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Aphorisms

At Flatford Mill: Real Life as Metaphor

James Geary
5 Comments
Categories: Aphorisms, metaphor

Yesterday I was at Flatford Mill, the site of John Constable’s family business and the setting for some of his most famous paintings. Constable, like Van Gogh, is one of those painters whose work is so famous that it is difficult to actually ‘see’ it anymore. With Van Gogh, usually you ‘see’ the paintings once, the first time, and then you just see the t-shirts, coffee cups, and place mats after that.  I never ‘saw’ Constable at all, though. His paintings are so famous, and so ubiquitous on tea towels, coasters, and jigsaw puzzles, that I never even looked once, much less actually ‘saw.’ But with my daughter’s class at Flatford Mill, I looked at Constable for the first time—or at least, at the color reproductions we carried with us as we walked around the lush, green countryside visiting the places that he painted—and was amazed at what I saw: vivid, vivacious scenes of everyday life, painted with incredible intensity and love for the people and places depicted. I finally understood why Constable is so famous.

So yesterday morning, I was sitting in front of Constable’s father’s mill, on a bench that afforded me a view of Willy Lott’s house identical to the one that Constable painted in The Hay Wain, when a FedEx van drove up and parked right in front of my nose, blocking my view of Willy Lott’s house and the little mill pond and replacing it with the passenger door of the FedEx van, which had the slogan

The world on time

painted on the side of it. I was annoyed at the driver’s thoughtlessness—disrespect even—until I realized what a perfect example this was of metaphor imitating life, or life imitating metaphor, I’m not sure which. The FedEx van and its slogan are the perfect metaphor for the way the constant pressure of work and worry and deadlines obstructs my appreciation of the commonplace beauty of daily life—of looking at, really looking at paintings; of walking in the countryside on a gorgeous sunny day with my daughter; of sitting on a bench and simply doing nothing.

FedEx delivers the world on time, and for that I am truly grateful. But it also gets in the way of another world, a world that is just as important and, in fact, far more permanent than the one FedEx delivers. Constable painted a world so intensely present and so detailed that it is both a world completely in and of its time and a timeless world, too. The world that’s happening in The Hay Wain happens forever, and the fact that it happened at all is because John Constable stopped the other things he was doing and ‘saw’ it.

The FedEx driver picked up or dropped off whatever package he needed to pick up or drop off, and then he drove away, restoring to me my unobstructed view of Willy Lott’s house and another world—just in time, too.

The ‘Savings’ versus ‘Cuts’ Metaphors

James Geary
3 Comments
Categories: Aphorisms

In the U.K., the Labour Party has complained to the BBC over the broadcaster’s use of the word “savings” to describe the coalition government’s efforts to reduce the budget deficit. The Labour Party insists these efforts should be described as “cuts,” as this piece from The Guardian makes clear. All the fuss about cuts versus savings has to do with “associated commonplaces,” the term coined by philosopher Max Black to describe the clouds of metaphorical associations and connections conjured up by even the simplest words.

Metaphors—and the associated commonplaces they activate—matter because they frame how we think. A metaphor opens up certain avenues of thought even as it closes down others. Just think of the different associated commonplaces created by the terms ‘estate taxes’ versus ‘death taxes’, ‘healthcare reform’ versus ‘socialized medicine’, ‘collateral damage’ versus ‘dead civilians’, ‘rightsizing’ versus ‘mandatory job losses’. Each of these terms conjures up very different and typically contradictory associations. And the more metaphors like this are repeated, the more firmly entrenched the attendant associated commonplaces become.

The Labour Party doesn’t want the deficit reduction effort to be described as ‘savings’ since ‘savings’ has an overwhelmingly positive connotation, especially during an ‘age of austerity’. Conversely, the Conservative-Lib Dem coalition doesn’t want the deficit reduction effort to be described as ‘cuts’ since ‘cuts’ has an overwhelmingly negative connotation, and implies inflicting real pain.

If this all seems kind of obvious and harmless, consider the dramatic effect different associated commonplaces can have. In Miller-McCune, Tom Jacobs describes how University of Michigan researchers asked two groups of people a question about the environment. One group was asked whether they believed ‘global warming’ was happening; the other group was asked whether they believed ‘climate change’ was happening. Around 86% of self-identified Democrats believed the environment was altering, regardless of how that process was described. Among self-identified Republicans, however, 60% endorsed ‘climate change’ but only 44% endorsed ‘global warming’. Why?

“‘Global warming’ entails a directional prediction of rising temperatures that is easily discredited by any cold spell,” Jacobs quotes the researchers as saying, “whereas ‘climate change’ lacks a directional commitment and easily accommodates unusual weather of any kind … Moreover, ‘global warming’ carries a stronger connotation of human causation, which has long been questioned by conservatives.” In other words, different associated commonplaces trigger dramatically different responses. Maybe useful to remember as we try to figure out how to save the planet by cutting CO2 emissions…

Metaphor and Euphemisms for Death

James Geary
11 Comments
Categories: Aphorisms

At a talk at The School of Life last week, someone drew a blank strip of paper from the globe, which entitles them to either 1) read a random passage from that day’s newspaper and I have to spot at least one metaphor within 30 seconds or 2) name any theme and I have to think of a relevant aphorism on the spot. If I fail in either of these tasks, that person gets a free copy of my book. In this particular case, the audience member did both. When she read from the Evening Standard, it took about 5 seconds to spot the first metaphor: ‘opaque’ in reference to a situation whose outcome was unclear. When she came up with ‘death’ as her theme, though, I had a brain freeze and couldn’t think of a single aphorism on that subject. (‘Brain freeze,’ by the way, a phrase I picked up from my kids, is a kenning.)

