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metaphor
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show 189 more with this conextual meaning
  • "the bad guy is always a black-hearted villain. ... The tones of black and white have the greatest amount of contrast between them, therefore writers and poets, who have always dealt with extremes in passion and people, use black and white to create those images of contrast. Can you think of any other example where color is used as a metaphor to express an idea?"   (source)
    metaphor = a figure of speech in which a word is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity -- as when Shakespeare wrote, "All the world's a stage."
  • "She's raising wordless screams and bleeding invisible blood."
    "In a metaphorical sense?"   (source)
    metaphorical = symbolic--not literal
  • I spoke metaphorically.   (source)
    metaphorically = using a figure of speech
  • Forget the hashed metaphor.   (source)
    metaphor = a figure of speech in which a word is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity -- as when Shakespeare wrote, "All the world's a stage."
  • There was, of course, the matter of forty million people I picked up by the time the whole thing was finished, but that's getting all metaphoric.†   (source)
  • I wondered if they might be used — metaphorically, of course — to demonstrate the existence of God.†   (source)
  • Let us employ the metaphor of salt.†   (source)
  • "It's only a metaphor.†   (source)
  • Before CyberStorm, the term cyberwar had more of a metaphorical quality, like the War on Obesity, but not anymore, now that the damage had been seen, the costs tallied, and the horrors witnessed.†   (source)
  • With limited instruction, he had perfected the art of withholding his insights, forgoing his witticisms, curbing the use of metaphors, similes, and analogies—in essence, exercising every muscle of poetic restraint.†   (source)
  • But I saw the movie as a sort of metaphor for my own life.†   (source)
  • Or was that some kind of half-assed metaphor?†   (source)
  • Magdalene's story has been shouted from the rooftops for centuries in all kinds of metaphors and languages.†   (source)
  • " But he's not nodding his head or pushing my hair behind my ear and his grandmother's ring is sitting on Mother's velvet sofa like some ridiculous metaphor.†   (source)
  • Arnold contended, only half jokingly, that the entire world was increasingly described by the metaphor of the theme park.†   (source)
  • Prairie settlers always saw a sea or an ocean of grass, could never think of any other metaphor, since most of them had lately seen the Atlantic.†   (source)
  • In Hasnapur the metaphorical and the literal converge.†   (source)
  • There are a thousand metaphors and all of them are inadequate: forty bombs per aircraft, four hundred and eighty altogether, seventy-two thousand pounds of explosives.†   (source)
  • It was just a metaphor.†   (source)
  • Dell thinks that he's going to take me right back to Jamison, but Mai puts her foot down, metaphorically speaking.†   (source)
  • She remembered reading them in Mr. Pierce's seventh-grade English class, talking about symbolism, metaphors, and denouement.†   (source)
  • I love metaphors and she has come up with the idea of lighting candles to symbolize my past, present, and future.†   (source)
  • My grandfather was literal minded, not a man who traded in metaphor or suggestion.†   (source)
  • "They're a metaphor for acceptance; they've sworn to protect a world that hates and fears them."†   (source)
  • While trying to make sense of the history of cell culture and the complicated ethical debate surrounding the use of human tissues in research, I'd be accused of conspiracy and slammed into a wall both physically and metaphorically, and I'd eventually find myself on the receiving end of something that looked a lot like an exorcism.†   (source)
  • Ford leaped to his rescue, hazarding "… counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor of the … er …"†   (source)
  • Was he being metaphorical?†   (source)
  • Though I tried not to think of the Austrian man who had kept the woman locked in a basement for twenty years, it was unfortunately the metaphor that came to mind.†   (source)
  • But still, we are forced to admit that in this woeful world, there exist objects with an almost palpable energy of menace …. spatulas that seem cursed, couches that contain literal and metaphorical stains of the past, houses that seem to perpetually groan and moan for the sins contained in their environs.†   (source)
  • Crazy Cat becomes a metaphor for my situation.†   (source)
  • 'Metaphorically or literally?' smiled his employer.†   (source)
  • "I'VE DECIDED BAGGAGE carousels are a perfect metaphor for life," Olly says from atop the edge of a nonmoving one.†   (source)
  • I hope that's metaphorical, Jack.†   (source)
  • They were metaphorical.†   (source)
  • It seemed a little "admin" or bureaucratic—coat-and-tie stuff, to use a civilian workplace metaphor.†   (source)
  • Or perhaps the meaning is more metaphorical: Did Paul and Silas reconcile the man's doubts?†   (source)
  • Wondering if the comlog had translated the word "sleep" properly or if it might be an idiom or metaphor for "die," I nodded and followed them toward the village at the edge of the Cleft.†   (source)
