Metaphor

After this lesson you will be able to identify metaphors in a

written passage and explain verbally or in writing what is being expressed without the use of explicit comparative

words.

Understanding figures of speech is important. In order to be an

effective critical reader, you will need to be able to determine when

an author is speaking figuratively and not literally.

Being able to identify and understand an author’s use of figurative language

will enable you to…..

make logical connections

between details,

make accurate inferences,

and draw appropriate conclusions about the author’s intended

meaning and the meaning of the text.

Metaphor

The comparison can be implied throughout a

longer work or explicitly stated in a

simple sentence.

A metaphor is often used to explain a complex idea or

concept in different terms, that, hopefully, are more

common and easier to understand.

For example, comparing politics to the game of football to describe a government’s aggressive behavior.

Metaphors are especially common in literature but can

be found just about anywhere.

Read the following passage from Burton G. Malkiel’s

A Random Walk Down Wall Street

A random walk is one in which future steps or directions cannot be predicted on the basis of past actions. When the term is applied to the stock market, it means that short-run changes in stock prices cannot be predicted. Investment advisory services, earnings, predictions, and complicated chart patterns are useless. On Wall Street, the term “random walk” is an obscenity. It is an epithet coined by the academic world and hurled insultingly at the professional soothsayers. Taken to its logical extreme, it means that a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspaper’s pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by the experts.

Now, financial analysts in pin-striped suits do not like being compared with bare-assed apes. They retort that academics are so immersed in equations and Greek symbols (to say nothing of stuffy prose) that they couldn’t tell a bull from a bear.

The author uses a couple of metaphors in this passage.

A “random walk”“means a blindfolded monkey throwing darts at a newspapers pages could select a portfolio that would do just as well as one carefully selected by the experts.”

The stock market symbols of a bull and bear are also metaphors used to describe the conditions

of the stock market.

A bear market is one in which

values are plummeting.

A bull market is one in which

stock prices are rising.

All the world’s a stage, And all the men and

women merely players, They have their exits and their entrances; And one man in his

time plays many parts.

You give it a try…

Identify and explain the

metaphors in this excerpt from

Shakespeare’s As You Like It