Allegories, Metaphors, and Similes What is the difference between a metaphor and a simile? In two words, not much.

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 ...

Aristotle may have found little difference between simile and metaphor, but our brains apparently do not agree ...

In 1987 I described a set of metaphors for language and thought which have shaped semantic histories of speech verbs and epistemic verbs in the Indo-European language family at large, as well as ...

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 ...

Metaphors and other figurative language are deeply woven into the fabric of human communication, as this very sentence actually demonstrates. But how do our brains translate these metaphors into ...

Geneticists deploy a striking range of metaphors to communicate their science, to promote its value and to suggest its social meaning to the public. So too, critics of science and special interest ...