, metaphors, and similes.
The rest of the book is a compilation of nearly two thousand quotations, all formed by the use of analogies, metaphors, and similes. The book is organized into topics—like politics, sports, sex, and love—but I’ve decided to give each chapter a metaphorical title.
Some titles—like “Sports Is the Toy Department of Life”—clearly indicate the subject of the chapter. Other titles are not so obvious. The very next chapter—the most personal in the book—is titled “An Ice-Axe for the Frozen Sea Within.” The meaning of the title will become clear to you shortly, but I don’t think it is an exaggeration to say that the metaphor—from Franz Kafka—may forever alter the way you look at your book-reading efforts. The table of contents at the beginning of the book provides all the chapter titles as well as the subject area of each one.
In each chapter, I’ll begin by introducing the subject in a way that I hope will whet your interest. After a few foundation-laying pages, I’ll present a wide variety of quotations that fit within the theme of the chapter. In every chapter except one—which I’ll explain when you get there—the quotations will be arranged alphabetically by author. If you want to locate observations from a particular person, consult the Author Index.
Throughout the book, you will occasionally find brief commentary after a quotation. In general, this will be my attempt to explain an observation, tell you something about the author, or provide some other information to enhance your appreciation of the quotation.
This book is aimed at readers who have a deep interest in seeing language used in creative ways. It should also appeal to readers with a professional interest in language and the effective presentation of ideas: writers, poets, journalists, speakers, preachers, speechwriters, and teachers, especially those who teach writing, poetry, and public speaking.
In his 1625 classic Essays, the great English man of letters Francis Bacon wrote:
Some books are to be tasted, others to be swallowed,
and some few to be chewed and digested.
I’m not exactly sure where this book belongs in Bacon’s scheme of things, but I do know one thing for sure about how to approach this book. Go slowly. Like a museum curator putting together a special art exhibition, I have attempted to compile some of history’s greatest word paintings. So, just as you would be ill advised to rush through an art museum, it would be a mistake to speed-read your way through this book. Take the time to savor the observations and to admire the skill that was required to create them.
Professionally, I’ve been a psychologist for over thirty years. Personally, I’m a voracious reader and a serious quotation collector. Just as some people collect coins, or stamps, or butterflies, I collect quotations. I’ve been doing it for more than four decades, and I now have hundreds of thousands of specimens in my personal collection.
This is my fourth book in the word and language arena and like the previous ones, it has been a labor of love. But the process of writing a book is always more fun at the beginning and middle stages than at the end. For the past six weeks, with a production deadline staring me in the face, the project has consumed my life. Winston Churchill described the process best, and he did it metaphorically:
Writing a book is an adventure.
To begin with, it is a toy and an amusement;
then it becomes a mistress,
and then it becomes a master, and then a tyrant.
The last phase is that just as you are about to be reconciled to your
servitude, you kill the monster, and fling him out to the public.
Before I fling this monster in your direction, let me add one more thing. While I’ve been committed to accuracy, I’m sure I’ve made some mistakes. If you discover any errors or would simply like to offer some feedback, please write me in care of the publisher or e-mail me at DrMGrothe@aol. com.
I’ve also launched a Web site where you can delve into the topic a bit deeper or sign up for my free weekly e-newsletter (“Dr. Mardy’s Quotes of the Week”). Come up and visit sometime: www.MetaphorAmor.com.