  • Does it fit into a larger, more hidden, metaphor?†   (source)
  • Previously Depew had promised the members of the Whitechapel Club that if Chicago prevailed he would present himself at the club's next meeting, to be hacked apart by the Ripper himself—metaphorically, he presumed, although at the Whitechapel Club could one ever be certain?†   (source)
  • We ask,Is this a metaphor?†   (source)
  • Bailey paused, as if to allow the two of them to soak in the apt and tidy metaphor he'd conjured.†   (source)
  • A metaphoric unity was broken.†   (source)
  • I found it strange that Meg, a street urchin and Dumpster warrior, would relate so well to garden metaphors, but Chiron was an excellent teacher.†   (source)
  • That story has to be a metaphor for something else.†   (source)
  • Fast food has proven to be a revolutionary force in American life; I am interested in it both as a commodity and as a metaphor.†   (source)
  • I'm just being metaphoric," Kim said.†   (source)
  • It was a metaphor to fill our lives — that river, that first crossing, the mother of all crossings.†   (source)
  • Nobody on the faculty of any college or university in this part of the country can so much as utter the word Hitler without a nod in your direction, literally or metaphorically.†   (source)
  • If I may return to my earlier metaphor - you will excuse my putting it so coarsely they are like a man who will, at the slightest provocation, tear off his suit and his shirt and run about screaming.†   (source)
  • I don't fully reject the customer-service model, but I think it's important to use the right industry metaphor.†   (source)
  • For me to appear to you as a woman and suggest that you call me Papa is simply to mix metaphors, to help you keep from falling so easily back into your religious conditioning.†   (source)
  • They like their demons metaphorical.†   (source)
  • "A metaphor, or simply a figure of speech?" he says, also frowning.†   (source)
  • When you think about it, that's a more accurate metaphor than our present one.†   (source)
  • If I'd let my mind roll with that boxing metaphor just a little longer, I might've followed it to its logical conclusion: In a boxing match, the fighters absorb some vicious blows because they're ready for them.†   (source)
  • And here the metaphor of the gingerbread mold does not hold up because the mold exists independently of the particular gingerbread cookies.†   (source)
  • Hearing "civilized" languages debase humans, watching cultural exorcisms debase literature, seeing oneself preserved in the amber of disqualifying metaphors—I can say that my narrative project is as difficult today as it was thirty years ago.†   (source)
  • My colleagues will no doubt hang me metaphorically, but I say let them hang.†   (source)
  • The powerful metaphors serve, it may be inferred, as a warning against the abuse of women, especially pregnant or nursing ones.†   (source)
  • Martin was dafter than a syphilitic polecat—where do I get these metaphors from?†   (source)
  • Alex didn't necessarily think that Josie was hiding anything more than any other teenager, but it was different: a normal parent might metaphorically judge her child's friends, whereas Alex could do it legally.†   (source)
  • In some ways, I saw the garden as a metaphor for certain aspects of my life.†   (source)
  • All I knew was that I was at the end of my rope, and to continue the metaphor, for a long time, I was barely hanging on.†   (source)
  • Your metaphors are bumping into each other, my friend.†   (source)
  • There are many metaphors for the role of foreign assistance.†   (source)
  • There beside the hulk of the ruined car, countless miles from anywhere, Pollard was standing in a metaphor for his own life.†   (source)
  • I stared straight at him as it clicked, letting him know I got his little metaphor.†   (source)
  • She'd even used a metaphor, about the tunnel.†   (source)
  • We're obviously veering into sports metaphor territory.†   (source)
  • As I recall it now, it ran five pages and rape was only a muddled metaphor that I tried to contain inside a wordy albatross that purported to be about society and violence and the difference between television and reality.†   (source)
  • That was such a crappy metaphor.†   (source)
  • With Mr. Taylor, it's either a marathon metaphor or a citation from Scripture, and Cedric has heard the race routine many times before.†   (source)
  • And, if you'll forgive the dramatic metaphor, I was a lousy swimmer.†   (source)
  • Tomas did not realize at the time that metaphors are dangerous.†   (source)
  • Still, it's an apt metaphor for our profession.†   (source)
  • Is this one of those metaphor things?†   (source)
  • But half an hour of Kara's prying and another ten minutes of Tom beating his head against a metaphorical wall yielded nothing.†   (source)
  • Or is this," she gestured to the severed head the figure held, "just metaphorical?"†   (source)
  • It's what trousermen call a metaphor.†   (source)
  • He searched for a suitable metaphor, used the corner of the scarf again.†   (source)
  • Then Adams put the issue squarely where it belonged, saying, in essence, that all such stories of slave masters and their slave women were metaphors for the overriding sin of slavery itself.†   (source)
