Samuel Taylor Coleridge called metaphor “an act of the imagination,” whereas he relegated simile to “an act of fancy.” Photo from National Portrait Gallery, 1795. Public Domain Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

This lesson is as fun as recess! Join Ms. Randi House as she talks about similes and metaphors and how they make reading a lot more interesting. Rise and Shine is available to stream on pbs.org and ...

"Narcissus" by Caravaggio (c. 1598). Source: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain What is an allegory? An allegory (Greek, "a speaking about something else") is a complete and cohesive narrative, for ...

Jan. 14-20 is Idiom Week, and today we thought we’d have a heart-to-heart about some strange phrases we use. Idioms, metaphors and similes are all types of figurative language. According to ...

Aristotle concluded in the 4th century BC that “the difference is but slight” between similes and metaphors. After all, the metaphor “he’s a bear in the morning,” means the same as the simile “he’s ...

Source: Francesco Bini/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 The most famous of all allegories is the Allegory of the Cave, in which Plato compares unphilosophical people to prisoners who, having spent their ...

If you’ve seen the film “Il Postino,” you probably remember the scene where the actor playing the part of Pablo Neruda explains the meaning of the term “metaphor” to his new friend, the postman. Pablo ...

Legal texts in the sense of statutes and case opinions are not the only subjects for interpretation in law. A trial is a sign-and-symbol stew in which texts are simultaneously presented, interpreted, ...

There are those who regard the availability of metaphor as a blessing, an enhancement of the ranges of life. In one of the epigraphs to Denis Donoghue’s subtle and engrossing new book, the poet John ...