Metaphor is a speech turnover in which the meaning of a word is transferred from it to another word or phrase. The concept itself was invented by the ancient Greek philosopher Aristotle.
When people first learned to speak, nouns and verbs were enough for them. Then the vocabulary was supplemented with adjectives. Everything could be limited to this, if it were not for the desire of a person to decorate, decorate and diversify everything for his own pleasure. Well, the rain can't just be strong and cold. For completeness of sensation for an experienced speaker, it will become icy, wintery, with scalding frosty drops. And its sound will be not just rustling fallen leaves under the janitor's broom, but also ringing and gurgling along the drainpipes and drumming the autumn march on tin windowsills.
When reading classical literature, a true connoisseur often admires beautiful comparisons and metaphors. It is they who make the printed publication not just information with a listing of facts and actions, but an interesting literary work that awakens fantasy and imagination. How can you come up with this yourself?
To do this, you just need to let go of your stereotypes, take a walk and listen to your own feelings. By the way, the phrase “let go for a walk” is also a metaphor. To find an original metaphor, you need to imagine what it looks like that you want to beautifully describe in words. Don't be afraid to be the first and misunderstood. If one person can see a black man's chickenpox or a leaky umbrella in the night starry sky, then another, having read this metaphor, will certainly be able to imagine all this. If a thick fog seems to someone like cotton candy, then someone with a good imagination will even want to lick it. Just do not write definitions through the conjunction "as" or "as if", so that instead of a metaphor you do not get an ordinary comparison. Let the cotton candy of fog creep over the road in the description of nature, and the black umbrella of the night sky stretches overhead into a small hole.
Oddly enough, but in science metaphors are used as often as in creative research. But they take root more firmly and more reliably after some time. The explanation is simple - the name that is initially given is easier to get accustomed to than the name that something is renamed. For example, the concept of "electric current" was named so as soon as scientists learned about it. No one can call a light wave otherwise, although everyone knows that this is not at all the wave that we know from birth.
There are a lot of metaphors that have been used so long and often that they have already "set the teeth on edge" for the reading and listening public. For example, "tired to death", "bloody moon" or "airplane nose". But these expressions were also once unusual and original.
