Dead Metaphor Quotes

“All languages are composed of dead metaphors as the soil of corpses, but English is perhaps uniquely full of metaphors of this sort, which are not dead but sleeping, and, while making a direct statement, colour it with an implied comparison.”
― William Empson, Seven Types of Ambiguity

“There always exists a context that is capable of reproposing as new a codified catachresis or dead metaphor.”
― Umberto Eco, Semiotics and the Philosophy of Language

“The fact that metaphors can sleep and wake is both bad news and good news for speakers and writers who want to avoid mixed metaphors. The bad news is that when a metaphoric word or phrase is sleeping for us, we probably won’t notice if we use the word or phrase in ways that are inconsistent with its source-domain meaning.”
― Karen Sullivan, Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse

“Of course, the ‘living/dead’ nomenclature is itself a metaphor, in that it personifies metaphors as living beings that can ‘live’ and ‘die’. Like all metaphors, this personification metaphor is helpful in some ways but imperfect in others. It is useful because it allows us to think about ‘living’ metaphors as having some of the traits of living beings. That is, ‘living’ metaphors can be thought of as active, having effects, and able to cause changes. The personification metaphor also lets us effortlessly reason that ‘dead’ metaphors will not have effects or instigate changes. Nonetheless, in other respects the metaphor misrepresents the actual situation, because metaphors can be partly dead and partly alive.”
― Karen Sullivan, Mixed Metaphors: Their Use and Abuse

“However stone dead such metaphors seem, we can easily wake them up.”
― Ivor A. Richards, The Philosophy of Rhetoric