Powerful speakers recognize the metaphor as one of the most powerful linguistic tools in their speaking arsenal, and they use them when appropriate. Like their cousin the simile, a metaphor is a figure of speech, meaning that it is a phrase with a meaning that diverges from the literal meaning of the words used.Specifically, a metaphor connects two things that are in the ordinary course of things completely unrelated. Metaphors often go even further from the literal meaning of the words used than similes, and as a result their meaning can be very subtle. In many ways they show the cleverness and complexity of language and of the human brain that creates it.
Technically, metaphors are said to be divided into the familiar (called the vehicle), and the unfamiliar (the tenor). The unfamiliar is described by reference to the familiar. An example of a metaphor is “love is a rose”. In terms of the example, the properties of a rose are familiar (they’re beautiful but they have sharp thorns), while the properties of love are unfamiliar. If love is said to have the same properties as a rose, then we have an insight into what love is like (i.e. pleasurable but also sometimes painful).
Like other figures of speech such as keynote motivational speaker describes, the power of a metaphor is often that it lends a visual image to something that is ordinarily hard to imagine. For example: "Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food" (Austin O'Malley, Keystones of Thought, 1914). One could instead say “our memories often retain what is trivial and forget the important,” but the image of a crazy woman hoarding rags is far more powerful than this dry description. And speaking of memory, a great deal of research shows that we are much more likely to retain powerful images than we are to retain text or speech that doesn’t trigger our imaginations in this way.
There is research that suggests that speakers rated as more charismatic communicators (think Ronald Reagan or Barack Obama) use more metaphors in their speech than other speakers who aren’t rated as being as charismatic. Isn’t that reason enough to embrace the metaphor?
