(n.) A comprehensive maxim or principle expressed in a few words; a sharply defined sentence relating to abstract truth rather than to practical matters.
Example Sentences:
(1) For the man who created the " specialist in failure " aphorism to disparage a fellow manager, it is obvious how much that would hurt.
(2) His most celebrated aphorism was his response to a journalist who wondered whether Christian Democrats would ever be weary of wielding power: "Political power wears out only those who haven't got it."
(3) She is thinking about a book of aphorisms, for which Spark characters such as Mrs Hawkins and Miss Jean Brodie are famous.
(4) His aphorisms include the following: "may your food be your medicine".
(5) When we sit down for a more formal interview in his Manhattan hotel room a few hours later, Ross's earlier gregarious anecdotes are replaced by aphorisms that could come straight off one of those inspirational posters you see in recruitment consultant offices.
(6) I just thought up a nonsensical Confucian-sounding aphorism and said it in a grossly exaggerated version of my dad's voice.
(7) Greg Dyke must put plug in Qatar talk if Fifa revamp is to unite the world | Barney Ronay Read more Like Blatter, Dyke can lapse into mystifyingly abstract aphorisms.
(8) One cheering side-effect of economic depression, is that it provides occasion to recall Keynes's sideline in Wildean aphorisms.
(9) Vidal's critics disparaged his tendency to formulate an aphorism rather than to argue, finding in his work an underlying note of contempt for those who did not agree with him.
(10) It's an aphorism the ex-head of the civil service proved wrong.
(11) Much of that is down to Dupuis who, in a genre where bland aphorisms are often the norm, actually has something to say.
(12) Twain was always a barometric writer, with a knack for registering contemporary social pressures in sharp-eyed aphorisms that weren't merely quotable, but often well ahead of their time.
(13) The old aphorism is still valid: When in doubt, take it out.
(14) Which in turn helps partially to explain the significance of the aphorism: 'An Argentine is an Italian who speaks Spanish and thinks he is an Englishman.'
(15) Now they are the stalest of cliches, but when, in the first 1998 episode, in the midst of all that big hair and weird brown lipstick, you hear Carrie first describe the allure and disappointment of "toxic bachelors", when Samantha first says frankly that she likes to have sex without emotion, to "fuck like a man", it was bitingly fresh for women to speak these aphorisms out loud, in public, and in fabulous heels.
(16) Elizabeth is prone to blurting out aphorisms, such as "it's easier to give a blow job than make coffee" and "you should be just as happy with the breasts you have as you are with the futility of existence".
(17) In its submission to the special session, Colombia quotes Albert Einstein’s aphorism that the definition of insanity is “doing the same thing over and over again and expecting a different result”.
(18) Aphorisms often appear too trite to tell us anything meaningful, yet this is not the case with the assertion attributed to Mahatma Gandhi that "the true measure of any society can be found in how it treats its most vulnerable members".
(19) The files disclose that Thatcher's first months in power reveal a torrent of pungent political aphorisms that were to sustain her in power for the next 13 years.
(20) It was a favourite Reagan aphorism, sometimes half-true, sometimes a disastrous basis for policy in a globally connected, ever more sophisticated world.
Metaphor
Definition:
(n.) The transference of the relation between one set of objects to another set for the purpose of brief explanation; a compressed simile; e. g., the ship plows the sea.
Example Sentences:
(1) If figurative language is defined as involving intentional violation of conceptual boundaries in order to highlight some correspondence, one must be sure that children credited with that competence have (1) the metacognitive and metalinguistic abilities to understand at least some of the implications of such language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980; Nelson, 1974; Nelson & Nelson, 1978), (2) a conceptual organization that entails the purportedly violated conceptual boundaries (Lange, 1978), and (3) some notion of metaphoric tension as well as ground.
(2) Crawford's own poetry was informed by contact with refugees – "I began to think seriously about what it felt like to lose your country or culture, and in my first book, there are one or two poems that are versions of Vietnamese poems" – and scientists, whose vocabulary he initially "stole because it seemed so metaphorically resonant.
(3) As the metaphors we are using to conduct it show, the migration debate in Britain is sorely in need of some perspective.
(4) The spotlight metaphor seems inappropriate for visual attention in a dynamic environment.
(5) In a second experiment schizophrenics were significantly different from the depressives in showing less inclination to select a metaphorical meaning to an ambiguous adjective in a sentence.
(6) Three-quarters of the sample was impaired on at least one of four discourse tests (knowing the alternate meanings of ambiguous words in context; getting the point of figurative or metaphoric expressions; bridging the inferential gaps between events in stereotyped social situations; and producing speech acts that express the apparent intentions of others).
(7) It postulates the need of all sciences to operate with symbols of various levels of abstractions, including, in a very prominent way, metaphors.
(8) This summer, if all goes to plan, the metaphor will be vividly recast: the Globe's stage will itself become a world.
(9) According to the old metaphor of classical cybernetics the brain can be considered as a computer.
(10) And Crash is an extreme metaphor of the dangers that I see lying ahead of us.
(11) The metaphor of clinical work as textual explication, however, creates the expectation that there is a text somewhere to be found.
(12) So perhaps there is a political metaphor here after all.
(13) My friend had already climbed the same metaphorical mountain that I had just reached the summit of, and when she had reached the top she sat down and wept, much to the surprise of all her British friends.
(14) The results are discussed in terms of hemispheric memory for art works, metaphors, and the relationship between the two in the brain.
(15) The Oedipus myth has been a central metaphor in the evolution of psychoanalytic theory, particularly the psychoanalytic theory of development.
(16) Second, it refers to a metaphor representing the subjective experience of these patients who are unable to find a permanent identity but feel themselves sitting on the fence between a variety of different identities in a borderline position.
(17) The Tories, ever wedded to metaphors about killing foreigners, have called this the "Dambuster" moment.
(18) As critics of Mr Berlusconi have been barred from the state broadcaster Radiotelevisione Italia, Mr Fo protests that artists are being "defenestrated" metaphorically from the RAI for the same reasons that leftwing dissidents were literally thrown out of police station windows in the 1970s when Mr Fo wrote his work Accidental Death of an Anarchist.
(19) But that's not a metaphor: the universality of computation follows from the known laws of physics.
(20) Verbal processes later gain access to this graded perceptual knowledge, thus permitting the interpretation of synesthetic metaphors according to the rules of cross-modal perception.