4
A Reef of Dead Metaphors
In Antonio Skármeta’s Burning Patience (the novel on which the film Il Postino was based), the Chilean poet Pablo Neruda tries to explain to the young postman Mario what poetry is all about:
‘Metaphors, I said!’
‘What’s that?’
The poet placed his hand on the boy’s shoulder.
‘To be more or less imprecise, we could say that it is a way of describing something by comparing it to something else.’
‘Give me an example.’
Neruda looked at his watch and sighed.
‘Well, when you say the sky is weeping, what do you mean?’
‘That’s easy – that it’s raining.’
‘So, you see, that’s a metaphor.’
Mario desperately wants to become a poet himself, but he fails to come up with any metaphors of his own. So Neruda tries to give him a helping hand:
‘You are now going to walk along the beach to the bay and as you observe the movement of the sea, you are going to invent metaphors.’
‘Give me an example!’
‘Listen to this poem: ‘Here on the Island, the sea, so much sea. It spills over from time to time. It says yes, then no, then no. It says yes, in blue, in foam, in a gallop. It says no, then no. It cannot be still. My name is sea, it repeats, striking a stone but not convincing it. Then with the seven green tongues, of seven green tigers, over seven green seas, it caresses it, kisses it, wets it, and pounds on its chest, repeating its own name.”
He paused with an air of satisfaction.
‘What do you think?’
‘It’s weird.’
‘Weird? You certainly are a severe critic.’
‘No, Sir. The poem wasn’t weird. What was weird was the way I felt when you recited it … How can I explain it to you? When you recited that poem, the words went from over there to over here.’
‘Like the sea, then!’
‘Yes, they moved just like the sea.’
‘That’s the rhythm.’
‘And I felt weird because with all the movement, I got dizzy.’
‘You got dizzy?’
‘Of course, I was like a boat tossing upon your words.’
The poet’s eyelids rose slowly.
‘Like a boat tossing upon my words.’
‘Uh-huh.’
‘You know what you just did, Mario?’
‘No, what?’
‘You invented a metaphor.’
Skármeta here portrays the conventional image of metaphor as the ‘language of poetry’, the summit of the poetic imagination. On a flight of inspiration, the poet carries a concept away from its natural environment into an entirely different realm. Mario’s chance metaphor, which links the unrelated worlds of words and the sea, may not be the most striking of poetic images, but in the hands of more inspired poets the impact of uprooting a concept from its natural environment can be arrestingly evocative – just think of Yeats’s closing lines from his poem ‘He Wishes for the Cloths of Heaven’: ‘I have spread my dreams under your feet; Tread softly because you tread on my dreams.’
As the quintessence of poetic genius, metaphor may at first seem entirely irrelevant to the history of ordinary day-to-day language. For what could this elixir of artistic inspiration possibly have to do with the evolution of mundane communication? But in fact there is also an entirely different side to metaphor, far-flung from the poetic imagination. Removal vans in Athens, like the one in the picture above, don’t bear the word METAΦOPEΣ (METAFORES) on their back end because they are advertising courses in creative writing. The reason is much more prosaic, and is simply that meta-phora is Greek for ‘carry across’ (meta = ‘across’, phor = ‘carry’). Or to use the Latin equivalent, meta-phor just means trans-fer.
Removal van in Athens
And one certainly does not have to be an aspiring poet in order to transfer concepts from one linguistic domain to another. Even in the most commonplace discourse, it is hardly possible to venture a few steps without treading on dozens of metaphors. For metaphors are everywhere, not only in language, but also in our mind. Far from being a rare spark of poetic genius, the marvellous gift of a precious few, metaphor is an indispensable element in the thought-processes of every one of us. As will soon become apparent, we use metaphors not because of any literary leanings or artistic ambitions, but quite simply because metaphor is the chief mechanism through which we can describe and even grasp abstraction.
This chapter will expose the role of metaphor in the making of linguistic structures, by tracing a stream of metaphors that runs right through language and flows from the concrete to the abstract. In this constant surge, the simplest and sturdiest of words are swept along, one after another, and carried towards abstract meanings. As these words drift downstream, they are bleached of their original vitality and turn into pale lifeless terms for abstract concepts – the substance from which the structure of language is formed. And when at last the river sinks into the sea, these spent metaphors are deposited, layer after layer, and so the structure of language grows, as a reef of dead metaphors.
TREADING ON METAPHORS
If these high-flown claims about the ubiquity of metaphor sound rather far-fetched, then consider the following paragraph:
At the cabinet meeting, ground-breaking plans were put forward by the minister for tough new legislation to curb the power of the unions. It was clear that the unions would never go along with these suggestions, and the conflict erupted as soon as news of the plan was leaked to the press. At the trade-union conference, the minister encountered a frosty reception. He tried to get across the idea that the excessive power of the unions was holding back economic growth. He said that while productivity had sunk in recent years, salaries were rising. But his comments were drowned by angry heckling. Any semblance of politeness collapsed when the General Secretary confronted the minister head on, saying that he was not on top of the facts, and that his figures were riddled with inaccuracies. The unions were not asking for any rise in salaries, he argued, they only wanted to avoid further cuts in real terms, by ensuring that salaries remain in line with inflation.
This report can be accused of many things, but certainly not of being poetically inspired. If anything, its flat journalese feels only marginally less boring than a shopping list or a telephone directory. And yet this paragraph is jam-packed with metaphors. The first sentence alone contains no fewer than four different ones:
At the cabinet meeting, ground-breaking plans were put forward by the minister for tough new legislation to curb the power of the unions.
