Reading time: Less than 1 minute
I like to share interesting pieces of figurative language I encounter in my reading. I write today about a metaphor from Kim Severson…
When we renovated our house six years ago we spent a lot of effort on our kitchen. I’m a serious cook, as is one of our daughters, and we tend to host a fair number of extended family dinners.
Interestingly, we shrunk the size of our kitchen (the old room had been cavernous and inefficient) but we also installed some high end tweaks to make cooking easier. My fave — and easily the one that draws the most attention from visitors? A back-of-the stove faucet (see photo above), allowing me to fill stock pots without having to lug the vessel from the sink.
Because of my own experience with kitchens, I read a recent New York Times piece by writer Kim Severson with particular interest. Headlined: “Small kitchens, by choice,” the article examines the shrinking size of kitchens across America.
I found the piece interesting and well written and I particularly enjoyed a clever piece of figurative language — a metaphor — right at the beginning. Here is how Severson put it:
For many, the American dream kitchen has long been a grand showplace, filled with granite islands that stretch like aircraft carriers through a sea of shining appliances.
So rich and multilayered, this sophisticated metaphor in comparing kitchen islands to aircraft carriers — not only evokes American militarism it also pays homage to the national anthem, with its use of the word “shining.”