What is a metaphor and where is it used?

Among the artistic means that any author has, beyond the envy of the genre in which he writes, the metaphor occupies a special place. It allows you to enrich the speech and paint in the necessary emotional shades of almost any work, most accurately convey the image of an object or phenomenon. What is a metaphor? This transfer of the properties of one object or phenomenon to another, based on their similarity, that is, something like a comparison, only hidden, without the word "how" and the like, but the reader fully understands that this is a comparison.

It can be the use of the name of one object in order to describe the properties of another. An example can serve as a line from many poetic works, for example, "Pedestrians muzzle of rain sucked" from Mayakovsky - it is clear that unfortunate citizens no one sucked, but they just fell under heavy rain, but the image turned out very bright and understandable - if the author wrote more Straight, it would have turned out much less expressively. Sometimes, in order to accurately determine whether a metaphor is an epithet, one must clearly understand what a metaphor is and what an epithet is, and even this does not always help. First of all, it concerns adjectives, for example, "golden autumn" - the word "golden" here can be considered both as a metaphor and as an epithet.

Also, the functions of the metaphor can carry whole images of the heroes of the works: in particular, this is inherent in the works of Gorky, for example, the image of the mother in the work of the same name. Also, the meaning of the metaphor is almost all proverbs and sayings: for example, "seven nannies have a child without an eye" is not always applied to a relatively rare situation when there are seven governesses for one unfortunate child.

In order to understand what a metaphor is, one can imagine a situation where one person tries to explain to a friend long and boringly how he sees a phenomenon - as we know, it is rather difficult, but in this case one can turn to an expressive image, and then All at once will fall into place. That is, the function of the metaphor is a quick and understandable transmission of emotion or sensation.

In fact, you do not need to know what a metaphor is to use it. We encounter them far not only in highly artistic works. For example, images of dreams - this is almost always a metaphor, which is why they are one of the first and favorite subjects of study of psychologists and psychiatrists. By the way, these experts in their work also often use metaphors - it helps them to find a more subtle approach to patients.

We are also: often in everyday life there are situations where it is inappropriate to say something directly, and we have to look for words that convey the desired meaning, but in essence they are completely different: as we already know, this is also a metaphor.

Very widely metaphor is used in advertising: most advertising slogans are metaphors. In fact, if you take them literally - most often some nonsense turns out, but, nevertheless, they find a response precisely from those to whom they are addressed, and in fact they do not always think about what a metaphor is, and moreover, that It is addressed to them.

Thus, a metaphor is one of the most common language techniques that has long gone beyond the scope of literature and is successfully used by each of us in everyday life. Metaphor allows a person, instead of long and muddled explanations, to most accurately convey what he wants to say, in any situation. Without this artistic medium, it would be much more difficult to find a response in other hearts not only to poets and writers, but to all of us. It is such a unique thing that helps everyone, regardless of whether they know what a metaphor is.