Literally, ‘ground-breaking’ is something you do with a shovel, not with a plan. And ‘tough’ is really an attribute of materials like fabrics, metals or meat. A steak, for instance, can be tough when it is not easily chewed, but by no stretch of the imagination was the legislation really meant to be masticated. ‘Tough’ here has been transported out of its original environment in the physical world of materials, and carried across to the abstract domain of ideas. And in just the same way, the plans for new legislation were never actually ‘put forward’ by the minister, as this is yet another metaphor, where the physical act of pushing something is presented as an image for ‘suggesting’. Curbing the power of the unions is also metaphorical, since a curb is literally the piece of metal put in horses’ mouths to control their movement, but not even this minister was planning to rein in union members with bridles.
The rest of the passage is also laden with metaphors, which are italicized in the paragraph below. As you run through it once again, bear in mind that what really erupts is a volcano, not conflicts; what really leaks is water, not information; trees grow, not the economy; ships sink, not productivity; people drown, not comments; buildings collapse, not semblances of politeness. Most importantly, note that all the metaphors here flow in one direction, from the concrete to the abstract. In every one of them, concrete terms have been transferred from their original habitat to more abstract domains.
At the cabinet meeting, ground-breaking plans were put forward by the minister for tough new legislation to curb the power of the unions. It was clear that the unions would never go along with these suggestions, and the conflict erupted as soon as news of the plan was leaked to the press. At the trade-union conference, the minister encountered a frosty reception. He tried to get across the idea that the excessive power of the unions was holding back economic growth. He said that while productivity had sunk in recent years, salaries were rising. But his comments were drowned by angry heckling. Any semblance of politeness collapsed when the General Secretary confronted the minister head on, saying that the minister was not on top of the facts, and that his figures were riddled with inaccuracies. The unions were not even asking for any rise in salaries, he argued, they only wanted to avoid further cuts in real terms, by ensuring that salaries remain in line with inflation.
In India there is a sect of Jainist monks called the Shvetambara, who always carry a broom and sweep the ground before them as they walk, lest they accidentally tread on some insects and squash them. If one were to show the same consideration towards metaphors in language, one would require much more than a broom. One would need to levitate, or take a vow of eternal silence, for it transpires that even the most tedious prose is teeming with metaphors.
* * *
Still, there is plainly a huge difference between the humdrum metaphors in this passage and the evocative images of Yeats or Neruda. Poetic metaphors can be stunning, but in this news report one barely even notices the metaphors, unless they are specifically pointed out. So why don’t we react to ‘tough legislation’ in the same way as to ‘treading on dreams’? The answer, in a word, is familiarity. The reason why we don’t trip up on any of the metaphors in this passage is that they have all been recycled many times before. ‘Tough’ may once have been a glamorous newcomer in the domain of ideas, but it is now so often used in this abstract sphere that it has been entirely assimilated, so that a conscious effort is required to remember that ‘tough’ is not a native of the region, but an immigrant from the world of materials. With ‘curb’, the process of naturalization is even more advanced, since these days one is much more likely to hear about someone curbing the power of the unions than curbing the movement of a horse. What was once a vibrant metaphor has thus asserted itself as the usual meaning of this verb, and the literal sense is hardly remembered.
In literary studies, metaphors which have become commonplace and have lost their evocative power are dismissed as ‘dead metaphors’, and in the passage above all the metaphors are thoroughly and irremediably dead. They have come to be used so often in their metaphorical abstract sense that all semblance of their former vitality has been lost and they have firmly established themselves as the stock-in-trade of ordinary language.
But there is more to familiarity than individual acquaintance, for most metaphors in ordinary language are also familiar on a much deeper level. Suppose, for instance, that during an election campaign you read in a newspaper that ‘critics derided the new election manifesto as nothing more than a soufflé of promises’. This phrase is clearly metaphorical, since by anyone’s standards a soufflé is properly made of egg whites, not of promises. But although you may never have heard this particular metaphor before, it is still unlikely to strike you as a great poetic coup, or as something entirely out of the ordinary. The reason must be that ‘soufflé of promises’ belongs to a larger context which is familiar. You will certainly have encountered many similar images that use food terms to describe abstract ideas, thoughts, and emotions. People speak of troubles brewing, anger simmering, resentment boiling, fanaticism fermenting, employees seething (literally: ‘boiling’) with discontent. People chew over new suggestions and digest new information; the masses swallow whatever lies the newspapers feed them; students regurgitate facts at the examination; children gobble up the latest Harry Potter book; fans devour reports of their idols’ private lives. We can have sweet dreams, bitter hatreds, sour relations, or half-baked ideas; and all this can give some food for thought. So there is a well-established link in our mind between the two domains, which unites all the individual images into a broader conceptual metaphor: ‘ideas are food’. And thus when we hear a phrase like ‘soufflé of promises’, the image does not sound so surprising, because it fits neatly into this familiar frame.
