Introduction
The word metaphor, which comes from the Greeks, is itself a metaphor. “Meta” means beyond, and “phor” means to carry – a metaphor can be said to carry meaning beyond its original context. For example, the statement “that idea doesn’t hold water” implies that the idea is a bad one, by invoking the image of a bucket with holes in it. Indeed, an idea that is “full of holes” is one that it is easy to disprove or argue against. If you understand these metaphors, you know they do not imply that a good idea could literally carry water. While metaphors had long been dismissed by linguists and philosophers as inexact and sloppy, they are increasingly being accepted and studied as an important feature of human communication and comprehension. We all inhabit the narratives we create, and metaphors are the foundation that give those narratives efficiency, power and meaning in our lives.[1] For some of us, metaphors can also be remarkably clever and fun.
Figures of Speech
Metaphors, and their related cousins – similes, analogies, idioms, clichés, puns and hyperboles – are all known as “figurative”, as opposed to “literal” use of language. They are very handy linguistic shortcuts that can convey significant and memorable meaning in short phrases. The original “memes” of colloquial language, metaphors are a key feature in literature, particularly poetry. Metaphors work by connecting a well-known image or idea to a situation in an entirely different context. The more novel and unusual the connection, the more memorable the metaphor. Curiously, the original meaning of the phrase may become lost, supplanted by the ubiquitous use of the phrase in common language – that’s when metaphorical references become idioms or clichés.
One of the more famous metaphors is the one used by Shakespeare in his comedy As You Like It: “All the world’s a stage, and all the men and women merely players.” The speech outlines an extended metaphor comparing a human life to the theatre. Shakespeare is suggesting that life is a drama, that people are playing roles, and that we enter and exit scenes in our lives just as actors enter and exit the stage. He also suggests that, while we don’t know the future, the future, like a script, is predetermined and the human experience itself is destined to be repeated.
An example of a metaphor that has perhaps become more of a cliché, is a phrase that appeared a number of times recently in reference to protests on college campuses in support of Palestinians. The argument was that some of the views being expressed were simply too abhorrent to be considered as free speech. The views were referred to as being “beyond the pale”, meaning they should be prohibited and punished as too offensive. Ironically, the users of the phrase, in some cases learned academics, did not appear to recognize its origins. After the Roman conquest of Britain some 2,000 years ago, those who lived beyond the Roman fortifications, which were guarded by sharpened stakes known as “pales”, were viewed, and treated, as uncivilized barbarians. They were “beyond the pale.” This ancient bigotry grounded in Roman power hardly seems to be an appropriate frame to use in discussing the boundaries of free speech.
Another curious example of the way meaning can “jump over” in cultural evolution is the very word that distinguishes the figurative use of language. The literal meaning of the word “literally”, when applied to a statement, is that the statement is true and exact in its meaning. I used the word properly in the first paragraph. It means the exact opposite from “figuratively”. However, that meaning of the word seems to have been lost in modern colloquial conversation. “Literally” is almost always used now for emphasis rather than meaning. “I literally fell out of my chair when I heard that!” is an example of the word “literally” being used figuratively, as an enhancer. “Fell out of my chair” is a metaphor for the degree of surprise I experienced. Oddly, the use of the word “literally” in this colloquial context seems to make it clear that I did not actually fall out of my chair, as that would be absurd.[2]
These examples, and the many thousands of others that occur ubiquitously in conversation and in writing, demonstrate the deep flexibility and spontaneous evolution of language through time.
Cultural communication serves as a vast river where meaning flows in strong currents through time but often branches off in tributaries, swirling eddies and cross-currents, changing in response to cultural circumstances and usage.
How’s that for a metaphor? The image I found for this post is a visual metaphor for that sense of flow.
