Sheep Sheer metaphor

Aristotle wrote: The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor. Plato didn't trust metaphor because it wasn't measurable.

This morning I looked at my recently shorn pathetic basil (that had involuntarily offered up all their leaves to a pestocide binge on my part) and I immediately thought of sheep.

I said aloud, poor sheep-shorn basil. An involuntary metaphor!

Then I corrected myself: and said, The basil looks like it was shorn by sheep.

Perhaps my involuntary metaphor was due to a profound lack of morning tea in my system that induced such a thought. Either that, or it was the catnip.

The point is, I saw the metaphor first in my mind's eye, then I backed off, and turned it into a simile, which is weaker, albeit safer.  Metaphor makes me look crazy, simile is a logical rationalization process.

I think that we think in metaphor first without realizing it, and then work our way back toward the logic of simile so that people don't think that we're completely nuts! Crazy talk.


Who is the master of metaphor?

Donna Champion That would be Pablo Neruda.

Maureen Hurley The shorter a word, the more meanings it has. -Paul A Delaney, meteorologist

Donna Champion e.e. cummings?

Chris Devine George Lakoff or Geoffrey Nunberg

Donna Champion The apparition of these faces in the crowd;
Petals on a wet, black bough.

What nobler employment, or more valuable to the state, than that of the man who instructs the rising generation? --Cisero

Maureen Hurley Good old Chick Pea had some pithy quotes for a fireman!

gleaned from a Facebook post, rev 10/17