Metaphors and similes can be powerful rhetorical devices.
During the debate over ratifying the Constitution both Federalists and Antifederalists readily used metaphors and similes in describing the Constitution itself. Antifederalists referred to the Constitution as “an iron trap,” “a gilded pill,” and “a Monster with open mouth and monstrous teeth ready to devour all before it”; while Federalists referred to the Constitution as the “Magna Carta of American liberty,” “the New Roof,” and a “sacred temple of freedom.” A few newspaper printers actually illustrated architectural metaphors as federal pillars, arches, and domes.
The more than 1,000 metaphors and similes in this compilation were strewn amongst a field of more than ten million words that filled thirty-five volumes of documents and thirteen additional sets of supplemental documents of The Documentary History of the Ratification of the Constitution and the Bill of Rights. They were little distinguished from their more mundane parts of speech—nouns, verbs, adjectives, adverbs, prepositions, and conjunctions—but when culled and compiled by themselves, they blossom like a bouquet of freshly cut flowers.