MisterVee87 t1_iuxb3qh wrote
Reply to comment by DrakBalek in The meaning crisis and language II — We need to ‘believe’ myth and metaphor in order to understand ourselves by Melodic_Antelope6490
Traffic flowed like a river is a simile, not a metaphor.
Traffic is a river is a metaphor. And it requires none of the things you said. It requires the ability to abstractly compare the two things for their abstracted commonality.
DrakBalek t1_iuxcd7x wrote
That's fair, I usually get those two mixed up.
. . . of course, so did the author of that Medium article . . .
>It requires the ability to abstractly compare the two things for their abstracted commonality.
And how should the audience compare these two things for the abstracted commonality if they're not familiar the things they're comparing?
Melodic_Antelope6490 OP t1_iuyfj14 wrote
To clarify here - A simile is a subcategory of a metaphor, it's just stated differently. So all similes are metaphors but not all metaphors are similes. It's arguable there are only two tropes - metaphor and symbol, with metonymy and synecdoche essentially being kinds of metaphors. But Traffic flowed like a river is a verbal way of referencing an underlying metaphor 'traffic is a river', just like 'we got off to a bumpy start' references an underlying metaphor 'a relationship is a journey', or 'they really swallowed that' the metaphor 'ideas are food'. In other words metaphors can be referenced indirectly.
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