A metaphor can give people an insight they cannot forget.
A metaphor is a non-literal use of language. A metaphor says that one thing is another, quite different sort of thing. To be a metaphor, it must literally not be true. Paradoxically, in its non-literal-truth, metaphor is the most effective way to communicate deeper truths.
We use metaphors to make the abstract seem concrete; to make the vague seem clear; to help us to feel that we understand mysterious things, to feel that we can reason about them, to feel comfortable with them.
Comedians use metaphor for one-liners. Politicians use metaphor for applause lines. All speakers and writers use metaphor to seek immortality on the pages of Bartlett's.
As an example of using metaphor to understand the mysterious, when Hamlet was contemplating suicide, he needed to reason about death, but who understands death? So Hamlet had to use a metaphor: "To die, to sleep;/ to sleep: perchance to dream: ay, there's the rub;/ for in that sleep of death what dreams may come..." He equated death to sleep, with which we have experience, but that gave him pause. Might death perhaps not be end?
Not all metaphors are powerful. With use, a metaphor can become stale. With extensive use, it can die as a metaphor and take on a literal meaning, as the word "star" in "she is a star." It is possible to refresh stale metaphors and revive dying ones by simply asking, "What kind of?"
To show how that's done, I devoted about a half an hour while stretched out in my recliner to finding interesting ways to use the metaphor, LIFE IS A STORY. First I asked, "What kind of story?" and I got "a work of fiction" and "a play." From these I also got "a book," which isn't built on LIFE IS A STORY, but I'm not going to turn down metaphors because they were not precisely what I was seeking. Those, however, didn't go far enough. I had to ask again, "What kind of...?": "What kind of a work of fiction?", "What kind of a play?", "What kind of a book?" I got somewhere around two dozen metaphors. Here I'll share six of them just as I wrote them. They can all use refinement and editing. "Some lives are built on character; some, on action; some, on ideas; and some, on milieu."
"The story of my life remains unpublished, while other people have best sellers."
"My autobiography needs a subject."
"It's a fairy-tale life: a sane person, a crazy world."
"Some are actors. Some are audience. Some are prompters clutching last year's script." (I've used this for a T-shirt design.)
"Some lives are tragedies. Some are comedies. Most are improvs."
There you have it: by asking, "What kind of...?" you can quickly find an abundance of fresh metaphors to choose among. Not all will be winners, of course, but the odds of finding a winner in two dozen is much greater than finding it in a single stale metaphor.
THOMAS CHRISTOPHER offers information on how to be a wit on the web page, How To Create Witty Sayings. He created a web T-shirt shop, WittySelfExpression.com, as a place to apply rhetorical techniques.
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