 Your friend from Saturn now transports you through space to his home sphere, and looking back remotely on earth you say to him, nodding at the earth, “floor.” Perhaps he will think this is still part of the lesson and assume that the word “floor” applies properly to the earth, at least as seen from Saturn. But what if you thought he already knew the meaning of “floor” and you were remembering how Dante, from a similar place in the heavens, saw the inhabited earth as “the small round floor that makes us passionate”? [Paradiso 22.151, trans. Laurence Binyon] Your purpose was metaphor, not drill in the use of the language. What difference would it make to your friend which way he took it? With the theory of metaphor under consideration, very little difference. (36–7)