"Metaphor: A figure of speech (more specifically a trope) that associates two distinct things;
the representation of often thing by another. The image (or activity or concept) used to represent or
'figure' something else is the vehicle of the figure of speech; the thing represented is called the tenor.
For instance, in the sentence 'That child is a mouse,' the child is the tenor, whereas the mouse
is the vehicle. The image of a mouse is being used to represent the child, perhaps to emphasize his
or her timidity."
Ross Murfin and Supryia M. Ray,
The Bedford Glossary of Critical and Literary Terms (2003), p. 262
"Derived from the Greek roots meta (over, across, or beyond) and phor (to carry),
the literal meaning of metaphor is "to carry across." A metaphor carries across a name from the source
to the target. Rhetoricians throughout history have recognized metaphors as linguistic hand-me-downs,
meanings passed on from an old word to a new thing."
James Geary, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor (2012), p. 9
The Road Not Taken
by Robert Frost, August 1915
Two roads diverged in a yellow wood,
And sorry I could not travel both
And be one traveler, long I stood
And looked down one as far as I could
To where it bent in the undergrowth;
Then took the other, as just as fair,
And having perhaps the better claim,
Because it was grassy and wanted wear;
Though as for that the passing there
Had worn them really about the same,
And both that morning equally lay
In leaves no step had trodden black.
Oh, I kept the first for another day!
Yet knowing how way leads on to way,
I doubted if I should ever come back.
I shall be telling this with a sigh
Somewhere ages and ages hence:
Two roads diverged in a wood, and I—
I took the one less traveled by,
And that has made all the difference.
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