Sometimes a spade is not a spade.

The World’s Oldest Metaphor, by Marcello Gori

Aren’t metaphors merely a colorful way of saying something literal, that is otherwise, a non-boring way of saying something boring? Merely the rhetorician’s weapon that subjects his/her audience into compliance? The dictionary of literary terms denote the metaphor as a figure of speech where something is described in the terms of another, or attribute something with a quality that is associated with something else. For instance, Walt Whitman’s metaphor for grass is “the beautiful uncut hair of graves.” The relation between the two terms in a metaphor is implicit, unlike a simile, where it is explicit. Continue reading Sometimes a spade is not a spade.