[8] A comprehensive scholarly examination of metaphor in antiquity, and the way its use was fostered by Homer's epic poems The Iliad and The Odyssey, is provided by William Bedell Stanford, Greek Metaphor,[9] Frances Brooke's 1769 novel The History of Emily Montague was used in the earliest Oxford English Dictionary (OED) citation for the figurative sense of literally; the sentence from the novel used was: "He is a fortunate man to be introduced to such a party of fine women at his arrival; it is literally to feed among the lilies.
[10] Within literary analysis, the terms "literal" and "figurative" are still used; but within the fields of cognition and linguistics, the basis for identifying such a distinction is no longer used.
[15] A metaphor[17] is a figure of speech in which two "essentially unlike things" are shown to have a type of resemblance or create a new image.
[24] Personification[25] is the attribution of a personal nature or character to inanimate objects or abstract notions,[26] especially as a rhetorical figure.
A pun is an expression intended for a humorous or rhetorical effect by exploiting different meanings of words.
In tests, figurative language was found to be comprehended at the same speed as literal language; and so the premise that the recipient was first attempting to process a literal meaning and discarding it before attempting to process a figurative meaning appears to be false.