30 etaphors explicitly or implicitly identify one phenomenon with another phenomenon from which the first is literally distinct. At the same time, the very specificity, familiarity, and tangibility that may recommend a metaphor may incidentally enable it to obscure and distort. Paradoxically, the better a metaphor is, the worse this kind of problem threatens to become. In extreme circumstances, a good metaphor may be so compelling that it altogether subverts its referent's original meaning. No longer recognized as a metaphor, it redefines truth on its own limited terms.
Metaphors appear in virtually all branches of discourse.
Assuming metaphors to be products of the imagination, conventional wisdom has traditionally identified them with the arts of poetry and literature. Many metaphors certainly appear in these contexts, but metaphors can also be found in other more overtly analytic realms. 34 To say that jurisprudential metaphors exist and even flourish is not, however, to say that they have been uniformly welcomed, even by the most creative lawyers and jurists. In the early years of this century, Yale legal theorist Wesley Hohfeld agreed. Today, few would dismiss it as mere semantic decoration, ornament, or rhetorical device.