 Whenever we use figurative language, we're describing one thing by relating it to another thing. The two most common words to describe those two things being compared are vehicles and tenors. The tenor is the thing being described. The vehicle is the figurative language you use to describe it. These terms are taken from the famous rhetorician I.A. Richards, who wrote out the structures of metaphors way back in 1936. The vehicles and tenors may sound confusing, but they're easily understood, especially after seeing a couple examples. Here's one from a famous pop song from the late 90s. I must confess that my loneliness is killing me now. Don't you know I still believe that you will be here and give me a sign. Hit me, baby, one more time. I probably don't need to tell you that Britney Spears isn't asking a literal baby to literally hit her. That'd be a much darker and more confusing song. Instead, she's using figurative language to describe her feelings for her ex. To make sense of these lyrics, we have to match up the vehicles that she uses with the respective tenors. Let's start with the easiest one first. At the end of this quotation, Spears employs a very common metaphor in which the word baby is a vehicle for what she really means, her ex. Earlier, she uses another very common, hyperbolic vehicle, killing me, to describe another tenor, her sadness. Finally, hit me doesn't mean literally attack me. It's another vehicle with yet another recognizable tenor. Contact me. In spite of all this figurative language, we never think that Britney is asking a baby to hit her, because the connection between her vehicles and tenors are well established. We might even call them dead metaphors, because the original, vivid connection between vehicles and tenors has been deadened by repetitive use. So why would you want to use these terms in your literary analyses? Well, breaking down a metaphor into vehicle and tenor can remind us to ask questions about the relationship between the two terms. Here, it's useful to bring in two other terms that are often associated with figurative language, ground and tension. Ground is the thing or things that the vehicle and tenor have in common. In other words, the ground is what enables the metaphor to work, to make sense. In the first example from Spears' song, the ground that unites baby and significant other is the fact that both babies and significant others are precious, beautiful and delightful. The tension are all the things that are dissimilar between the items being compared. In this case, for a variety of reasons, a significant other is quite different than a baby. A good metaphor or simile or synecdoche will balance between ground and tension. Too much ground means that the metaphor or simile won't delight or surprise us. If I say something like, this pen is like a pencil, I'm using way too much ground and not enough tension. That metaphor doesn't throw the element of comparison into sharp relief. The opposite scenario is equally bad. If I say, this pen is like a t-shirt, my audience won't have a clue as to what I mean and the metaphor won't work. Let's move to a more complex example described in Professor Tim Jensen's What Is a Metaphor video. In that lesson, Jensen describes the controlling metaphor of invisibility in Ralph Ellison's novel Invisible Man. The title of that novel, as you probably know, is an allusion to H. D. Wells' famous novel of the same name and its subsequent film adaptations, in which a scientist literally turns himself invisible and enlists this power to carry out a series of thefts and murders as he tries to reverse the process. Ellison alludes to that novel at the start of his story, but he's careful to showcase the tension as well as the ground and the metaphor. I am not one of your Hollywood movie ectoplasms. I'm a man of substance, a flesh and bone, fiber and liquid, and I might even be said to possess a mind. I am invisible, understand simply because people refuse to see me. Like the bodiless heads you sometimes see in circus side shows, it is as though I've been surrounded by mirrors of hard, distorting glass. When they approach me, they see only my surroundings, themselves, or figments of their imagination. Indeed, everything and anything except me. There are a ton of things that we could do with this passage, with respect to the tension and ground between the vehicle, the invisible man, and the tenor, the narrator. We could ask, for example, why Ellison invokes a pulp Hollywood story to ground how people view the narrator. At the same time, we could ask how he sets that metaphor in tension with how he presents himself. We could also ask how the narrator's race operates here, how the visible presence of his black skin renders him an invisible body without a head to the white people around him. Finally, we could ask what the narrator means by seeing me. Does he mean that verb literally, as in seeing the body of a person? Or does he mean that figuratively, as in seeing the person who inhabits that body? There is obviously a lot of tension as well as ground here, which is what makes Ellison's metaphor different than the dead metaphor is described in the song. But this isn't to say that pop songs can't also be complex. Let me leave you with one final example, a pop song that moves beyond the dead metaphor. In her 2008 hit song, All the Single Ladies, Beyonce Knowles sings about her alter ego, Sasha Fierce, meeting an ex at a club. The chorus goes, The two vehicles here are it and put a ring on it, but figuring out what they might mean takes a bit of work on our part, which is one of the reasons why the song is so terrific. Clearly you put rings on fingers, so it, the vehicle, can in one sense be understood literally as Sasha Fierce's finger. Putting a ring on someone's finger is associated with marriage, so Sasha Fierce standing in for All the Single Ladies is metonymically taunting her ex for not proposing to her when he had the chance. But that same vehicle, it, is doing something else in the first part of the line. Sasha probably isn't saying that her ex loves her ring finger. She also isn't necessarily talking about herself here, she probably wouldn't call herself it. Figuring out what this tenor might mean and the tension it produces between the first hit and the second hit will help you to distinguish between good figurative language and great figurative language.