Add Yahoo as a preferred source to see more of our stories on Google. No matter if you're in school or well past your days in English class, figures of speech are used every day in our lives. From ...

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 ...

Marble bust of Aristotle. Public domain. Metaphors are not user-friendly. They are hard to find and hard to use well. Unfortunately, metaphor is a mainstay of good lyric writing; indeed, of most ...

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 ...

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 ...

"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 ...

It can be quite revealing to tune in to the kind of imagery people use when talking. Consider, for example, how people speak about the current economic crisis. Some view the economy as a complex ...

The player kicked the ball. The patient kicked the habit. The villain kicked the bucket. The verbs are the same. The syntax is identical. The player kicked the ball. The patient kicked the habit. The ...

No matter if you're in school or well past your days in English class, figures of speech are used every day in our lives. From songs and television shows to conversations and advertisements, we often ...