Needless to say, such ‘conceptual metaphors’, mappings of one domain on to the other, are not confined to food and ideas. They have been shown to pervade not only everyday language, but our whole perception of the world. One example that can illustrate how deeply such conceptual mappings are engrained in both language and mind is the image ‘more is up, less is down’. In the news report above, there were three different images that derived from that overarching metaphor: ‘economic growth’, ‘productivity had sunk’, and ‘salaries were rising’. But there is a variety of other expressions that fit into the same image: ‘sterling is up against the dollar’; ‘they’re down to their last supplies’; ‘turn up the heating’; ‘this engine has very low power’; ‘the population will peak, but there will be a drop in consumer spending’; ‘his self-esteem plummeted’. The number of examples can rise without difficulty, and this shows that we consistently think of more complex or abstract notions (such as self-esteem or the economy) in terms of the simpler spatial directions, up and down.
At this point, one may protest that ‘sterling is up against the dollar’ is surely not just a figure of speech. After all, isn’t it possible to see in practice when sterling goes up or down, by looking at the daily chart in the newspaper? And when the central heating needs to be ‘turned up’, this often does involve pushing a knob upwards. So how can all this be dismissed as a mere metaphor? But try thinking about it this way: why are graphs plotted to show that more is up and less is down? In theory, there is no particular reason why graphs shouldn’t be drawn with ‘down’ meaning ‘more’, and ‘up’ meaning ‘less’, just like the two charts below:
These two diagrams may look pretty odd, but there is nothing wrong with them from a logical point of view. They only appear so strange because they go against the pervasive ‘more is up’ convention. And in the same way, there would be nothing mechanically unnatural about a control panel where ‘turning up’ the heating would require pushing a knob down. So the conceptual metaphor ‘more is up’ has taken over much more than just language, and has become so deeply entrenched in our minds that it even influences how we plot graphs and design control panels. In these, as in countless other examples, the image has gained an independent existence, and through our cultural artefacts, it even shapes the world around us.
Of course, all this does not mean that the image ‘more is up’ is wholly arbitrary. When water is poured into a bottle, for instance, the more water there is, the higher its level. And if apples are piled up in the larder, the more apples, the higher the pile. So the image ‘more is up’ is clearly rooted in real life and based on experience. Nevertheless, in language, the image has gone far beyond this original basis. The Admissions Tutor may boast that ‘student numbers at St Rufus are up’, but nothing really becomes higher in the college when more students are admitted, just as nothing really becomes lower when the temperature is ‘down’. ‘Up’ and ‘down’ here are merely metaphors, albeit thoroughly dead ones.
* * *
MONSIEUR JOURDAIN: I’m in love with a lady of great quality, and I wish that you would help me write something to her in a little note that I will let fall at her feet …
PHILOSOPHY MASTER: Is it verse that you wish to write her?
M.J: No, no. No verse.
PH.M: Do you want only prose?
M.J: No, I don’t want either prose or verse.
PH.M: It must be one or the other.
M.J: Why?
PH.M: Because, sir, there is no other way to express oneself than with prose or verse.
M.J: There is nothing but prose or verse?
PH.M: No, sir, everything that is not prose is verse, and everything that is not verse is prose.
M.J: And when one speaks, what is that then?
PH.M: Prose.
M.J: What! When I say, ‘Nicole, bring me my slippers, and give me my nightcap,’ that’s prose?
PH.M: Yes, Sir.
M.J: By my faith! For more than forty years I have been speaking prose without knowing anything about it.
(Molière, Le Bourgeois Gentilhomme, Act II)
Like Monsieur Jourdain, who all his life has been speaking prose without knowing it, we all speak and think in metaphors. In ordinary language, we trample on the relics of metaphors all the time, and hardly even pay them a moment’s thought.
But in unearthing these metaphors we have only begun to scratch the surface of language, since up to now, all the metaphors have been dug up from very shallow linguistic strata. The metaphors so far may be barely noticeable to the casual onlooker, but with some conscious effort their original meaning is at least still recognizable. If one only pauses to think about these images, one is aware that it’s really a steak that is tough, not legislation, or that what really rises is water, not unemployment. Scratch a bit deeper, however, and you will find hundreds of metaphors that are no longer even identifiable remains, but merely dried-up skeletons whose original literal meanings have long been lost, and are only recoverable from yellowing historical dictionaries. Take the following sentence, for instance, and try to detect the metaphors it contains:
Sarah was thrilled to discover that the assessment board had decided to make her barmy rival redundant, after she suggested that he had made sarcastic insinuations about his employers.
Unless you happen to be an enthusiastic etymologist, you should find it difficult to spot many metaphors here. Nevertheless, almost every word in this sentence was once a thriving image. If one puts the flesh back on these dry bones, and restores them to their original vitality, the result will be something like this:
Sarah was pierced to un-cover that the sitting-by plank had cut off to make her full-of-froth person-from-the-river overflowing, after she carried-under that he had made flesh-tearing twistings about those who fold him.
Barmy as the sentence may now seem, it simply shows the origin of the words in the previous one. The word ‘thrill’, for example, goes back to an Old English verb thyrlian, which originally meant ‘pierce’ (and incidentally, is related to the word nos-thyrl, ‘nostril’, or ‘nose-hole’). The current sense of ‘thrill’ must have started out as a metaphor with some shock value. ‘I’m thrilled to bits’ (literally ‘I’m pierced to bits’) must have been a graphic equivalent of today’s ‘it’s killing’ or ‘smashing’. But as the image became familiar and established, the metaphor was bleached of its vitality and died, and eventually the original sense fell by the wayside, so that today, ‘thrill’ is only a skeleton that betrays no trace of its metaphoric origin. The other words in the sentence above have comparable histories:
• ‘Dis-cover’ initially meant ‘remove the cover from’. In the seventeenth century, it could still be used in this physical sense: ‘if the house be discovered by tempest, the tenant must in convenient time repaire it.’