  • "Show me the door, tell me where it goes, and I'll help you," he said, wishing she would stop speaking in metaphors and give him the hard facts.†   (source)
  • I heard the bitter edge to my explanation and knew it was because of where I now stood–physically and metaphorically in the middle of nowhere.†   (source)
  • A temporary gathering of bits, a few random dust specks, so to speak--pure metaphor, you understand--then by chance a vast floating cloud of dustspecks, an expanding universe--†   (source)
  • Catch yourself in conversation with a vye, and it'll be using ominous words and violent metaphors—toying with its prey.†   (source)
  • This was only the beginning of Billy's miseries in the metaphor.†   (source)
  • "Baseball metaphors don't work with me."†   (source)
  • By what right did you use my work to make an unwarranted, preposterous switch into another field, pull an inapplicable metaphor and draw a monstrous generalization out of what is merely a mathematical problem?†   (source)
  • She also spoke of the wild metaphors characteristic of Texas speech.†   (source)
  • It was a metaphor.†   (source)
  • I remembered that moment often and wondered what mystery or metaphor of chemistry I had stumbled upon, what fierce, accidental power I had unleashed.†   (source)
  • The anonymous poets returned again and again to the same metaphors.†   (source)
  • Metaphorically," she added with an easier smile than she'd expected to pull off.†   (source)
  • Or that (and this I draw mostly from the side notes, scribbled in several hands) he is making fitful passage, in a metaphorical sense, through the epic "seasons" of life.†   (source)
  • On that account, the canons of metaphor, poetic and visual, should be revised.†   (source)
  • Dominique gives a metaphoric shrug.†   (source)
  • Don't ask me where these people find their metaphors, I don't know.'†   (source)
  • "It cost an arm and a leg' is a metaphor," Tyler said quickly.†   (source)
  • … Rather strong on metaphor, mind you.†   (source)
  • Or, to use one of your own metaphors, we till the field until the crop is ripe.†   (source)
  • Heretofore the naming of names has gone on either literally or as metaphor.†   (source)
  • "A narrow escape," said Farrell later, reinforcing my metaphor with unconscious precision.†   (source)
  • If the liberal arts do nothing else, they provide engaging metaphors for the thinking they displace.†   (source)
  • It is said a dog lives as long as its teeth; metaphorically, Leamas' teeth had been drawn; and it was Mundt who had drawn them.†   (source)
  • I wonder whether the nickname Nightingale, for the brigand son of Odikmantii, in the well-known Russian folk epic, is not a metaphor based on similarity of sound.†   (source)
  • With piles of books and papers heaped on his desk, speaking frequently to nearly empty galleries and an indifferent chamber, Benton poured forth thousands of statistics, classical illustrations and magnificent metaphors upon colleagues with farmore formal schooling and originality of thought.†   (source)
  • MORE Metaphorical arms.†   (source)
  • So you believe this portal is a metaphor.†   (source)
  • "It's a metaphor for adolescence," my mother piped up.†   (source)
  • Maybe we invented metaphor as a response to pain.†   (source)
  • The captain was taken with the beauty of the metaphor, and let his silence imply surrender.†   (source)
  • Lead them around by the nose; that is a metaphor.†   (source)
  • If that's not a metaphor for some serious sex, I don't know what is.†   (source)
  • Coach sure loved those military metaphors.†   (source)
  • Big white whale is a metaphor for everything.†   (source)
  • Langdon apparently decided the unseemly metaphor had gone far enough.†   (source)
  • Or is a metaphor a definite category beneath the heading of 'figure of speech'?†   (source)
  • AIDS is the mother lode of symbol and metaphor.†   (source)
  • "I'm not so good with metaphors, dear," Vivian says.†   (source)
  • And she wouldn't be making these stupid baseball metaphors.†   (source)
  • There was the hope Dr. Holden had talked about—the grass was a metaphor for his hope.†   (source)
  • "Hmmm," he said, "counterpoint the surrealism of the underlying metaphor …"†   (source)
  • It's all a metaphor—a symbol of the Ancient Mysteries."†   (source)
  • You are using some kind of metaphor that I cannot understand.†   (source)
  • It was covered in sexual analogies and metaphors today.†   (source)
  • Okay, I'll go with Evan's mayfly metaphor; mayflies are prettier, and at least they can fly.†   (source)
  • I didn't need to be a god of poetry to spot the metaphor.†   (source)
  • My kingdom for an I. Felt myself slipping, but even that's a metaphor.†   (source)
  • This means that the word metaphor is a metaphor.†   (source)
  • They'd probably say I thought football metaphors had the same effect.†   (source)
  • I've heard him use the fishing metaphor many times.†   (source)
  • These are examples of metaphors I laughed my socks off.†   (source)
  • But you have to be careful which metaphor you choose, because it matters.†   (source)
  • It's a very common metaphor—a mystical portal through which one must travel to become enlightened.†   (source)
