Six Metaphors A Minute?
As you’ve heard me mention, we use about six metaphors a minute in ordinary English. This figures comes from Raymond R Gibbs Jr, "Categorisation and Metaphor Understanding"
Psychological Review 99, no 3 (1992) and is quoted in Gerald Zaltman’s excellent book, How Customers Think.
The exact number does depend what you count as a metaphor. For an example, check out the following extract from another great book, Steven Pinker’s The Stuff Of Thought.
“When in the Course of human events it becomes necessary for one people to dissolve the political bands which have connected them with another and to assume among the powers of the earth, the separate and equal station to which the Laws of Nature and of Nature’s God entitle them, a decent respect to the opinions of mankind requires that they should declare the causes which impel them to the separation.”
The United States Declaration of Independence is perhaps the best known passage of English prose expressing an abstract political idea. Its subject matter, a challenge to power, has long been a part of the human condition. But challenges to power had hitherto been contests of sheer brawn, and here the Challenge was being justified from first principles by enlightenment
philosophers. Indeed, what was being articulated was not only the rationale for the challenge, but the rationale for the rationale.
At the heart of this abstract argument, though, is a string of concrete metaphors. The issue at hand was the bands that connected the colonies to England, which it was necessary to dissolve in order to effect a separation. (Though today the word dissolve means “absorb in a liquid,” it originally meant “loosen asunder”. The four metaphors really allude to a single, unstated metaphor; ALLIANCES ARE BONDS. We see the metaphor in other expressions like bonding, attachment and family ties.
Also palpable is the metaphor in impel force to move whose literal sense is plain in the noun impeller, ithe moving part that pushes the water or air in a pump, and in its cousin propeller. The implicit metaphor is that CAUSES OF BEHAVIOUR ARE FORCES. It underlies the cognates repel and compel, and analogous terms like impetus, drive, force, push and pressure. A related metaphor may be found in powers of the earth (which calls to mind horsepower and electric power): A SOVEREIGN STATE IS A SOURCE OF PHYSICAL FORCE.
A bit less obvious is the metaphor for human history, course, which refers to a path of running or flowing, as in the course of a river, a racecourse and a headlong course. The metaphor is that A SEQUENCE OF EVENTS IS MOTION ALONG A PATHWAY, a special case of the TIME IS MOTION metaphor we met in the previous chapter.
The very name of the document echoes two older metaphors, which we can glimpse in related words. To declare, like clarify, comes from the Latin for “make clear,” an instance of the
UNDERSTANDING IS SEEING metaphor, as in I see what you mean, a murky writer, and
shedding more heat than light. And independence means “not hanging from,” echoed in suspend, pendant, and pendulum. It alludes to a pair of metaphors, RELIANCE IS BEING SUPPORTED (propped up, financial support, support group), and SUBORDINATE IS DOWN (control over him, under his control, decline and fall).
If we dig even deeper to the roots of words, we unearth physical metaphors for still more abstract concepts. Event, from Latin evenire, originally meant “to come out“ (compare venture).
Necessary comes from “unyielding," (compare cede). Assume meant “to take up.” Station is a standingplace, an instance of the widespread metaphor that equates status with location.
Nature comes from the Latin for “birth” or “inborn qualities," as in prenatal, nativity and innate.
Law in the sense of “moral necessity“ is based on law in the sense of manmade regulations, from Old Nurse lag, “something set down." The metaphor A MORAL OBLIGATION IS A RULE underlies entitle, from the Latin word for “inscription.” Decent originally meant “to be fitting."
Respect meant “to look back at" (remember aspect), kind comes from the same Germanic root as kin, require from “seek in return.”
Even the little grammatical words have a physical provenance. Sometimes it is evident in
modern English, as in the pronoun it (A SITUATION IS A THING) and the prepositions in (TIME IS SPACE), to (INTENTION IS MOTION TOWARDS A GOAL) and among (AFFILIATION IS
PROXIMITY). Sometimes it is evident only in the word’s ancestor, such as of, from a Germanic word related to “off,” and for, from the IndoEuropean term for “forward.”
Not much is left. Political comes from the Greek polités, meaning “citizen,” from polis, “city,”
Which is a metonym rather than a metaphor, but still has an association to something tangible.
The and that come from an ancient IndoEuropean demonstrative term (also the source of then, there, they, and this), standardly used in connection with pointing. That leaves God, man, and people, which mean what they mean and have for a long time, and the quasilogical terms and, equal, and cause.