• ‘Assessment’ comes ultimately from Latin assidere ‘to sit by’. (In the law courts, the assessor was an aid who ‘sat by’ the judge.)
• ‘Board’ originally meant ‘plank’, and is not as skeletal as the other metaphors here, since it can still be used in the concrete sense today.
• ‘Decide’ comes ultimately from Latin de-caedere ‘cut off’.
• ‘Barmy’ originally meant ‘full of barm’ (that is, ‘froth’ or ‘yeast’).
• ‘Rival’ comes from Latin rivalis, meaning someone who shares the same river. From there, the word came to mean someone who shares (or competes for) the same mistress (that is, rival in love), and from there, to rival more generally.
• ‘Redundant’ also comes from Latin, where it literally meant ‘overflowing’ (from unda ‘wave’).
• ‘Suggest’ comes from Latin sub-gerere, ‘carry under’.
• ‘Sarcastic’ comes from Greek ‘flesh tearing’ (sárx – flesh), and is related to the word sarcophagus (literally ‘flesh eating’).
• ‘Insinuation’ comes originally from Latin sinus ‘curve’.
• ‘Employ’ comes ultimately from Latin plicare ‘to fold’.
The words in the sentence above are by no means isolated examples. Browse through any historical dictionary and you will find thousands of such dry bones. Nor is there anything terribly unusual about English in this respect. If English can boast anything exceptional, it is only that so much of its abstract vocabulary was borrowed from French and Latin, so in many cases, the concrete-to-abstract transfer did not happen on home turf, but before the words were borrowed. But similar metaphors are found in languages all over the world. As one example from the list above, consider the verb ‘decide’, which in English derives from a Latin verb meaning ‘cut off’. At first this image may seem unusual, but in fact, the physical activities of cutting or separating seem to be the source of the concept of ‘deciding’ in many languages, even those which did not borrow from Latin so heavily, if indeed at all. The German ent-scheiden, for instance, comes from scheiden ‘separate’; Ancient Greek diaireô literally means ‘to take one from another’ or ‘cleave in twain’, but was also used to mean ‘decide’; the Swahili phrase -kata shauri ‘decide’ literally means ‘cut matter’; the Basque erabaki ‘decide’ literally means ‘to make (someone) cut’ (from the verb ebaki ‘cut’), the Indonesian memutuskan ‘decide’ derives from the stem putus ‘severed’; in Endo, a Nilo-Saharan language of Kenya, the verb til ‘cut’ is also used for ‘decide’; and the same goes for ancient Akkadian parāsum, biblical Hebrew gazar, and Chinese jué. Similar images are found in many other languages across the world. So even though other languages may have fewer Latinisms than English, they still closet just as many skeletons in their cupboards.
* * *
Chiedi al rio perché gemente
dalla balza ov’ebbe vita
corre al mar, che a sé l’invita,
e nel mar sen va a morir.
Ask the stream why, groaning,
from the slope where it was born,
it runs into the sea that lures it
and in the sea it goes to die.
L’elisir d’amore (Librettist: Felice Romani)
At first, the ubiquity of metaphors even in the plainest of speech may seem perplexing, and their persistent one-way course even more so. Why is it that when one only scratches a bit, most abstract words turn out to have concrete origins? Why should the surge of metaphors always flow from concrete to abstract, and so rarely in the other direction? Why do we say about legislation that it is ‘tough’, but not about a steak that it is ‘severe’?
The answer to these questions is quite straightforward. Imagine for a moment that the metaphor ‘tough’ was not at our disposal, and that some alternatives for describing ‘tough legislation’ had to be found. Except for ‘severe’, what options are there? We could say that the legislation was ‘inflexible’, ‘strict’, ‘repressive’, ‘oppressive’, ‘firm’, ‘stern’, ‘stringent’, ‘unyielding’, ‘unbending’, ‘harsh’, and so on. But there’s the rub – none of these alternatives would help dodge a metaphor, since, just like ‘tough’, all these tough-talking terms originally derive from the physical world. They all set out in life in the domain of materials. Some, like ‘unbending’, ‘firm’, ‘unyielding’ or ‘inflexible’, still betray traces of their old selves – think of ‘flexing your muscles’, for instance. But even the other options, those that are no longer recognizable, are skeletons of what once were full-blooded metaphors from the world of materials. ‘Oppressive’, for instance, comes from ‘press against’ (opprimere in Latin); ‘stringent’ is derived from ‘bind tight’ (stringere), while ‘harsh’ (from Middle English harsk) originally meant ‘hard and rough to the touch’.
The truth of the matter is that we simply have no choice but to use concrete-to-abstract metaphors. And when one stops to think about it, this is not even so surprising, since after all, if not from the physical world, where else could terms for abstract concepts come from? One thing is certain, nothing can come from nothing. The mind cannot just manufacture words for abstract concepts out of thin air – all it can do is adapt what is already available. And what’s at hand are simple physical concepts: objects one can point at (like ‘head’ or ‘tree’) and physical actions (like ‘cut’ or ‘run’).
A simple experiment suffices to demonstrate that there is no way of getting round a concrete-to-abstract metaphor. Try choosing at random a few of the most abstract of abstractions you can imagine, and then tracing their ultimate origin. As long as their pedigree is known, chances are they will go back to some simple words from the physical world. The word ‘abstract’ itself is one such example, for what could be more abstract than that? Today ‘abstract’ may be the fare of philosophers, a word used to refer to concepts that are removed from physical reality. But the origins of ‘abstract’ are much more earthly, as ‘abstract’ comes from a Latin verb which simply meant ‘draw away’ (abstrahere).
