warrants some assistance.

The degree of effort required in applying any given metaphor should be
in relation to the degree of emotion proper to the passage in which it
is used. Only those metaphors which require little or no mental
exertion should be used in very emotional passages, or the emotional
effect will be much weakened: a far-fetched, abstruse metaphor or
simile implies that the writer is at leisure from his emotion, and
suggests this attitude in the reader.--[E.B.]




II. SOME NOTES ON METAPHOR IN JOURNALISM

Live and dead metaphor; some pitfalls; self-consciousness and mixed
metaphor.

1. Live and Dead Metaphor.

In all discussion of metaphor it must be borne in mind that some
metaphors are living, i.e. are offered and accepted with a
consciousness of their nature as substitutes for their literal
equivalents, while others are dead, i.e. have been so often used that
speaker and hearer have ceased to be aware that the words are not
literal: but the line of distinction between the live and the dead is
a shifting one, the dead being sometimes liable, under the stimulus of
an affinity or a repulsion, to galvanic stirrings indistinguishable
from life. Thus, in _The men were sifting meal_ we have a literal use
of _sift_; in _Satan hath desired to have you, that he may sift you as