I want you to reach back into your Junior High school experience and remember something your English teacher taught you. For some of you that's going to be quite a stretch. For others not so much. You know who you are.

The concept I want you to pull up into your memory banks is the concept of a metaphor. A metaphor is a figure of speech in the English language where you use something totally unrelated to a particular idea, to describe that idea. Usually metaphors capture our attention, because in a few words, they accurately describe our emotions or the facts of a situation.

Let me give you some examples:

• That person is about as nervous as a long-tailed c…