Another good candidate for the ‘what can be more abstract than that?’ competition is the concept of ‘understanding’, which after all takes place entirely within the fiction of the mind; one cannot see it, hear it, or touch it. Now, suppose your language did not have a word to describe ‘understanding’, how would you go about expressing the concept? If you are short of inspiration, try looking at some of the metaphors that English speakers use today as synonyms: we talk of grasping the sense, catching the meaning, getting the point, following an explanation, cottoning on to an idea, seeing the difficulty. Are you with me? And it’s not just the more colourful synonyms that go back to simple physical origins, for even the basic words for ‘understanding’ derive from similar sources. The verb ‘understand’ itself may be a brittle old skeleton by now, but its origin is still obvious: under-stand originally must have meant something like ‘step under’, perhaps rather like the image in the phrase ‘get to the bottom of’. Its close synonym ‘comprehend’ is also a skeletal metaphor from the physical world, and originally comes from ‘seize’ (Latin prehendere).
One could pick hundreds of other examples of abstract concepts, and the result would always be the same. They can’t help but go back to some terms from the physical world. Quite simply, then, metaphors flow from the concrete to the abstract because we need them to. The only way we have of expanding our expressive range to encompass abstract concepts is to draw on concrete terms.
Chapter 2 mentioned a triad of motives for language’s inner restlessness: economy, expressiveness and analogy. In previous chapters, expressiveness has featured only in a rather narrow role of adding emphasis, for instance when bolstering a simple ‘no’. But the examples above are beginning to reveal that expressiveness goes much deeper than merely shoring up refusals. Speakers feel the need to express novel and abstract ideas, or to convey already existing concepts in fresh and original ways, and there is generally only one outlet for this expressive urge: adapting existing means – concrete concepts – to new ends. The cognitive mechanism that allows us to draw links between different domains is analogy (to which we shall return later on, in Chapter 6). But while analogy is what allows us to think in metaphors in the first place, what lures the stream of metaphors down towards abstraction is nothing other than our need to extend our range of expression. This expressive urge also drives us to use the same images again and again, but through such over-use the metaphors are bleached of their original vitality and eventually fade and die.
TO HAVE AND TO HOLD
We have probed deep enough by now to realize that metaphor is much more than just a frill on the edges of language. The sheer density of metaphors even in the most listless prose may be surprising, but the real extent of metaphor’s involvement in ordinary language is only just beginning to surface. All the metaphors mentioned so far, from ‘redundant’ to ‘insinuations’ and from ‘stringent’ to ‘sarcasm’, appear to be at a remove from simple quotidian language, and may thus give the impression that metaphorical thinking is confined to an elevated level of sophisticated discourse, and that plain speech would have neither the need nor the inclination for metaphor. So it may seem all the more startling that far from being rare, metaphor is as rife in the plainest day-to-day chit-chat as it is in the most highfaluting prose.
Take the verb ‘have’, for instance. By anyone’s standards, ‘have’ is not some fancy optional extra, but an indispensable component of the hardcore of language. We ‘have’ hands and legs and eyes, we ‘have’ relatives and friends, we ‘have’ clothes and houses, we ‘have’ dandruff and the flu, and it’s difficult to imagine having even the simplest conversation without having ‘having’ at the tip of one’s tongue. And yet, even though ‘have’ is the bread-and-butter of the vernacular, it is nevertheless a fairly abstract notion, quite unlike physical activities such as ‘kicking’ something or ‘putting’ it somewhere. Think about it this way: what do you actually do when you ‘have’ something? (Not much, probably, if what you ‘have’ is a third-cousin-twice-removed in Oklahoma with whom you’ve lost all contact.) Now, suppose for a moment that there was no word around to describe ‘having’ something. How would you go about expressing the notion?
As it happens, this question is by no means academic, because many languages today (most, in fact) don’t have a verb that corresponds to the English ‘have’, and so they use other ways of expressing possession. To see some of the alternatives they come up with, consider the following examples:
Russian, Turkish and Irish all opt for the strategy of using physical proximity as a metaphor for the notion of possession. They take one of the possible physical manifestations of ‘having something’, namely the thing being near, on or at you, and use this simpler physical state of affairs as an image for the more general abstract notion of possession. This image is extremely common across the languages of the world, and it often turns up also in more elaborate forms. Here are a few variations on the theme ‘position is possession’:
At first sight, such metaphors may seem quaint and perhaps even rather poetic. But on reflection, it should be clear that similar images are used in ordinary English. Think of phrases like ‘a man with a lot of money’, which really means the same as ‘a man who has a lot of money’, or the phrase ‘it’s in the bag’, which means it’s a dead cert that you have it.
