metaphoricality

English

Etymology

From metaphorical +‎ -ity.

Noun

metaphoricality (uncountable)

1. The quality of being metaphorical.

   Synonyms: metaphoricalness, metaphoricity, (rare) metaphoricness

   • 1929 June, Dorothy M[iller] Richardson, “Continuous Performance: Almost Persuaded”, in K[enneth] Macpherson, Bryher [pseudonym; Annie Winifred Ellerman], editors, Close Up: The Only Magazine Devoted to Films as an Art, volume IV, number 6, London: Pool, page 34:

     The barrier Antheil drilled holes in when he “composed” mechanisms, (Did not one of his works require sixteen pianos and a screen?) and Dos Passos splintered when he described a group of straight-faced elderly relatives arrived in mourning garb at a house of death for funeral and reading of Will, gravely jazzing through the hall, and other American writers have severely shaken by their unashamed metaphoricality, and all those novelists have fist-punched who in pursuit of their particular aims produced texts retrospectively labelled cinematographic.

   • 1965, John Fowles, The Magus, Boston, Mass., Toronto, Ont.: Little, Brown and Company, →OCLC, page 227:

     But once again there came this strange surprise that the emitters stood all around me. I was not receiving from any one direction, but from all directions. Though once again, direction is too physical a word. I was having feelings that no language based on concrete physical objects, on actual feeling, can describe. I think I was aware of the metaphoricality of what I felt. I knew words were like chains, they held me back; and like walls with holes in them.

   • 1996, Michael Toolan, “Introduction”, in Total Speech: An Integrational Linguistic Approach to Language (Post-Contemporary Interventions), Durham, N.C.: Duke University Press, →ISBN, page 14:

     In recent years, however, abundant evidence has been advanced in support of the idea that metaphoricality is no exoticism in the garden of language but a widespread indigenous part of the flora. Everyday language itself is riddled with metaphors, albeit often rather faded or worn ones.