What's the difference between literal and metaphor?

Literal


Definition:

  • (a.) According to the letter or verbal expression; real; not figurative or metaphorical; as, the literal meaning of a phrase.
  • (a.) Following the letter or exact words; not free.
  • (a.) Consisting of, or expressed by, letters.
  • (a.) Giving a strict or literal construction; unimaginative; matter-of fast; -- applied to persons.
  • (n.) Literal meaning.

Example Sentences:

  • (1) They are just literally lying.” In August Microsoft severed its ties, saying Alec’s stance on climate change and several other issues “conflicted directly with Microsoft’s values”.
  • (2) Estimated fluid consumption dropped from 10 liters to 4 liters daily and incidents of hyponatremia decreased by 62%.
  • (3) Resting plasma epinephrine and norepinephrine levels were 13.1 and 2.1 nmol liter-1 for the marine toad (Bufo marinus).
  • (4) And we literally had hundreds of thousands of them."
  • (5) Standard additions are unnecessary; Pt concentrations are read from a calibration chart of peak heights, which is linear up to 1.6 mg per liter.
  • (6) Communication issues in obtaining organ donation consent were examined, with particular focus on what are literally life-and-death decisions.
  • (7) It could still be terrorism but it looks as if the aircraft went out of control because the controls were literally burning up.
  • (8) A novel vector was employed which permits rapid and highly efficient cleavage of the GST fusion protein yielding 10 mg of purified PurH product per liter of bacterial culture.
  • (9) You literally never see that at political rallies, though obviously at Tea Party ones they are there all the time."
  • (10) An empirical rate expression was developed from experimental data which led to a prediction that the natural rate of oxidation in the ocean is about 0.023 micromoles of As(III) per liter each year.
  • (11) A technology for preparation of purified concentrates of rabies virus has been developed permitting to use simultaneously dozens of liters of tissue culture virus-containing fluid for the preparation of a concentrate.
  • (12) The maximum effect was obtained with 10(-7) molar gibberellic acid, whereas concentrations greater than 5 x 10(-7) mole per liter were inhibitory.
  • (13) Years ahead of its time, it saw each song presented theatrically, the musicians concealed in the wings (although Bowie said that they kept creeping on to the stage, literally unable to resist the spotlight) and with Bowie performing on a cherry-picker and on a giant hand, both of which kept breaking down.
  • (14) Some women attended the protest wearing jeans and T-shirts, while others took the mission of reclaiming the word "slut" – one of the stated objectives of the movement – more literally and turned out in overtly provocative fishnets and stilettos.
  • (15) But nobody got the reference and "the next day it was literally on CNN".
  • (16) 1.57pm BST Lap 36: Punchy stuff from Jules Bianchi up to 13th, literally bumping his way through Kobayashi on the inside.
  • (17) The majority of children came from low socio-economic homes (61%) with mostly illiterate or semi-literate mothers.
  • (18) As compared with the normoglycemic patients, the patients with hypoglycemia had elevated median plasma concentrations of glucagon (44 vs. 11 pmol per liter; P = 0.001), epinephrine (3400 vs. 1500 pmol per liter; P = 0.012), norepinephrine (7500 vs. 2900 pmol per liter; P = 0.002), and lactate (3.5 vs. 2.1 mmol per liter; P = 0.020) and similar alanine and beta-hydroxybutyrate concentrations.
  • (19) Finally, poliovirus experimentally seeded in 20 liters of tape water was recovered from Johns-Manville D79-Johns-Manville D39 or Johns-Manville D79-Filterite 0.45 micron 142-mm filter combinations was a efficiencies of 86 and 85%, respectively.
  • (20) Results concerning existence and uniqueness of equilibria, stability of the equilibria, and boundedness of solutions suggest that "compensatory" systems might not be compensatory in the literal sense.

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.