I’m thrilled that my new book will be publishing in the UK on ‘Remember, remember’, 5 November 2026, and in the US in spring 2027.
You’ll savour every fauna-fuelled page of Jeremy Butterfield’s enchanting The Metaphor Zoo.
Vanessa Feltz
English is home to a veritable menagerie of animal metaphors, similes, sayings, adages, proverbs, idioms and rhymes, ranging from the commonsense to the utterly absurd. From curious cats to mindless sheeple, l take a species-by-species safari through the English language in pursuit of animal idioms.
In The Metaphor Zoo, I explore the ways in which animal images and animal-related concepts enrich our language, reflecting and enhancing key human emotions and experiences.
I was particularly delighted to receive a ringing endorsement from David Crystal:
‘A hugely illuminating exploration of everyday animal language, full of lexical insight, and told with an appealing blend of humour, scholarly detail, literary perspective, and personal history. Linguistic zoology at its best.
Professor David Crystal
And from Benjamin Dreyer:
What a joy…to read Jeremy Butterfield’s charming, scholarly, boisterously playful, thoroughly engaging The Metaphor Zoo.