In addition to physical proximity, there are also various other sources speakers can draw on to express the notion of ‘having’ something. The languages below all use another common image, that of ‘target’ or ‘goal’. The idea here is that if something is intended for you, or destined to you, it is yours:
It seems, then, that even a language without an actual ‘have’ verb at its disposal need not feel unduly disadvantaged in expressing acquisitiveness, since there are plenty of other means for conveying the notion of possession. Even so, what if a language did want to acquire a proper ‘have’ verb – where would it go shopping for it? As it happens, there is no need to speculate about prehistoric thought-processes, since even today the origins of the verb ‘have’ in many languages are still transparent:
The images here are simple: what one holds or carries or seizes is used to convey what one ‘has’. And in fact, English does the same thing with the verb ‘get’ in sentences like ‘the man’s got a car’, which means the same as ‘the man has a car’. So like Waata and Nama, English takes a verb of taking, and uses it as a metaphor for possession: ‘what one has got, one has’. And if you are still unpersuaded, and are inclined to discount the expression ‘he’s got’ as just a sloppy substitute for the more respectable ‘have’, then you might like to know that the origin of ‘have’ itself is as grasping as all the rest. ‘Have’ ultimately derives from a Proto-Indo-European root *kap, which meant ‘seize’. The original sense of *kap survives in the Latin root cap ‘seize’, which found its way into English in the borrowed words ‘capture’ (as well as in ‘captive’, ‘caption’, ‘capable’, ‘recipe’, ‘occupy’, and even ‘catch’). The reason why the English homegrown ‘have’ looks so different from its forebear *kap is simply Grimm’s law, the series of sound changes in Germanic mentioned in the previous chapter, in which k was weakened to h, and p to f, thus turning *kap into *haf. So while ‘capture’ and ‘have’ look rather un-identical, they are in fact a pair of separated twins, deriving from the same source, *kap ‘seize’.
It seems, then, that there are numerous highways and byways that languages can take in order to express the notion of possession. But whatever the means, whether with a transitive verb like take, seize or hold, or with an image of physical proximity, there is no avoiding a metaphor from the physical world. The details may vary from language to language, but the idea is always the same: take one simple physical situation that is characteristic of ‘having’ something, and use it as an image for the abstract notion of possession more generally. Of course, ‘have’ is just a single word out of the rich lexicon of everyday communication, and it could be argued that one molehill does not make a mountain. But the role of metaphor in creating ‘have’ is by no means unusual – it is symptomatic of countless other run-of-the-mill words, even those from the most unpretentious vocabulary and the most plodding discourse. Indeed, as the novelist Jean Paul once said, language is nothing but a ‘dictionary of faded metaphors’. While in poetry, metaphors which have expired through over-use are dismissed as faded clichés, ordinary language is not so prodigal. The death of metaphors in no way detracts from their usefulness, as they simply add more means to our vocabulary.
But this is not all. In the following pages, I will argue that not even Jean Paul’s radical characterization can do justice to the pivotal role of metaphor in language. It turns out that metaphor is not only a chief supplier to our store of words, it also provides the raw materials for the structure of language itself.
SPACE-TIME
The Encyclopaedia Britannica begins its article on the concept of ‘space-time’ in Einstein’s theory of relativity with the following declaration:
Space-time. In physical science, single concept that recognizes the union of space and time, posited by Albert Einstein in the theories of relativity (1905, 1915). Common intuition previously supposed no connection between space and time …
But is it really true that ‘common intuition’ did not spot the connection before Einstein? Physicists may not have identified the relation between space and time in their theories until a century ago, but everyday language proves that ‘common intuition’ has in fact recognized this link for many thousands of years (even if not exactly in Einstein’s sense). For in language – any language – no two domains are more intimately linked than space and time. Even if we are not always aware of it, we invariably speak of time in terms of space, and this reflects the fact that we think of time in terms of space. Consider some of the simplest words we use to describe spatial relations: prepositions such as in, at, by, from, to, behind, within, through. The examples below should suffice to show that all these spatial terms function just as well in the domain of temporal relations:
The list could easily be lengthened, and the correspondences are by no means coincidental. What’s more, if the same experiment were to be repeated with spatial concepts in any other language, the result would be the same, as there is no known language where spatial terms are not also used to describe temporal relations. Language thus demonstrates that long before physicists, common intuition had already spotted the relation between space and time, and the nature of this intuited link is none other than metaphor. All the prepositions above originally denoted spatial terms, and all of them were metaphorically extended into the domain of time.
The link between space and time is another example of conceptual mappings between two domains (just like food and ideas). The movement nearly always goes in one direction, from space to time, since time is an abstract concept that can only be grasped by being visualized as something more tangible. So we think of time as a line in space, with ‘now’ as ‘here’, the past as the part ‘behind’ us, and the future stretching out ‘in front’ of us. A period of time (like a year) can thus be seen as a segment of this line, and this enables us to talk of being in it, going through it, and so on.
This link between space and time is so entrenched in our cognition that it is extremely difficult to extricate ourselves from it, and appreciate that time cannot literally be ‘long’ or ‘short’ (unlike sticks or pieces of string), nor can time literally ‘pass’ (unlike a train). Time cannot even ‘go forwards’ and ‘backwards’ any more than it goes sideways, diagonally or downwards. Time doesn’t actually go anywhere at all. Since the images here are so deeply rooted, it might seem strange to lump them together with the kind of poetic metaphors from the beginning of the chapter. The connection between space and time is so instinctive, and the metaphoric meaning so thoroughly naturalized in its new domain, that we need to make a considerable effort to register that even entirely functional prepositions like ‘to’, ‘from’, or ‘in’ could ever be used metaphorically. And yet, even if ‘from Monday’ and ‘treading on dreams’ seem worlds apart, in essence they are still two instances of the same mechanism: the carrying of a concept away from its original environment into a different sphere.
But this is still not the last of it, since metaphor does not just dally with a few spatial prepositions here and there. It will soon emerge that metaphor is endemic within the structure of language, and that the flow from space to time is in fact only a part of a much more widespread drift.
