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Discourse and Inference
Try to find the instances of metaphorical language in the following passages of written and spoken language. The first sample highlights the metaphors, making them easy to spot. See if you can also find the metaphorical language in the other examples.
A.
Whenever we talk about [time], we do so in terms of something lesser. We find or lose time, like a set of keys; we save and spend it, like money. Time creeps, crawls, flies, flees, flows, and stands still; it is abundant or scarce; it weighs on us with palpable heft. Bells toll for a “long” or “short” time, as if their sound could be measured with a ruler.
—Alan Burdick, Why Time Flies: A Mostly Scientific Investigation, Simon & Schuster
B.
I spent much of my time in Halls Creek visiting the Kimberley Language Resource Center: an unremarkable house from the outside, a treasure-trove within…. Founded in 1984, working on a shoestring, the language center boasts an archive that includes hundreds of CDs and reel-to-reel tapes. As well as interpreting tracts to desert-dwellers, it has released more than fifteen hundred cassettes and dozens of videos, not to mention a shelf or two of books. “We’ve been tearing our hair out producing resources,” Cath said. “And producing doesn’t make any difference.”
—Mark Abley, Spoken Here: Travels Among Threatened Languages, Houghton Mifflin
C.
Why are we so mesmerized by bees? We turn to them as guides to eternal mysteries, use them as examples of desirable human virtues, and apply their products for our physical and spiritual healing. Do bees just provide useful metaphors, or do they actually possess qualities that hold the key to profound understandings and health?
—Mark L. Winston, Bee Time: Lessons from the Hive, Harvard University Press
D.
The state of youth sports in America is either booming or suffering, depending on which box score you’re checking.
You could follow the money. Kids’ sports is a nearly $17 billion industry, which makes it larger than the business of professional baseball and approximately the same size as the National Football League. Or you could follow the kids. The share of children ages 6 to 12 who play a team sport on a regular basis declined from 41.5 percent in 2011 to 37 percent in 2017.
—The Atlantic, “American Meritocracy Is Killing Youth Sports,” Nov. 6, 2018
E.
In the following sample of spontaneous speech, the speaker is describing the end of a recent relationship:
“Eventually, I just got sick of it. He couldn’t handle that I had my own life. He wanted to stay connected 24/7, but you know. I needed some breathing room. I wanted to do stuff with my friends, pursue my dreams, or just chill out on my own some time. He hated that because none of it revolved around him. Eventually, I put a line in the sand. I said, look, I need to be on my own most nights of the week, and we can do stuff on one day each weekend. He said that would be OK for him, but it wasn’t. He kept complaining and laying a guilt trip on me. So I got fed up and dumped him.”
Click here to reveal the metaphors lurking in these examples: