Various myths surround the topic of metaphor. I here criticize 10 such myths, hoping thereby to open the way to a better understanding of the topic.

THE MYTH OF FALSEHOOD

Only literal statements are true, according to this myth. All the rest distort and falsify. The poets (as Plato taught us) lie; only the scientists tell the truth. To describe an unreliable, cowardly, or sickly person as a weak reed is just to speak a falsehood, which becomes a truth through negation: obviously, the person referred to is not a weak reed.

But it is obvious that he is not a weak reed only if “weak reed” is taken literally, for it is, indeed, obvious that no person is literally a reed, weak or otherwise. And it is utterly trivial to say that a metaphorical statement, taken literally, may be false. Taken metaphorically, however, the statement may well be true: He is indeed a weak reed, and it is false to deny that he is. To be sure, metaphorical assertions are eligible for falsehood. But they are, no more than literal assertions, always false.

THE MYTH OF EMBELLISHMENT

If not always false, then metaphors are always, at any rate, cognitively contentless; so runs the present myth. Rhetorical adornments merely, metaphors can (and, for the sake of theoretical clarity, should) always be stripped away, allowing the bare literal truth to shine forth.