On the whole, perhaps the best advice about using
them is, Don't unless you have to. In other words, where a figure of
speech is a necessity of expression, where you cannot make your thought
clear and impart to it the warmth of feeling with which it is clothed in
your own mind except by a touch of imaginative color, then use a figure
of speech, if one flashes itself on your mind. If you add it
deliberately as adornment of your speech, it will strike a false note;
if you laboriously invent it the effort will show. Unless your thought
and your eagerness for your subject flow naturally and inevitably into
an image, it is better to stick to plain speech, for any suggestion of
insincerity is fatal to the persuasiveness of an argument.
The value of the figure of speech is chiefly in giving expression to
feelings which cannot be set forth in abstract words, the whole of whose
meaning can be defined: in the connotation of words--that indefinable
part of their meaning which consists in their associations,
implications, and general emotional coloring--lies their power to clothe
thought with the rich color of feeling which is the life. At the same
time, they serve as a fillip to the attention. There are not very many
people who can long keep the mind fixed on a purely abstract line of
thought, and none can do it without some effort.
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