I'm using the word loosely but still accurately, I believe. The horse in the ptg. is an as if horse and the actual horse can be thought of as if it were painted. I don't think a metaphor excludes its variable instrumentally for whatever that instrumentality is, it's also an as-if metaphor. Endless.
wc I haven't got a good grasp of how you are using the term "metaphor." Sometimes it seems straightforward in the conventional sense of a thing taken as a symbol or representative of a different kind of thing. I grasp what I think you mean by its being a word or the sound of a word. But when you say the horse can be "an object in the middle ground of a landscape," I don't see the metaphor, I don't see the horse in the middle ground "as if it were something else." That is using the horse instrumentally, for example, to scale the scene and give the viewer a sense of distance and scale, or the tilting of the terrain. | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | | Michael Brady
