Ebook: Phrase Finder. Name-word finder, Metaphor finder, Sophisticated synonyms

Faithful friends are still, from the days of Greece and Rome, Orestes and Pylades, or Damon and Pythias, or Aeneas and his fidus Achates. From Biblical times the classical prototype for longevity comes to us as Methuselah, and for just as many centuries Jezebel has connoted a bepainted and nefarious lady. To call a man a Shylock, or a Scrooge, or a Harpagon, or to say that he is apprenticed to Mammon, is to establish his reputation for “avarice.” Habiliments imparting the idea of “intrigue” are worn by such masculine names as Volpone, Machiavelli, Rasputin, and the class-word Jesuit. The same notion of machination on the distaff side is conveyed by the mere mention of Lucrezia Borgia, Messalina, Becky Sharp, or Catherine the Qreat. In the fictional place-name Graustark, or the personal one of a popular author of plots of intrigue, E. Phillips Oppenheim, is contained the same idea of scheming and espionage in background and type.

This heritage of eponyms, or “callifig-names,” brought into our everyday vocabularies from all eras and civilizations is enormously rich. English literature itself has deposited a hoard of Fagins and Micawbers and Lochinvars in our memories for use whenever we wish to give someone else with similar characteristics a descriptive label which will be understood by all who hear or read our words. The attempt has now been made to include in this volume all these personal “tags” that were displayed so prominently by their original bearers as to have left a new and convenient addition to our dictionaries of description. All these “name-words” are either proper nouns or derived from proper nouns. They are not restricted to those designating people, however, but include the names of famous places, buildings, eras, battles and the like (such as Marathon, Waterloo, Attica, Parthenon, Augustan).
The original purpose of this volume was to present to the writer a convenient and useful collection of colorful and pictorial phrases that would serve to strike sparks from descriptive writing by the substitution of an occasional “picture-phrase” for a plain and simple word with which it is synonymous. In the pursuit of this purpose, the writings of thousands of British and American authors from the “classical” days of our literature on down to modern times were examined for their picturesqueness of content, and the desired phrases catalogued under file-words, or functional synonyms, suggested by their literal meaning.

Since the most liberal collection of such “photographic” phrases came from the department known as “figures of speech” in our high-school and collegiate study of English composition, it was to be expected that the bulk of the material accumulating would be cast in the nature of either simile or metaphor. Reminding ourselves of the difference, we set before us this cheerful daily reminder to serve as a touchstone in their detection: “She looks like a dream” (simile); “She is a dream” (metaphor). Proceeding along this happy road, we resolved that our product should eventually be known as a dictionary of metaphors, since a metaphor is, after all, simply the kernel of a simile. To these errant metaphors we would add all similes that established a beachhead on our desk, and by the simple expedient of clipping their wings and shearing them of their like’s and as’es, affix them permanently to some page of our book.