Metaphors as Cognitive Hacks
Respect for metaphorical speech has recently been on the rise, as researchers have come to recognize the unique cognitive value that metaphors provide. A strong case for the special role of metaphors in cognition was first made in the book Metaphors We Live By, by linguists and philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson published in 1980. They argued that metaphorical thinking enables a human to use simple images, pictures and connections to make sense of complex ideas and experiences. While literal communication may enable precision, it can be slow and tedious. Metaphors allow a person to grasp and retain, or to communicate, the most important features quickly and efficiently. In the grand arc of human evolution, the ability to communicate information quickly, memorably and emphatically would have had clear survival benefits. So you could say humans have been programmed (using a bad metaphor!) to think metaphorically.
As Lakoff and Johnson put it: “the concepts that govern our thought are not just matters of the intellect. They also govern our everyday functioning, down to the most mundane details. Our concepts structure what we perceive, how we get around in the world, and how we relate to other people.’ Furthermore, ‘our conceptual system is largely metaphorical.”[3]
This may not always be helpful. Metaphors are a beautiful and marvelously efficient means of communicating complex and sophisticated ideas. But, just like advertising jingles and social media deepfakes, they can be used to hack the human brain. As an example, just look at the ways the flag of the United States has been used metaphorically over the past centuries. The flag is itself a powerful metaphorical object. The stripes refer to the 13 original colonies that declared independence, and the 50 stars represent the individual modern states. The red color is thought to represent the blood of those who died to protect our freedom, with the blue representing justice and freedom (blue sky). While originally a symbol of unity and rebellion for the new nation, the flag has since served principally as a symbol of loyalty. In the civil war it took on meaning as the banner of the union and its support for emancipation of the slaves. In the 20th century, as the nation’s global influence expanded, the flag came to represent the promise of freedom and prosperity, the symbol of the American Dream. In the 1960’s, a countering narrative arose focusing on the militarization of the country and the pursuit of what many felt was an unjust war. Burning the flag became a symbolic gesture of defiance. In the last few elections, the flag has been displayed, sometimes in a “supersized” or aggressive fashion, as a symbol of loyalty to the Republican Party and the “Make America Great Again” theme. Rather than encouraging the nation to come together and “rally ‘round the flag”, this use of the flag seems to be demanding unquestioning loyalty, a call for hegemony rather than plurality.
Through this evolution, you cannot deny the metaphorical power of the flag to grab attention and to help shape a narrative. Nor can you deny the growing power of and indiscriminate use of metaphor in political speech in the world of social as well as published media. Metaphors, particular those that are novel and shocking, are effective in getting attention and in being remembered. It is cheap and it works. Why not use it? Sadly, however, the increasing proliferation of metaphorical references for political rhetoric that are unhinged from historical, scientific facts or from cultural norms that enable civil civic conversation, is significantly undermining the key feature of a properly functioning society – civic trust. As another older metaphor points out: “If anything goes, everything does.”[4] We do need to fix that.
The Magical Power of Abstraction
The human mind seems to have a special capacity for “abstracting” what is seen and experienced. Such abstraction is, at the organic level, a process of narrowing down and weeding out unneeded sensory data. What we think we perceive is already an abstraction, a “curated” picture of the raw experience of the senses. This abstraction is necessary and essential in order to facilitate quick and acceptably accurate, if not perfect, responses to threats and opportunities in our environment. Attempting to perceive and make sense of all sensory data would be overwhelmingly slow. Trying to communicate with others on the basis of such raw data would, in many circumstances, prove to be deadly. (This sentence, in the use of the word “deadly”, makes both a literal and figurative claim simultaneously.)
A further abstraction takes place in communication between humans. The images and thoughts in our mind are translated, initially into sounds and gestures, and later into formal language, in a communally developed system of abstractions. Animals also communicate, but their motions and sounds count only as “signs” or pointers directing attention – like the dance of the honeybees or the singing of birds. The human language goes beyond by designating meaning, associating specific motions and sounds with abstract designations in a rule-based system that necessarily has to be developed and learned communally.[5] A common human language, known by both speaker and receiver, facilitates joint understanding, joint action, and increasing socialization. The technology of language is probably the most important tool ever invented by the human species. Our survival and success in the paleolithic world, in the invention and use of increasingly complex tools and weapons, and in the development agriculture, likely were contingent on, or vastly accelerated by, advances in language. Complex modern societies would be impossible without it.
