Please don’t let our country to be exterminated,” Zelensky said before signing off. “They deserve to live.
Extermination, metaphor or reality . . . in: “As You Like It”
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances,
And one man in his time plays many parts,
His acts being seven ages.
William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2/7
A metaphor is a figure of speech, that, for rhetorical effect, directly refers to one thing by mentioning another. It may provide (or obscure) clarity or identify hidden similarities between two different ideas. One of the most commonly cited examples of a metaphor in English literature comes from the “All the word’s a stage” monologue from “As you like it.”
All the world’s a stage,
And all the men and women merely players;
They have their exits and their entrances …
William Shakespeare, As You Like It, 2/7
Note 1: This quotation expresses a metaphor because the world is not literally a stage, and most humans are not literally actors playing roles. In stating that the world is a stage, Shakespeare uses the terms of the world and stage to convey a similarity of ‘the ways of the world’ and ‘the behavior of the people who inhabit it.’
Note 2: The word metaphor itself is a metaphor, coming from a Greek term meaning “transference (of ownership)”. The user of a metaphor ‘alters’ the meaning of the word, and this then carries it from one semantic “realm” to another.
