AP® English Literature and Composition · Big Idea FIG
6.B Dead, Mixed and Revived Metaphors
A dead metaphor is a comparison used so often that people stop picturing it and just hear a plain name for a thing, like the leg of a table or the hands of a clock.
A metaphor starts alive: it asks you to see one thing in terms of another, and you feel the leap. Say 'the leg of the table' enough times, in enough generations of speech, and the leap stops registering. The word doesn't disappear, but the comparison underneath it does. 'Leg' becomes just the name for that part of a table, no body involved. That is death by repetition: the figure survives, the feeling of figuration does not.
The trouble shows up when two dead metaphors meet in one sentence and some trace of their buried pictures wakes up anyway. 'Nip it in the bud' and 'a blessing in disguise' each work fine alone, since nobody pictures a garden or a disguise. Jam them together - 'nip the blessing in the bud before its disguise grows' - and the ghost of both pictures flickers back, clashing. That's a mixed metaphor: dead figures aren't always safely dead, and carelessness can drag their corpses into view.
This is why editors are wrong to hunt down every dead metaphor for removal. Often there is no literal alternative: the hands of a clock are called hands, full stop, and the river's mouth has no other name. Cutting them doesn't sharpen the prose, it just removes ordinary vocabulary. Poets exploit the opposite move: they take a dead metaphor and force its literal sense back to life, making 'mouth' speak or giving 'hands' pockets, so a worn phrase suddenly feels invented again.
Key terms
- dead metaphor
- A comparison used so often that it now functions as a plain, literal name rather than a felt figure.
- mixed metaphor
- Two metaphors, often dead ones, combined in a way that accidentally revives and clashes their buried images.
- revived metaphor
- A dead metaphor brought back to life when a writer makes its literal, original sense active again.
- figurative language
- Words used to mean something beyond their literal sense, by comparison, substitution, or exaggeration.
Watch it explained
- How it worksHow does a metaphor die by being used until the comparison stops being felt?
- Worked exampleShow me what goes wrong when 'nip it in the bud' meets 'a blessing in disguise' in one line.
- Common mistakeWhy isn't a dead metaphor a mistake that ought to be edited out?
- Going furtherWhat happens when a poet revives a dead metaphor by taking it literally again?
Check yourself
End of topic.