A colleague’s daughter is in a dispute with her teacher about whether a metaphor can also be a hyperbole. The daughter says yes. The teacher says no. I say the answer should be a raging, exploding elephant of obviousness with side-mounted machine guns.
Metaphors operate on analogy, with the understanding that the analogy is appropriate; hyperbole operates on inappropriate comparison or magnitude; a hyperbolic metaphor is one that operates on an analogy that is inappropriate in magnitude. A simple search of “hyperbolic metaphor” will show that many people far better acquainted with English and its figures than this intellectually rigid teacher consider metaphor and hyperbole to be compatible. Simile and hyperbole are also compatible.
The teacher may think that because hyperbole operates on one axis (magnitude) and metaphor on another (analogy) they are incompatible, or that a metaphor by definition is ridiculous and so it would be redundant to call a metaphor a hyperbole, or that a metaphor plays on only certain aspects of the resemblance so any disproportionate features will be disregarded. But in fact we have quality and quantity expections in objects, and the context may be set up so that the mismatch in magnitude is clearly intentional and cannot be disregarded.
I can say “her breasts are ripe oranges” and we will understand that they are about the size of oranges; there is no exaggeration of magnitude. And I can say “her breasts are burning Zeppelins” and whether it is hyperbole is arguable because I may be comparing only the shape, not the size. But if I say “Melanie’s breasts are ripe oranges, Lotte’s are water balloons, and Erika’s are burning Zeppelins,” we clearly have a comparison that in the last stretches the magnitude to hyperbole.
Likewise, with questions of quality, if I say “his workplace is a Nazi death camp,” it’s obviously a metaphor, but it’s also such an extreme image that it is undeniably hyperbolic.
And one should be aware that metaphor and hyperbole can exist side by side without being actually in the same figure. If I say “Erika’s breasts are burning Zeppelins that any sane man would run across a busy highway to worship,” the metaphor is the image of the burning Zeppelins (it could also be hyperbole, but only if it is understood that size is also being implied, not just shape) but the hyperbole is the statement about their influence on behaviour.
So there it is. The teacher may think she’s an expert, but the raging, exploding elephant of obviousness with side-mounted machine guns is walking into her classroom…
Go get ‘em, James! Loved the side-mounted machine guns.
reading this made me so happy to find someone who agreed with me! i am studying english and my teachers were umm-ing and ahh-ing about whether they can co-exist. my quote is ‘My son is everything to me.” I believe this to be hyperbolic metaphor because:
metaphor: because his son is not literally everything ever, but also
hyperbole: compares him to the extreme of infinity i guess, which to me makes it both.
and thats what im arguing in my speech.
ps. love the breast examples
I’m 100 percent with you, your friend’s daughter and everybody else who thinks metaphor and hyperbole are compatible. I am studying English Lit. and am currently deep in close textual analysis of John Webster’s Duchess of Malfi. Reading a section over and over the best way I could think to describe it was ‘hyperbolic metaphor’, so I googled that phrase to see if it was in any kind of common usage and came upon this fine blog.
I shall be using the term in my report for sure.
“Hyperbolic metaphor” is my favorite combination of words in the English language. True story.
nicely done :3