A minor media flurry occurred in 2013 when it was announced that the Oxford English Dictionary had re-defined the word “literally” so that it could now mean “metaphorically,” i.e. “not literally.” The senior dictionary editor, Fiona MacPherson, explained that this constituted merely “another shade of meaning” or even “a subtle nuance,” and added that the first recorded example of such a use came from 1769. All that means, to people like myself, Denis Donoghue, and, I trust, the readers of this review, is that the word has been used wrongly since 1769. As Donoghue argues in his new book, unless a metaphor has a non-metaphorical referent, it cannot function. When we learn about poetic imagery at school, we are commonly taught that a simile is a straightforward comparison of two things using “like” or “as,” in which the real thing (A) is called the tenor, and the imaginary thing to which it is compared (B) is called the vehicle (terms invented by I. A. Richards). We are also told that a metaphor differs from a simile because the assertion of likeness between A and B is a matter of identification rather than similarity, so that the form of a metaphor would be “A is B.” Yet this is not as tidy a matter as it seems. When President Clinton, in 1998, replied to a question put by the Grand Jury that “It depends upon what the meaning of the word ‘is’ is,” he was widely ridiculed. Nonetheless, he was raising