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 ...

Jan. 14-20 is Idiom Week, and today we thought we’d have a heart-to-heart about some strange phrases we use. Idioms, metaphors and similes are all types of figurative language. According to ...

English is a language rich in metaphor — take for example the many ways that human behavior can be linked with birds. Someone who is fearful is a chicken, a show-off can be called a peacock and a ...

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 ...

Source: "London - Metropolitan Railway / Underground Map 1923 (Postcard)" by Roger W/Flickr, CC BY SA 2.0 Can the use of analogy provide us a deeper understanding of the mind? To draw this out, in ...