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 ...

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 ...

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 ...

JANINE: Big crowd in tonight, Jeff. JEFF: Including Bob the superfan. Bob here has never actually seen Jess perform. JANINE: Let’s help him picture her in his head - we can use metaphors and similes.

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 ...

"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 ...

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 ...

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 ...