Dead metaphor
From The Art and Popular Culture Encyclopedia
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A dead metaphor is a metaphor that through much use has become part of the language. Our language contains tens of thousands of such dead metaphors, in fact it would be hard for a language to form without them. See Semantic change. The expression dead metaphor is also sometimes used in a derogatory sense to mean a cliché. However, a truly dead metaphor is one in which the original meaning is largely forgotten and not simply a cliché.
Some examples of dead metaphors include (the metaphoric or metonymic word is given in bold):
- flowerbed
- head teacher
- forerunner
- to run for office
- to lose face
- to lend a hand
- to broadcast
- pilot -- originally meant the rudder of a boat.
- flair -- originally meant a sweet smell.
- a computer mouse
- fishing for compliments
- seeds of doubt
- world wide web
- tulip -- originally meant the eastern headdress, the turban.
- kidney bean
- turtleneck sweater
- turn-on
- flared jeans
- he ploughed through the car at traffic lights
- blood money
- foothills or the foot of a mountain
- brow of the hill
- branches of government
- windfall gain
- facade -- originally meant the face in its original language, latin.
- fly
Because the speaker often does not know the metaphor's literal meaning, the user understands the phrase as a complete semantic unit rather than as a metaphor, i.e. the entire phrase carries a meaning distinct from the sum of the meanings of its individual components.
For instance, horses once played an important part in human activities, but nowadays few people in the West have experience of them. Despite this, modern English is riddled with equine metaphors: "holding the reins of power", "trot it out", "take the bit between one's teeth", "be saddled with", "put him through his paces", "ride roughshod over", "flogging a dead horse", "give the whip hand", "hold your horses", "long in the tooth", "put out to pasture", "getting his oats" and so on. These may be considered dead metaphors as the historical equine-related meaning is generally not appreciated by the contemporary user.
