Like other figures of speech such as keynote motivational speaker describes, the power of a metaphor is often that it lends a visual image to something that is ordinarily hard to imagine. For example: “Memory is a crazy woman that hoards colored rags and throws away food” (Austin O’Malley, Keystones of Thought, 1914). One could instead say “our memories often retain what is trivial and forget the important,” but the image of a crazy woman hoarding rags is far more powerful than this dry description.
