US Intelligence Agency to Compile Mountain of Metaphors

coondoggie writes "Researchers with the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity want to build a repository of metaphors. You read that right. Not just American/English metaphors mind you but those of Iranian Farsi, Mexican Spanish and Russian speakers. Why metaphors? 'Metaphors have been known since Aristotle as poetic or rhetorical devices that are unique, creative instances of language artistry (for example: The world is a stage; Time is money). Over the last 30 years, metaphors have been shown to be pervasive in everyday language and to reveal how people in a culture define and understand the world around them,' IARPA says."

Re:not metaphor examples

[gman003]

Nope. A simile (you suck at spelling, by the way) is "X is like Y", whereas a metaphor is "X is Y". So when I say "your face looks like a horse's ass", I'm insulting you with a simile, but when I say "your brain is a black hole - things go in, and are lost to all time and space", I'm insulting you with a metaphor. Both of those (similes and metaphors) are examples of a broader category of analogies.