All similes are trivially true, because everything resembles everything else in some respect; and all metaphors are literally false, because everything is what it is and not another thing. I propose the existence of a third category, which I shall call counterfactual metaphor. An example is: “You could be a shadow, beneath the street light, behind my home.” Is this true? I rather think not: plausibly you could have one arm instead of two, if you were born without one or lost one in an accident, but you couldn’t have different parents or be made of ice. Being a shadow is more like the latter cases than the former. Still, your being a shadow is not like your being a prime number or a circular square. So when it is said that you could be a shadow beneath the street light, you are jerked into thinking about how you might be like one, though you cannot be one.

With this discovery I break new ground in linguistics, semantics, evolutionary psychology, literary theory, aesthetics, and essentialism, to mention only the most obvious.