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Metaphor vs Epitaph - What's the difference?

metaphor | epitaph |

As nouns the difference between metaphor and epitaph

is that metaphor is the use of a word or phrase to refer to something that it isn’t, invoking a direct similarity between the word or phrase used and the thing described, but in the case of English without the words like or as, which would imply a simile while epitaph is an inscription on a gravestone in memory of the deceased.

As a verb epitaph is

to write or speak after the manner of an epitaph.

metaphor

English

(wikipedia metaphor)

Noun

  • (uncountable, figure of speech) The use of a word or phrase to refer to something that it isn’t, invoking a direct similarity between the word or phrase used and the thing described, but in the case of English without the words like'' or ''as , which would imply a simile.
  • * What then is truth? A movable host of metaphors''', metonymies, and; anthropomorphisms: in short, a sum of human relations which have been poetically and rhetorically intensified, transferred, and embellished, and which, after long usage, seem to a people to be fixed, canonical, and binding. Truths are illusions which we have forgotten are illusions — they are '''metaphors that have become worn out and have been drained of sensuous force, coins which have lost their embossing and are now considered as metal and no longer as coins.'' — Friedrich Nietzsche, ''On Truth and Lies in a Nonmoral Sense , 1870, translated by Daniel Beazeale, 1979.
  • (countable, rhetoric) The word or phrase used in this way. An implied comparison.

    • Hypernyms

    * figure of speech

    Derived terms

    * dead metaphor * extended metaphor * malaphor * metaphorical * metaphorical extension * metaphoricity * metaphorism * stale metaphor

    See also

    * analogy * idiom * metonymy * simile

    epitaph

    English

    Noun

    (en noun)
  • An inscription on a gravestone in memory of the deceased.
  • A poem or other short text written in memory of a deceased person.

    • Verb

    (en verb)
  • To write or speak after the manner of an epitaph.
  • * Bishop Hall
    • The common in their speeches epitaph upon him "He lived as a wolf and died as a dog."
  • To commemorate by an epitaph.
  • * G. Harvey
    • Let me be epitaphed the inventor of English hexameters.

    See also

    * eulogy – oration about the dead, often at funeral * obituary – published writing on the dead * epigraph – quote on a tombstone