You go through your school life with your English teachers (Bless) telling you what a Metaphor is - and for the rest of your days, it is more than likely; you will view metaphor as one, or all of the following:
a) Metaphor expresses similarities, used mainly in poetic flourish or by politician in rhetorical persuasion.
b) Metaphors occur when a word is allotted to not what it normally designates but to something else.
c) You are given to understand by the teachers that there are pre-existing similarities between what words normally designate.
So you leave school with a sense that metaphors are, well, kind of linguistically deviant - should have an ASBO wrapped round them for they are saying one thing while meaning another. Anyway shouldn’t language if used in its proper sense be literal. Eh well, no.
Follow me into my garden and I will endeavour to make my point...
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