LA
Author
LATRAME
@latrame
We learn figures of speech the way we learn a list of dead vocabulary. Metaphor, metonymy, oxymoron. Ticked, recited, forgotten.
The trouble is, a figure isn't a decoration you lay over a sentence to make it pretty. It's a shortcut for thought.
"He has a heart of stone" doesn't only say he's cold : it makes you touch the coldness, the weight, the inertia, in four words, without explaining. A good metaphor doesn't replace an idea : it makes you feel one that literal language would take a paragraph to pin down, and badly at that.
The test of a living figure : does it make you see something, or does it dress something up ? "Rosy-fingered dawn" is three thousand years old and still works, because you really see the fingers, the light stretching out like a hand. "A radiant sun" makes you see nothing at all. Same length, two worlds.
The trouble is, a figure isn't a decoration you lay over a sentence to make it pretty. It's a shortcut for thought.
"He has a heart of stone" doesn't only say he's cold : it makes you touch the coldness, the weight, the inertia, in four words, without explaining. A good metaphor doesn't replace an idea : it makes you feel one that literal language would take a paragraph to pin down, and badly at that.
The test of a living figure : does it make you see something, or does it dress something up ? "Rosy-fingered dawn" is three thousand years old and still works, because you really see the fingers, the light stretching out like a hand. "A radiant sun" makes you see nothing at all. Same length, two worlds.