 When they think they’ve hit on such a possible adjustment, listeners promptly implement it: they reinterpret the comparison in accord with the adjusted canon of similarity and take the resulting adjusted content to be what the speaker intended to get across all along. (The whole process takes place without conscious inference; indeed, this is part of what makes the adjustment a natural one in Fogelin’s eyes.) To take a comparison figuratively is simply to execute this kind of adjustment in how we interpret it. A simile, a figurative comparative statement, is simply a comparison that manifestly requires and therefore routinely receives this kind of adjusted truth-conditional interpretation. When a simile is figuratively true, it will ordinarily be literally false—it will compare things such that the first is unlike the second by generally prevailing or previously prevailing standards, yet the first is like the second by new standards the simile itself helps to impose; this is the sense in which a simile is an exhibition of unity in variety, a likening of dissimilar things.