Consider three sentences, based on a comment by Morley Safer on the radio show Car Talk:
- The Renault in my garage is a crouching tiger.
- The Renault in my garage is like a crouching tiger.
- The Renault in my garage is like a BMW.
Sentences 2 and 3 both use the word “like” but are very different kinds of comparison. Sentence 3 is fact-oriented; 2 is imaginative, an example of figurative language.
Both 1 and 2 are figurative (they paint a picture). Sentence 2 is a simile because it uses “like” (or “as”) to make an explicit comparison. Sentence 1 is a metaphor because the comparison is implied rather than stated.
The difference between a metaphor and a simile is usually a minor matter, hardly worth noticing. In a few cases, a simile may come across as less passionate, more detached, because of the “like” or “as” phrasing:
METAPHOR: When I saw her, my heart caught fire.
SIMILE: When I saw her, it was as though my heart caught fire.
In a general discussion of figurative language, the term “metaphor” may encompass all such comparisons – similes as well as metaphors. During Metaphor Awareness Month, we keep an eagle eye out for figurative comparisons of any stripe.
Photo: Karl Stull; tiger from imgur.com/Kipling Did It Best
