The Power of Metaphor

This is a monster, and in her case it is not a metaphor.

Here's what Wikipedia say a metaphor is:

"A metaphor is a figure of speech that describes a subject by asserting that it is, on some point of comparison, the same as another otherwise unrelated object. Metaphor is a type of analogy and is closely related to other rhetorical figures of speech that achieve their effects via association, comparison or resemblance including allegory, hyperbole, and simile."

Now of course that doesn't make any sense, because you have to have examples to understand it. Before that, I will note that Ray Bradbury said we could not exist without metaphors, and he's exactly right.

Now I will use some examples to show what a metaphor is.

First, a metaphor uses the words "is" or "are." "He is a pig" is a metaphor, because a man is being compared to a pig. He's not literally a pig, but that metaphor means he's fat, ugly, messy.

Here's some more metaphors.

I heard of Hannah Rosin a year or so ago. She's a nut (a metaphor). She wrote The End of Men and is married to...a balless wonder (a metaphor), and she started humiliating her son when he was three by having him argue with her 11-year-old daughter about which sex was superior. As far as I'm concerned, she is an unfit mother and the father is unfit.

I don't use word like "Alpha" and "Beta." I prefer the more accurate words I was raised with. (I will say "mangina" is a great word - and that, too, is a metaphor.)

Hannah Rosin's husband is a wimp and a pussy, and she is a man-hating cunt (the word "skank" also comes to mind).

"Hi! I'm a mangina and wimp, and I was born without testicles!"

Now those are metaphors, because I'm comparing her husband to a wimp and a pussy. He's not literally a pussy, but figuratively he is one. There is no root word for "wimp" that I know of, but it's considered to have become popular from 1915 to 1920.

"Pussy" is a slang term for the female pudenda and is thought to derive ultimately from Low German puse - vulva. "Cunt" derives from a list of London street names from about 1230. That street name was "Gropecuntelane," one of a warren of streets and alleyways given over to the lowest forms of prostitution.

Of course, her husband is not literally a vulva, and Hannah Rosin is not a street given over to the lowest forms of prostitution.

But metaphorically, how they have been described is exactly what they are.

And that, friends, explains just how powerful and necessary metaphors are. And I guarantee you that you now know what a metaphor is. Ain't education grand?