"Narcissus" by Caravaggio (c. 1598). Source: Wikimedia Commons/Public Domain What is an allegory? An allegory (Greek, "a speaking about something else") is a complete and cohesive narrative, for ...

No matter if you're in school or well past your days in English class, figures of speech are used every day in our lives. From songs and television shows to conversations and advertisements, we often ...

This lesson is as fun as recess! Join Ms. Randi House as she talks about similes and metaphors and how they make reading a lot more interesting. Rise and Shine is available to stream on pbs.org and ...

A metaphor is a figure of speech that compares one thing to another without using “like” or “as.” This guide explains the ...

Source: Francesco Bini/Wikimedia Commons/CC BY-SA 4.0 The most famous of all allegories is the Allegory of the Cave, in which Plato compares unphilosophical people to prisoners who, having spent their ...

Samuel Taylor Coleridge called metaphor “an act of the imagination,” whereas he relegated simile to “an act of fancy.” Photo from National Portrait Gallery, 1795. Public Domain Samuel Taylor Coleridge ...

Shakespeare didn’t suggest that a person by any other name would be just as likeable, Dr. Martin Luther King Jr. didn’t just have a vision, and Muhammad Ali didn’t just throw punches. Instead, they ...

“Education is not the filling of a pail,” reads the sign above my colleague’s desk, “but the lighting of a fire.” These lines — often attributed to the poet W.B. Yeats — happen to articulate my own ...

Now I’m looking for something a little more specific — pithy metaphors and jokes, maybe two sentences at most. Metaphors are the Rolls Royce of figures. Or, to put it more aptly, metaphors are the ...