Metaphors we live by
The usual first encounter with the term metaphor is in a dry, almost clinical setting: once-living figures of speech are wrested from their contexts, reduced to their structural characteristics, and held up for examination as literary devices. Metaphors We Live By (Lakoff and Johnson) makes a case that metaphors are fundamental not only to how we humans communicate with each other, but also how we understand the world and make sense of our lives.
While we don’t go around talking in poetic figurative language all the time, even our normal, everyday language is steeped in metaphor. We understand and speak of concepts in terms of other concepts: love is a journey and thus has a destination and obstacles to progress, an argument is war and thus has victors and losers, time is money is a resource that thus can be saved, spent, and budgeted.
Each metaphor characterizes a different aspect of the concept. Love, for instance, having always been a human obsession, has been described in perhaps as many different ways as anything can be described: not only is love a journey, but love is war, love is a physical force, love is madness, love is a plant musky with the possibility of blooming:
I love you as the plant that never blooms
but carries in itself the light of hidden flowers;
thanks to your love a certain solid fragrance,
risen from the earth, lives darkly in my body.
— Pablo Neruda, Sonnet XVII
I’ve always loved a good metaphor and felt that there was more to it than a literary appreciation: a great metaphor, by its originality and aptness, reveals and illuminates part of the truth. As both a reader and a writer I hope to discover more metaphors to understand and appreciate the world by.
This essay is part of a month-long series of 30 essays.