meta-phor-play

as a wee raynorling, i lumped the concept of metaphor into the same category as rhyme and alliteration—mere ornaments of language. but just as my taste in fashion matured from aeropostale and abercrombie & fitch to armani and prada so too have my thoughts on the importance of the metaphor. 

indeed i now recognise the metaphor as the very nature of human thought. to understand through metaphor is perhaps our single greatest evolutionary advantage. it is what has elevated the house of homo to the top spot in the kingdom animalia—and as far as i’m convinced, the sole reason why the robots will never conquer us, even the ones that look like arnold schwarzenegger.

i could rant on and on but i will spare you. instead i will treat you to a few f-entries from a dictionary of similes by frank jenners wilstach (1917). this extraordinary book groups metaphors by key words. thus, were i unfamiliar with the concept of melancholy, i could turn to page 256 and see how great poets described the concept in terms of other things. goethe says, “melancholy as a slighted damsel.” poe describes it as “the moaning of the distant sea.” and hawthorne: “like the voice of a child that was spending its infancy without playfulness.” and now i have fairly good idea of what melancholy is without having ever read its actual definition. this is the power of metaphor.

here are some other entries in the key word of f:

• That face of yours looks like the title-page of a whole volume of roguery. —Colley Cibber
• A face that was like an open letter in a foreign tongue. —Henry James
• Faces did glister like the key-hole of a powdering-tub.—Rabelais
• Fades like a once-heard tale.—Lewis Morris
• Failed like a brief dream of unremaining glory.—Shelley
• Faint as the music that in dreams we hear.—Mary A. de Vere
• Fair as original light first from the chaos shot.—Richard Lovelace
• Fall like small birds beaten by the storm against a dead wall, dead.—P.J. Bailey
• Falls like a slaughtered beast headless.—Swinburne
• Familiar as a voice of home.—John Crawford
• Fangless as the fat worms of the grave.—James Whitcomb Riley
• Ferocious as a bogus archangel full of cocaine.—H.L. Mencken
• Fierce as a blast of hate from hell.—Swinburne
• More fine than moonbeams.—Ibid.
• Fists like shoulders of mutton.—Balzac
• Foaming at the mouth like champagne bottles.—Israel Zangwill
• Follow one another like ducks in a gutter.—Beaumont and Fletcher
• Fragrant as the breath of angels.—O.W. Holmes
• Fruitless as the lamentations of a prophet crying in the wilderness.—Frank Horridge