. . .  If the speaker omits "like," "as," or 
"than," making, say, the literally impossible 
assertion "My heart is a singing bird,'' he 
uses a metaphor. Just as "Caesar growled" 
contains terms that are literally 
incompatible, so "My heart is a singing 
bird," by its incompatible terms (impossible 
terms, we might say), forces the hearer to 
regard the connotations rather than the 
denotation of one term. If we do not have 
both terms ("My winged heart" instead of ... 
My heart is a bird"), we have an implicit or 
submerged metaphor. In Milton's "all these 
and more came flocking," if "all" referred to 
sheep, "flocking" would be literal; but 
because "all" refers to pagan deities, 
"flock ing" is metaphoric, implicitly 
replacing, approximately, "in a crowd like a 
group of sheep." A mixed metaphor combines 
two metaphors, often ludicrously: "Let's iron 
out the bottlenecks." Dr. Johnson was so 
bothered by the mixture in Macbeth's "My way 
of life / Is fall'n into the sear, the yellow 
leaf," that he sug gested "way" was a 
misprint for "May”; few other readers find 
the mixture disturbing. A dead metaphor has 
lost its figurative value: the eye of a 
needle, the foot of a hill.
In metonymy the name of one thing is 
used for another which it suggests or is 
closely related to. For example, if a letter 
is said to be in Milton's "hand," it means 
that the letter is in Milton's own 
handwriting. When Lyndon Johnson and John 
Kennedy were competing for the Democratic 
nomination for the presidency, Johnson said 
that the office needs a man with a little 
gray in his hair, i.e., age and wisdom. In 
synecdoche a part of something is substituted 
for the whole, or the whole is used in place 
of one of its parts. "Ten sail" thus stands 
for ten ships; "bread" in "give us this day 
our daily bread" stands for food in general. 
A transferred epithet is a word or phrase 
shifted from a noun it would normally modify 
to one in the neighborhood, as in Cray's 
"drowsy tinklings," where "drowsy" literally 
modifies the sheep who wear the bells, but is 
here figuratively applied to the bells. In 
present usage the distinction between these 
figures is so slight that the word "metonymy" 
covers synecdoche and all transferred 
epithets.
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