* * *
Outside of a dog, a book is a man’s best friend.
Inside of a dog, it’s too dark to read.
(Groucho Marx)
For British readers, Groucho’s pun requires a double-take, since it pivots on a meaning of the phrase ‘outside of’ that is not current in Britain. In the past, using ‘outside of’ to mean ‘except for’ was frowned upon even in America, as witnessed by the censure of an American manual of good usage from 1859: ‘Outside … is frequently used by writers in newspapers in a sense not known to the language:… “outside of the Secretary of War” for “no one but that official”.’ Nevertheless, if one takes precedents into account, the criticism looks rather misplaced, for the change of ‘outside of’ from the spatial relation ‘on the outer side of’ to the logical relation of exclusion precisely parallels the development of more respectable synonyms such as ‘besides the Secretary’, ‘except for the Secretary’, or ‘no one but that official’. All of these started out in life as simple spatial terms:
• But comes from Old English be-utan ‘by the outside’.
• Except comes from Latin ex-cipere ‘out-take’.
• Excluding comes from ex-cludere ‘out-shut’.
• Besides and aside from still clearly betray their spatial origin.
• Apart (from) comes from French à part, literally ‘to the side’.
• Without was originally the counterpart to within and meant ‘outside’, as in the hymn ‘there is a green hill far away, without a city wall’, or in the instruction to Noah to cover the ark ‘within and without with pitch’ (see here).
It seems, then, that spatial terms are not only the sources of temporal concepts, but also lurk behind other complex notions such as logical exclusion. The flow from space to time is thus only one part of a much more far-reaching drift, from space to many other abstract domains. The change from ‘outside’ to ‘except’ is just one example, but we only have to return to the spatial prepositions ‘from’, ‘through’, ‘at’, and so on, to find other comparable translocations. As shown below, many of these spatial terms have not only acquired a temporal meaning, but have also drifted to even more abstract realms and are used to describe causes and reasons:
Like most of the metaphors already encountered, the images here are ultimately grounded in experience. Think of a sentence like ‘the travellers got typhoid from the contaminated water’. The physical origin of the disease is also its cause: the disease started because of the water, but it also came – physically – from it. But in generalizing the metaphor we have unshackled the image from that basis in experience, and can now talk freely about one thing coming ‘from’ another, ‘out of’ another, or happening ‘through’ another, to express abstract chains of cause and event.
The flow from space to abstract domains is by no means restricted to prepositions, however, and can reach even the most unexpected areas of language’s structure. One good example is ‘pointing words’ (or ‘demonstratives’ in linguistic terminology) such as the English ‘that’, which are used to point at an object and single it out. If one sees a shirt in a shop window, for instance, one might point at it and say ‘I like that.’ Now at first, it might seem that the action of pointing would be unlikely ever to become a metaphor, for what could be the point of ‘pointing metaphorically’ at a shirt, or at anything else for that matter? But consider the following marital exchange: ‘Darling, do you have any idea where my blue Marks and Spencer’s shirt is, you know, the one with the button missing from the cuff?’ ‘Oh, I chucked that away ages ago, it was so scruffy!’ It would be difficult to pretend that the word ‘that’ does any real physical pointing here – you cannot point at a shirt that’s no longer there. What the word ‘that’ does in this context is ‘point’ at the previous mention of this shirt in the conversation. The act of pointing has thus been transferred from the domain of physical space into the abstract ‘space of conversation’, to refer to previously mentioned participants (something that linguists call ‘anaphora’). ‘Pointing metaphorically’, therefore, is both extremely common in language, and has all the point in the world to it, for it helps to maintain coherence over long stretches of discourse, and allows us to refer to people and objects concisely and efficiently. Just imagine how protracted the ensuing domestic exchange would become, if instead of simply saying, ‘But that was my favourite shirt, I got that from my grandmother for my graduation…’ you had to repeat ‘the blue Marks and Spencer’s shirt with the button missing from the cuff’ over and over again. Quite simply, then, pointing metaphorically allows us to get to the point.
One could (and people do) write thousand-page monographs on the flow of meaning from space into abstract domains, describing every twist and turn it takes in language after language. But it’s not necessary to rake through all the details in order to get the wider view of the linguistic landscape, and to appreciate that the surge of metaphors from the domain of space makes its presence felt everywhere in language, and even seeps into the deepest foundations of its structure.
So far, in tracking the course of metaphoric abstraction, I have ended the discussion of each section with the refrain ‘but this is not all’. At this stage, however, it may seem difficult to continue in this vein. If, as I have suggested, metaphors have drifted from the domain of space into absolutely everywhere in language, then what more is there left to chart? And yet, one crucial aspect of the process remains to be discovered, for we still have not traced the stream to its ultimate source.
AT THE BACK OF SPACE
So far, spatial relations such as ‘in’, ‘through’ or ‘behind’ have featured as the source of metaphoric extension into the abstract domains of time, cause, and so on. But are spatial terms the ultimate source of this flow? After all, spatial relations already entail some degree of abstraction, since they are not things of substance that can directly be observed. (You cannot point at a ‘through’, for instance, any more than you can directly observe an ‘in’.) So might words for spatial terms in fact develop from something even simpler and more solid? And if so, then from what? By this stage, we are beginning to run out of places to look, but the following examples from Ewe, a language spoken in Togo and Ghana, can point us in the right direction:
These examples illustrate four stages of the flow towards abstraction, the last three of which should by now be thoroughly familiar, as they go from space (‘behind’) to time (‘after’), and from there, to the abstract domain of mental faculties. But Ewe shows that the spatial term ‘behind’ is itself a product of metaphor, and reveals the ultimate origin of the word megbé: a solid noun, part of the human body.
