Explorer
Metaphor Fingerprints
Six Founders. Eight families of metaphor. One Shakespeare silhouette for comparison.
When the Founders or Shakespeare reach for a figurative comparison, they tend to draw from a small number of recurring image families: edifice (foundations, pillars, cornerstones, ruin); body (limbs, heads, lifeblood, the body politic); ship (helm, course, anchor, tempest); fire (kindle, flame, consume); plant (root, branch, seed, fruit); path (way, road, course, journey); motion (rise, fall, advance, decline); container (full of, empty, overflow). Each one tells you something different about how the writer sees the world.
Each radar below is one Founder. The red shape is their own metaphor signature, in occurrences per million words. The blue dashed silhouette behind is Shakespeare’s, for comparison. The numbers at prominent vertices show the Founder’s actual rate on that metaphor family.
John Adams
Heavy BODY metaphors (16.1/M, close to Shakespeare). Above average across most families.
Benjamin Franklin
His MOTION rate (15.4/M) is the closest of any Founder to Shakespeare's. FIRE is also high.
Thomas Jefferson
Above-average SHIP, PATH, PLANT. A balanced metaphorical vocabulary across most families.
George Washington
Low almost everywhere; only PATH and MOTION reach moderate levels. Plain prose.
James Madison
The PLANT specialist. 29.9/M is roughly two and a half times any other Founder's rate. EDIFICE also high.
Alexander Hamilton
Highest SHIP (15.7/M) and PATH (16.2/M) of any Founder. Political life as navigation.
What the shapes mean
EDIFICE is the Founders’ signature family.
Look at the EDIFICE axis on every radar. Shakespeare sits at the centre: rate 0.0 per million words. Hamilton, Madison, and Adams all project outward on that axis. Constitutional rhetoric (the language of foundations, pillars, cornerstones, bulwarks, ruin) is an old metaphor family—polities have been figured as buildings since antiquity—but in this corpus it belongs to the Founders alone: absent from Shakespeare’s measured patterns, constant in theirs. Shakespeare, whose political imagination is monarchical, has almost no use for it. The Founders, designing a republic from first principles, have constant use for it. EDIFICE is one of the small handful of places the Founders push the English language somewhere Shakespeare didn’t need to take it.
Madison the gardener
Madison’s radar shoots out on the PLANT axis at 29.9/M: roughly two and a half times any other Founder’s rate, and six times Shakespeare’s. The result is Madison the political botanist: liberty has roots; factions are weeds; the Constitution must be cultivated; the union has branches. This is no coincidence, given his agricultural Virginia upbringing—and it is a steady habit of mind, traceable across all of his writing.
Hamilton at sea
Hamilton’s SHIP (15.7/M) and PATH (16.2/M) rates are the highest of any Founder. He talks about the Republic with the vocabulary of navigation: helm, course, storm, shoals, tempest. For Hamilton, government is steering. Madison plants; Hamilton navigates. The two principal architects of The Federalist use almost completely different image families for the same project.
Franklin and motion
Franklin’s MOTION rate (15.4/M) is the closest of any Founder to Shakespeare’s (17.4/M). Things rise, fall, advance, and decline in his prose in much the same proportions they do in Shakespeare’s. Combined with his high FIRE rate, Franklin’s metaphorical signature is the most Shakespeare-shaped of the six: another quiet piece of evidence for the absorbed-mode argument the project makes about him.
Adams and the body
Adams’s BODY rate (16.1/M) is the highest of the six and almost matches Shakespeare’s (15.1/M). His writing is full of bodies political and physical:limbs, head, lifeblood, nerves of the state, tender as the apple of the eye. The metaphor is centuries old by the time Adams reaches for it, but he reaches for it constantly. It is one more place the Adams citational mode shows through.
Washington’s plain prose
Washington’s radar is the smallest of the six. His writing uses metaphor sparingly across every family. The two axes that reach any height are PATH and MOTION: the vocabulary of marches, advances, courses to be taken. The metaphors of a soldier and a surveyor. The figure is plain because the writer is plain.
The full per-method ranking lives in the Ranking explorer; the methodological argument behind the eight metaphor families lives in the Eleven Ways of Looking essay.