Similes And Metaphors:  Like, What’s The Real Difference?:
A New Distinction Based on Reading Plato’s Dialogues

John E. Ziolkowski (George Washington University)

Ever since Aristotle distinguished similes from metaphors by the presence of an introductory word such as ‘like’ or ‘as’, people have followed his authority. According to this conventional distinction, “You are my sunshine” is a metaphor and “Your eyes are like stars” is a simile, the only difference in construction being the word ‘like’ that is said to make the comparison explicit.  Aristotle says several times that there is not much difference between similes and metaphors. 

As I gathered examples of similes in a recent study of these figures in Plato’s Dialogues., however, I began to have a problem with this distinction because many metaphors cannot be changed into similes by the simplistic procedure of adding a single word, as when Socrates is speaking about his theory of raising children in the ideal republic but uses terminology of bees and bee-hives: “What a swarm of arguments you are stirring up by this demand!” (Republic Bk 5, 450b)  Adding the word ‘like’ would not make this example a simile.  In a metaphor the language refers to one sphere but the meaning to another, as Aristotle himself noted in his Poetics where he defines metaphor as “the application of a noun which properly applies to something else” (1456b7).  I began to realize that there was actually a basic distinction that cannot be expressed so easily as he indicates in his Rhetoric.  The abundant scholarly writings on the subject also have been helpful, although naturally everyone is hesitant to take exception with the great Aristotle.  Metaphor is what we might call a kind of ‘code’ language meant to be understood as such. People repeatedly use metaphors like “the tip of the iceberg” (for concealed problems), “Step up to the plate” (take responsibility) or “Don’t go there!” (don’t talk about that).  The confusion comes from the simple examples that are usually given, which I prefer to call ‘predicate similes’ because I don’t believe the ‘code’ aspect is well illustrated in these. There are also many more introductory words than ‘like’ and ‘as’.  A handout will give examples of similes in both Plato and modern English. (351 words)