The parts of the body are the closest and most immediate things in our physical environment, and are thus most deeply imprinted in our cognition, so it is no wonder that body-parts are the sources of terms for all kinds of more abstract concepts in so many languages. English ‘back’, for instance, took almost exactly the same route as Ewe megbé, for ‘back’ is the back-bone of the prepositional phrase ‘at the back of’, which simply means ‘behind’. Moreover, just as in Ewe, ‘back’ proceeded even further towards abstraction, and can also be used as a temporal relation (‘she died a few years back’), or even as the description of a mental condition (‘backward’). So the development from ‘back’ to ‘after’ or ‘behind’ is not just a peculiar feature of some tropical languages, it is a part of a universal march of limbs and ligaments towards abstraction.
Here is another example from a different language, drawing on a different part of the body:
And if the progress from ‘face’ to ‘in front of’ sounds rather laboured, then it might help to bear in mind that the English phrase ‘in front of’ comes from precisely the same source. The original meaning of the noun ‘front’ was simply ‘brow’ or ‘forehead’, as can still be seen in Shakespeare’s line ‘Grim-visag’d war hath smooth’d his wrinkled front’. But through a natural metaphor, what is ‘at one’s forehead’ was transferred to what is ‘in front’, and the change was so successful in English that the original sense of ‘front’ has all but been forgotten.
There is hardly any part of the body which has not been enlisted as a metaphor for spatial and more abstract concepts, as the following examples illustrate.
Incidentally, some of these metaphors, such as from ‘mouth’ to ‘in front of’ or from ‘back’ to ‘above’, may appear somewhat contorted. Why should Mixtec speakers, for instance, say ‘a bird is flying back the cornfield’ when they mean ‘over’ the field rather than ‘behind’ it? But of course, it is not just humans that have body parts that can serve as metaphors, and some languages rely on what linguists call the ‘zoomorphic model’. When we free ourselves from our anthropocentric prejudices, and think of four-legged animals instead, then it becomes clear why ‘mouth’ or ‘head’ can be mapped to ‘in front’, why ‘back’ can become ‘above’, and ‘belly’ ‘underneath’.
* * *
This chapter began with a view of metaphor as an ornamental figure of poetic art, but as we probed more deeply, the picture changed beyond recognition. Metaphors turned up everywhere, dead or alive, hiding behind even the plainest words of ordinary language. It transpired that metaphor is an essential tool of thought, an indispensable conceptual mechanism which allows us to think of abstract notions in terms of simpler concrete things. It is, in fact, the only way we have of dealing with abstraction. The desire to communicate abstract concepts is thus behind a relentless surge from the concrete to the abstract: from parts of the body to spatial relations, from physical proximity to possession, from seizing to understanding. There is practically no patch of language that this surge does not reach, no plot that it does not irrigate.
The last few examples of this flow towards abstraction, where parts of the body are used to describe spatial relations, may not seem so different from the metaphors on display earlier on. Certainly, the principle is the same: simple concepts – here, parts of the body from ‘head’ to ‘heel’ and from ‘breast’ to ‘intestines’ – are swept out of their original environment and carried into the domain of spatial relations. Compared to some of the metaphors from the beginning of the chapter (such as the shift from ‘pierced’ to ‘thrilled’, say, or from ‘flesh-tearing’ to ‘sarcastic’), the shift in meaning from ‘back’ to ‘behind’ or from ‘lip’ to ‘along’ does not even seem so dramatic.
In one crucial sense, however, these body-part examples are different from everything else we have seen so far, since the metaphors here have somehow breached the border between ‘content words’ and ‘grammatical elements’. Recall that content words are the solid bricks of language, nouns and verbs like ‘head’, ‘back’, ‘go’ or ‘give’, whereas grammatical elements such as prepositions, auxiliaries or conjunctions are only the mortar, the adhesives that help to bind the content words into meaningful sentences. But let’s take another look at what these body-part metaphors have achieved. Their starting point was sturdy nouns like ‘back’ or ‘head’ – entirely normal content words. Yet after what seems only a modest metaphorical leap, these body-parts find themselves transformed into grammatical elements. Through metaphor, therefore, these solid nouns have somehow crossed the boundary between content and structure, and turned into prepositions. It appears that metaphor not only alters the meaning of existing grammatical elements, but through its ability to transform content into structure, metaphor is also involved in creating those grammatical elements in the first place.
So finally, the flow of metaphors towards abstraction is beginning to reveal how life and death in language are entwined. Whereas in poetry metaphors turn into empty clichés once they die of over-use, in everyday language dead metaphors are the alluvium from which grammatical structures emerge. Like a reef, which grows from layer upon layer of dead coral skeletons, new structures in language can rise from the layers of dead metaphors deposited by the flow towards abstraction.
How this metamorphosis from content to structure is achieved in practice will be the subject of the following chapter. For this, we shall take a short break from our normal transmission, and go live to the George Orwell Centre at the London South Bank, where a conference in honour of Orwell’s centenary is now in full swing. This year, the delegates are discussing ‘The State of the Language’, so let’s join them in the main auditorium, where the afternoon session is about to begin.