This document discusses metaphors and how to identify them. It provides examples of metaphors, such as: - Comparing politics to a game of football to describe aggressive behavior - A passage that uses the metaphor of a "random walk" to describe the unpredictability of the stock market and compares stock pickers to "bare-assed apes" - Common stock market metaphors that refer to a bull market when prices are rising and a bear market when they are falling - An excerpt from Shakespeare's As You Like It that contains the metaphor of the world being a stage and people being players who take exits and entrances and play many parts.

1. Metaphor
After this lesson you will be
able to identify metaphors in a
written passage and explain
verbally or in writing what is
being expressed without the
use of explicit comparative
words.

2. Understanding figures of speech is
important. In order to be an
effective critical reader, you will
need to be able to determine when
an author is speaking figuratively
and not literally.

3. Being able to identify and understand
an author’s use of figurative language
will enable you to…..
make logical
connections
between
details,
make accurate
inferences,
and draw
appropriate
conclusions
about the
author’s
intended
meaning and
the meaning
of the text.

4. Metaphor
The comparison can be
implied throughout a
longer work or
explicitly stated in a
simple sentence.

5. A metaphor is often used to
explain a complex idea or
concept in different terms,
that, hopefully, are more
common and easier to
understand.
For example, comparing
politics to the game of
football to describe a
government’s aggressive
behavior.

6. Metaphors are especially
common in literature but can
be found just about anywhere.
Read the following passage from
Burton G. Malkiel’s
A Random Walk Down Wall Street

7. A random walk is one in which future steps or directions
cannot be predicted on the basis of past actions. When the
term is applied to the stock market, it means that short-run
changes in stock prices cannot be predicted. Investment
advisory services, earnings, predictions, and complicated chart
patterns are useless. On Wall Street, the term “random walk” is
an obscenity. It is an epithet coined by the academic world and
hurled insultingly at the professional soothsayers. Taken to its
logical extreme, it means that a blindfolded monkey throwing
darts at a newspaper’s pages could select a portfolio that would
do just as well as one carefully selected by the experts.
Now, financial analysts in pin-striped suits do not like
being compared with bare-assed apes. They retort that
academics are so immersed in equations and Greek symbols (to
say nothing of stuffy prose) that they couldn’t tell a bull from a
bear.

8. The author uses a couple of metaphors
in this passage.
A “random walk”
“means a blindfolded monkey
throwing darts at a newspapers
pages could select a portfolio that
would do just as well as one
carefully selected by the experts.”

9. The stock market symbols of a bull and bear are
also metaphors used to describe the conditions
of the stock market.
A bear market is
one in which
values are
plummeting.
A bull market is
one in which
stock prices are
rising.

10. All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and
women merely players,
They have their exits
and their entrances;
And one man in his
time plays many parts.
You give it a
try…
Identify and
explain the
metaphors in
this excerpt from
Shakespeare’s
As You Like It