The abstraction does not stop there. Written language provided an additional layer of abstraction, taking spoken words and transcribing them into written symbols. Mathematics and its symbols and operations, is another abstraction, one that played a key role in the development of measurement and calculation techniques. The rule-based abstract practices of geometry and arithmetic ultimately grounds modern science. And finally, we now know that the figurative language of metaphors and its cousins further squeezes meaning into short narratives that captures the essence of a communication in a compressed, and compelling form. An abstraction, on an abstraction, on an abstraction.
As Benjamin Santos Genta puts it: “Metaphors thus seem to provide the foundation of how we conceptualize abstract concepts (and, therefore, much of the world).”[6]
Shakespeare said: “All the world is a stage”. That capture an important and complex truth. To take that metaphor further, each human, embedded deeply within human society, is producer, director, writer, editor, interpreter, actor, set designer, stage hand, and critic. And, also, audience.
[1] For an excellent overview of these issues, see: Benjamin Santos Genta, “Metaphors Make the World”, AEON Magazine, Feb 8, 2024.
[2] Two sources on the use of “literally” are Love it or hate it, nonliteral ‘literally’ is here to stay, by Professor Valerie Fridland, and “Use or Abuse of the Word ‘Literally’, an NPR interview on Day to Day, November 3, 2005.
[3] Quotes attributed to Lakoff and Johnson from: @ThenNow on Youtube, February 14, 2020 – Metaphors We Live By: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson
[4] I can’t find a definitive source for the phrase, which I distinctly remember, but it has been loosely linked by several sources, to the 1939 Cole Porter Song, Anything Goes, written for the musical of the same name.
[5] See: How Is Human Language Different From Animal Signals by Michael Egnor in MindMatters, 12/10/2018.
[6] Benjamin Santos Genta, “Metaphors Make the World”, AEON Magazine, Feb 8, 2024.
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BONUS – Metaphors in Science
Metaphors have always been part of the language of science, perhaps because they help us visualize the invisible. The “Big Bang” and “Black Holes” are both remarkable features of the cosmos named in metaphors. Those names offer vivid, simple and memorable imagery of two incredibly complex theoretical phenomena studied in physics. But just because you have a name and an image does not mean you have achieved understanding. The similarly simplistic names “Dark Energy” and “Dark Matter” may have given comfort that physicists were making sense of some very significant anomalies being observed in the universe. As it turns out, the theoretical underpinnings of both concepts are increasingly felt to be on shaky ground. And I’m not sure the theoretical concept of “The Multiverse” ever really did get off the ground. NOTE: these last two metaphors – “shaky ground” and “off the ground” involve two quite different original meanings. “Shaky ground” might be a bog, where your next step may plunge you into the muck. “Getting off the ground” is a reference to what a plane or rocket has to do for successful flight.
BONUS – Metaphors in Religion
Religions are largely based on extended narratives, many of which arose in oral traditions passed on through many generations. Those narratives often include descriptions of fantastical events for which there is little historical evidence, but which convey compelling ideas and themes. Those themes include teachings on how to live, how to treat others and how to manage the vicissitudes that occur in everyone’s life, including death. In this sense, religions are largely metaphorical – the stories demonstrate the key tenets of a religion in memorable and emotionally resonant narratives. They teach us how to live. However, some religions then take the step of claiming that their narratives are literally true, that the stories actually happened, and that all others are false. Given the scarceness of confirmatory historic evidence and what seems to be the impossibility of directly re-affirming the truth claims in the present, the only basis for adopting those truth claims would appear to be to accept them “on faith” or “on authority”. This raises a cultural dilemma. What, or who, is right? Perhaps an answer can be found in the ancient metaphor of the blind men trying to describe an elephant. Each touches one part of the elephant – head, ear, tusk, trunk, body, foot, back, tail – and then squabble over the elephant’s true identify. Rather than squabble, it would be best to explore our differences with humility and compassion (seeking a win-win) than to fight over our “rightness” (resulting in a lose-lose). I believe that “God is love” – let’s love our way out of the dilemma.