metaphorical

When he’s stashing the stolen paintings later in a farmhouse’s hayloft and accidentally knocks the ladder out from under him, the moment is amusing and appropriately metaphorical.

His own style, which is to say his mind, was compulsively metaphorical, gorgeously maximal, enough so to make him worry about “an implicit marvelling at myself as expressor.”

In both songs, Swift is unapologetically petty, offering her foes a metaphorical bouquet of flowers thick with thorns.

Badu treated “Mama’s Gun” like a “metaphorical diary” — as she does with all of her music — allowing herself to release everything that she was experiencing in real time.

Tadpoles become toads, and, in tales such as this one, metaphorical toads can be — whether through will, chance, or wishes — transformed into something else.