 Metaphor involves the use of a term or other sign in a novel sense different from its customary sense, what Turbayne calls “sort-crossing.” Yet not every sort-crossing, not every trope, counts as a metaphor, just those involving “the pretense that something is the case when it is not,” as when Descartes candidly says he will describe “this earth, and generally the whole visible world, as if it were merely a machine” (13–14). When I say man is a wolf, “though I give him [man] the same name I do not believe he is another sort of wolf. I only make believe he is… That is, I pretend that something is the case when it is not, and I implicitly ask my audience to do the same” (14). The pretending here comes with some intending: “I intend that [man] shares some of the properties of wolves but not enough of them to classified as an actual wolf.” Similarly “when I say that vision is a language I intend that vision shares some of the properties of language but not enough to let it be ranged alongside English and French” (15). It appears that what I say when I resort to metaphor, what I intend by it in Turbayne’s special sense, is whatever it would take to sustain my pretense and render it worthwhile. Pretense about the world goes hand in hand with pretense about language: the sense of semantic strain (zeugma) involved in “Men and timber-wolves are wolves” shows that the word “wolf” is really being used in two different senses even though it is as if it were being used in just one (15); there is a shared pretense that the two senses are the same (17), despite awareness on all sides that they are really distinct. Often what is expected to sustain and reward such a pretense, what we intend in pretending, is some set of resemblances between primary and secondary subjects. But this needn’t be the case, and when it isn’t, metaphor ceases to be a trope of resemblance entirely. Poetically ambitious synecdoches and metonymies are metaphors without being similitudes.