By Idioms, Metaphors

"She really ruffled his feathers" this is a metaphor, because we are talking about a woman annoying a man - not about a woman stroking a bird. "The moon's a balloon" is a metaphor - of cours the moon is not really a balloon "The world is my oyster" "She was a tigress when roused" Similes...

The idiom is 'to flog a dead horse' and you need to use the word 'flog' not beat. Idiomatic metaphors like these need their specific words to make sense. It means that you are doing something that is wasting your time, cannot have a good result, a pointless excercise.

Hello Taka If you wanted to use them as metaphors, you would have to use slightly different idioms: 1a. ...on the hunt for a better life. 1b. ...hunting down a better life. 2. ...chasing a better life. 'Hunt' probably has too aggressive a meaning to work with 'better life': it would be...

Nothing clear-- this appears to be a sort of mixed metaphor. One idiom referred to is 'reading between the lines', which means interpreting what is unsaid, inferring what the other person is not saying directly. The other saying involved is 'love is blind to the flaws/faults of the beloved',...

Hello Sextus 1) 'Rather' here sounds slightly strange; it's almost implicit. You would get the same sense if you left it out. 2) The difficulty here is that most of the words you could use are metaphorical at some level (tied, linked, etc), and there is no satisfactory metaphor for the way a...

No I disagree. I'm a native English speaker and the original sentence had no coherent meaning for me. 'Walk' cannot be used as a metaphor in that way. 'Learn to walk before you run' works as a metaphor for learning the basics before trying the difficult stuff, purely as 'walk' does relate to...

They are all idioms that recognise the dexterity of human beings. We can do so much with our hands that they enter the language as metaphors. To Hand = close enough to pick up. Out of Hand = not able to be controlled (i.e. handled) Off Hand = The sort of thing you might say with the flick of...

Idioms are peculiar. Even if one knows all the words that make one up, the meaning must be learned. That is, understanding the meanings of "get" and "along" individually does not really help in deciphering that "get along" can mean "to be friends with". Metaphors, on the other hand, create...

I am having a problem differentiating between a metaphor and an idiom. Is there a quick and dirty way to tell the difference?

But why is it that those so-called teachers of mine gets all gritty when they see idioms and metaphors. Teachers loved those in high school. Oh well, I'll wait 'til I become the teacher, hopefully, and have my revenge on my students lol j/k