Analogy and Metaphor
"Metaphors have a way of holding the most truth in the least space." Orson Scott Card
I found this on twitter and shared it on Facebook where it stimulated some interesting discussions.
My view is that we cannot change human nature by changing our language. We have often tried to reclaim words or alter how we talk about things - but changing chairman to chairperson hasn’t actually improved the gender pay gap, or put many more women onto the boards of large corporations. It’s a cosmetic change, that does little to alter the underlying dynamics.
That said, there are some instances where it’s good to change our use of language - it’s a good thing that we make more of an effort these days to respect people’s preferred pronouns or to avoid racial slurs, for example.
And I do think it can be useful to analyse what our language says about us and the society we live in. But overthinking every metaphor and analogy would be, I suspect, counterproductive.
I first read about how much of our language is metaphor in Buckminster Fuller's work - where he talked about our language around time and space. He suggested that to remind ourselves that we are living on a planet, we should stop saying "up" and "down" and instead talk about "in" and "out"
I spent the most part of a year in the eighties confusing people by doing just that.
Language and thinking work by analogy and metaphor precisely because they are abstractions - not literal.
If we attempt to over-ride the way we have acquired our use of language - which we picked up organically from the beginning of our lives - we impoverish our communication skills.
Considering the misunderstandings in the graphic, we can see how over-literal it all is. "Jump the gun" is about the starting pistol, not using a gun as weapon for violence. So you could argue that it's a metaphor based on competition, but not violence.
Most of the expressions discussed have actually become cliches, because they are so much abstracted that they have lost any 'original meaning.
The metaphors and analogies which become incorporated into our language come from our experience as embodied human beings and as members of society.
A couple of days after this discussion, I was researching the origins of the word “stalking” and when it was first used, for my current work in progress.
I knew that the word stalking wasn't in common use until the 90s, though obviously it's been happening for a lot longer, and I wondered how people talked about it.
Anyway, it turns out I was wrong - John le Carre used it in 1968-
From English Language and Usage Stack Exchange
“I've stumbled across an example of the modern usage of stalking that's a couple of decades earlier than most of those citations above. It comes from John Le Carre's 1968 novel A Small Town In Germany. A woman is describing her colleague's behaviour after she rejected his advances: he starts turning up at all the parties she goes to, and so she suspects that he has been reading her mail in her office pigeonhole in order to anticipate her movements. She confronts him about his behaviour, and relates his response:
'He assured me categorically that he was not… stalking me. That was the expression I used; it was one I instantly regretted. I cannot imagine how I came on such a ridiculous metaphor.'
What's particularly interesting, I think, is that the character appears to be inventing the modern usage within the story, but then trying to withdraw from it. (Of course, this being Le Carré, the man isn't a stalker at all, he's a suspected mole.)
This is, for me, an interesting illustration of how language develops. The word stalking is clearly a term from hunting - and so this term eventually took hold because it is a good analogy or metaphor for the behaviour concerned.
Ann
More reading - and viewing
Further reading
Recommended by a good friend, Carmilla Voiez (Facebook Page here, or follow her, on Amazon) - The Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff and Johnson.
And one from Douglas Hofstadter - Surfaces and Essences, Analogy as The Fuel and Fire of Thinking To me, this book was completely fascinating, but quite heavy going.
A good introduction to the ideas can be found in this video - (If you are impatient, there’s a long introduction and Hofstadter starts his talk at around the 13 minutes mark)