dead metaphor
- noun
- /dɛd ˈmɛtəfɔr/
- Literature
:
metáfora muerta
- When people say someone has "nice roots," they are using a dead metaphor that doesn't refer to actual plants anymore.
Examples
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Keywords: biology education; dead metaphor; naturalistic fallacy; root metaphor; worldview
Academic text (2006) -
But to use the dictum of a later time, religious and theological words, especially, were dead metaphors.
Academic text (2010) -
A "streamed forth" is a dead metaphor in the sense that when one uses the phrase, we don't actually picture flowing water.
Blog text (31) -
Although the stream as a physical aspect of the setting does not appear until its introduction in Chapter 16, a passage in "The Custom House" anticipates how the actual stream enlivens or substantiates a dead metaphor.
Blog text (31) -
Notwithstanding the dead metaphor implied by the phrase "in your heart," "as ifs" here introduce two relatively nonfigurative speculations: that Bartram "has begun to doubt" and that she now believes "that nothing will now take place."
Academic text (1992) -
Such expressions are, in themselves, dead metaphors, but in the context of Ollie's narrative, they take on a vivid aptness while paying tribute to the figural nature of the vernacular.
Academic text (2009) -
The phrase "kicking the bucket" is a dead metaphor since it no longer evokes the original imagery of death.
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Expressions like "the heart of the matter" often become dead metaphors that people use without thinking about their figurative meaning.
Synonyms
A phrase that once painted a picture but now names things directly
Antonyms
How Figurative
Surface Forms
Morphology
The parts 'dead' (without life) and 'metaphor' (afigure of speech) point toward a metaphor that is no longer 'alive' or vivid, so a learner who knows both words can plausibly guess it refers to a faded or non-vivid metaphor. However, the full, technical sense—being a commonly used metaphor whose imagery has been lost and is treated as literal—is specialized and not fully predictable from the constituents alone, so prior exposure helps.
Etymology
Dead metaphor comes from the idea that a clear word image has been used so often that people stop seeing the picture. So a dead metaphor is a phrase like leg of a table that now feels 'literal' instead of making us imagine a real leg.