  • I think it is a metaphor for some kind of recursive informational process.†   (source)
  • That is to say, the legend uses the chalice as a metaphor for something far more important.†   (source)
  • He used flowery language like …. well, like every sentence was a pungent bouquet of metaphors.†   (source)
  • Now to the nuts and bolts: Shakespeare didn't invent this metaphor.†   (source)
  • That's it, the perfect metaphor: peeling a banana.†   (source)
  • The second main reason is that people often talk using metaphors.†   (source)
  • That same punch in the nose may be a metaphor.†   (source)
  • Some languages are better at metaphor than others.†   (source)
  • The problems arise when we begin to believe literally in our own metaphors.†   (source)
  • The Lost Word is not a metaphor …. it is real.†   (source)
  • We don't suffer from a shortage of metaphors, is what I mean.†   (source)
  • If there's a metaphor connected with smallpox, I don't want to know about it.†   (source)
  • "He's made the same error many zealots make—confusing metaphor with a literal reality."†   (source)
  • Metaphors are a way to help our minds process the unprocessible.†   (source)
  • This document is going to be the final nail in your client's coffin, if you'll pardon the metaphor."†   (source)
  • He had used this metaphor since middle school.†   (source)
  • My five-year-old brother waving around an empty gun; there's a metaphor for you.†   (source)
  • To mix metaphors, no less religions ….†   (source)
  • Even if she wasn't completely sure where Nana came up with her metaphors.†   (source)
  • The Institute was my destiny, my character, and my metaphor.†   (source)
  • So much for that race metaphor, Cedric thinks to himself, delighted to employ an SAT word.†   (source)
  • Who if I look deeper into the metaphor, torments his father over an imaginary cliff.†   (source)
  • The enigmatic ring of those words will remain inside Takahashi as a kind of metaphor.†   (source)
  • "Carthage versus Rome, to use an Earthly metaphor," Gorku said.†   (source)
  • Because the whole notion of the word becoming flesh is a metaphor, as you said.†   (source)
  • Believe it or not, I actually understood that metaphor.†   (source)
  • A single metaphor can give birth to love.†   (source)
  • And that most of what we know about who Justin really is, we know from the Book through metaphor.†   (source)
  • I have said before that metaphors are dangerous.†   (source)
  • The exception to the metaphor is that we never really used mercenaries.†   (source)
  • "The metaphor does not work perfectly," Tyler said.†   (source)
  • Two of a dozen metaphors we use in the Circle to talk about Justin.†   (source)
  • "The metaphor of Carthage. or the Phoenicians rather, is apt," Gorku said, setting down his tongs.†   (source)
  • Now here was Oedipa, faced with a metaphor of God knew how many parts; more than two, anyway.†   (source)
  • The Demon makes the metaphor not only verbally graceful, but also objectively true.†   (source)
  • "Entropy is a figure of speech, then," sighed Nefastis, "a metaphor.†   (source)
  • He existed for Clerk Maxwell long before the days of the metaphor.†   (source)
  • You live for pretentious metaphors.†   (source)
  • He should avoid arcane metaphors.†   (source)
  • No need for it to go all the way, good God, no , no need to overturn the rocking chair, to use Tom Twyford's metaphor.†   (source)
  • Is that an attempt at a metaphor?†   (source)
  • "That's a very appropriate metaphor."†   (source)
  • Plotinus's metaphor is rather like Plato's myth of the cave: the closer we get to the mouth of the cave, the closer we get to that which all existence springs from.†   (source)
  • At first Velcro would not go into the box, and I felt this was a metaphor for how I was feeling, not wanting to return to my box/backyard.†   (source)
  • Nelson paused for a long time to wipe the ash from his face and puzzle over the metaphor of accessories and outfits.†   (source)
  • The quote is a metaphor, Father!†   (source)
  • One of the challenges with pain—physical or psychic— is that we can really only approach it through metaphor.†   (source)
  • It's a metaphor," says Christina.†   (source)
  • To me the metaphor was, how long can you keep your info to yourself before the National Enquirer comes around and wants it at all costs?†   (source)
  • "You often try to understand your experience through metaphor, Aza: It's like a demon inside of you; you'll call your consciousness a bus, or a prison cell, or a spiral, or a whirlpool, or a loop, or a—I think you once called it a scribbled circle, which I found interesting."†   (source)
  • This was an easy metaphor to summon, since the Colossus was presently stomping on a great many things.†   (source)
  • It would break the metaphor.†   (source)
  • That's a perfectly fine metaphor.†   (source)
  • So grass is a metaphor for life, and for death, and for equality, and for connectedness, and for children, and for God, and for hope.†   (source)
  • The word metaphor means carrying something from one place to another, and it comes from the Greek words liEta (which means from one place to another) and 11)EpEl.†   (source)
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