Enlightenment Via Stupidity

A moron I work with taught someone this: "We use similies to exaggerate, to stretch the truth."

Obviously, that's just fucking bizarre. We use similes (and metaphors) when attempting to simplify an explanation -- usually from more complex to less complex -- by introducing an understandable comparison. But as a result of hearing that erroneous explanation, I did realize something I'd never explicitly thought about before:

Similes and metaphors perform this action (ironically but not quite paradoxically) by introducing another element – which is to say, by adding the complexity inherent in another bit of knowledge, in other information; and it's all wrapped up in an assumption of familiarity.

An example: I know almost nothing about, say, how fuel-burning cars work. So, were someone to attempt to explain to me the workings of a complex thing by comparing that thing to the workings of an internal-combustion engine (or the rules of cricket, or why chickens exist), we would find ourselves further adrift in a widening river of confusion. All based on the assumption that this common-knowledge comparison would elucidate matters by introducing a (to-me-absolutely-opaque) abstraction.

It's the workable absurdity of clarification-via-further-complication that I found interesting.

Then it occurred to me that this is also how synonyms work:

"What's A mean?"
"B."
".... What's B mean?"

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