dead metaphor

plural dead metaphors

1. human sciencesA former metaphor which has in effect lost its metaphorical status and become literal.

   Typically, dead metaphors have been considered a characteristic of ordinary language, and live metaphors a crucial trait of poetic language.

   2009, Cornelia Müller, Metaphors Dead and Alive, Sleeping and Waking, University of Chicago Press, →ISBN, page 36

   2 more examples

   An objectivist might grant that digest an idea was once a metaphor, but he would claim that it is no longer metaphorical. For him it is a “dead metaphor,” one that has become conventionalized and has its own literal meaning.

   1980, George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, chapter 27, in Metaphors We Live By

   It is meaningless to speak of the soul in the twenty-first century […]. It has become a dead metaphor, one of those words that survive in language long after a culture has lost faith in the concept, like an empty carapace that remains intact years after its animating organism has died.

   2021, Meghan O'Gieblyn, chapter 1, in God, Human, Animal, Machine […] , →ISBN