Of course, there are dozens and dozens and dozens of aphorisms about death. So it irked me to no end that I couldn’t think of one. About 15 minutes later, after having conceded defeat and moved on, the old chestnut

There are only two things certain in life: death and taxes

popped into my head. But it was too late: I had already given this person a book. The next morning I awoke with the perfect aphorism for death in my head, Malcolm de Chazal’s

Death is the bowel movement of the soul evacuating the body by intense pressure on the spiritual anus.

The incident reminded me of the role metaphor plays in disguising or sidestepping issues we’d rather not talk about, death being a prime example. Just think of all the euphemisms—gentle metaphorical circumlocutions—we have for death: passed on, passed away, no longer with us, gone, etc… Many of the euphemisms for death are funny, too, like ‘pushing up daisies.’ I remember a joke my Dad used to tell when I was a kid every time we drove by a cemetery: “You know, Jim, people are just dying to get in there.” I thought of it many many years later as I rode into the cemetery to bury him. Black humor suits a funeral as much as black suits.

Which makes Paul Hensby’s list of euphemisms for death worth a quick perusal. Hensby is proprietor of My Last Song, named “the best funeral website in the world” by the Your Funeral Guy website, and lists several dozen mortuary metaphors, including

Bit the big one

Fallen off the perch

Bought the farm

Gone West

Given up the ghost

Popped his/her clogs

and my personal favorite

Assumed room temperature (popular among mortuary technicians)

The ‘Ideas are Food’ Conceptual Metaphor

James Geary
3 Comments
Categories: Aphorisms

George Lakoff and his collaborators have identified scores of what they call “conceptual metaphors,” figurative phrases that describe fundamental abstract concepts using the language of physiology and physical experience. Expressions like “Your claims are indefensible” and “He shot down all of my arguments,” for example, are instances of the conceptual metaphor ‘argument is war’; “This relationship is a dead-end street” and “We’ll just have to go our separate ways” are examples of ‘love is a journey’; “This plan is half-baked” and “Let me chew it over for a while” exemplify ‘ideas are food’.

Without conceptual metaphors like these, Lakoff and other advocates of conceptual metaphor believe, we would have no way of talking about—or even thinking about—abstractions like love, beauty, suffering, and joy. According to Lakoff and Mark Turner, another cognitive scientist: “Basic conceptual metaphors are part of the common conceptual apparatus shared by members of a culture . . . We usually understand them in terms of common experiences. They are largely unconscious, though attention may be drawn to them. Their operation in cognition is mostly automatic. And they are widely conventionalized in language, that is, there are a great number of words and idiomatic expressions in our language whose interpretations depend upon those conceptual metaphors.”

A fun illustration of the pervasiveness of the ‘ideas are food’ metaphor comes from this poem by Phil Isherwood, a research student in cultural and creative studies at the University of Bolton:

Food for Thought

Chewing on the half-baked.
Had to suck it and see.
What I couldn’t digest
only ate away at me.

Years of stodgy literature,
chewing on the cud,
snuffling for morsels
buried deep in mud.

I tried the candy floss
of fluffy inspiration, so
sweet to get your teeth into
but leads to constipation.

Best aphorism appetizers
before a poem or two.
Fully fed with metaphors
I can leave my mind to stew.

Metaphor and ‘Jumping the Shark’

James Geary
2 Comments
Categories: Aphorisms

On The Kathleen Dunn Show yesterday, on Wisconsin Public Radio, a caller expressed consternation about apparently incomprehensible metaphors. He complained in particular about sports metaphors, specifically the use of ‘Hail Mary pass’ in political speeches, and cited “jumping the shark” as an example of a metaphor he had often heard but never understood. I had never heard “jumping the shark” so I found it incomprehensible, too. Fortunately, another caller knew that the metaphor refers to an episode of Happy Days in which Fonzie, dressed in leather jacket and swimming trunks, actually jumps over a shark on water skis. The stunt was seen as a desperate attempt to come up with fresh plot lines for the show. Arguably, the writers failed in this case and “jumping the shark” became a metaphor for the point of no (or diminishing) return in TV or, indeed, any creative endeavor.

Here’s Wikipedia’s pretty comprehensive explanation of the “jumping the shark” metaphor: “an idiom used to denote when a particular production effort has surpassed its relevance and reached a point of decline in quality that it is incapable of recovering from. It refers specifically to the point in a television program’s history where the plot spins off into absurd storylines, unlikely characterizations, and adding or replacing characters. These changes were often the result of efforts to revive interest in a show whose audience had begun to decline.”

The Wikepedia entry goes on to provide a similar metaphor, this time applied to films: “nuking the fridge.” This metaphor, according to Wikepedia, is “an allusion to a scene early in the 2008 film Indiana Jones and the Kingdom of the Crystal Skull. In the scene, Indiana Jones is hit by the blast of a nuclear weapon while hiding inside a lead-lined refrigerator in a desperate attempt at survival. The refrigerator is hurled a great distance through the sky and tumbles hard to the ground, while the structures surrounding it are utterly obliterated. A relatively uninjured Jones emerges to witness the mushroom cloud miles away … Some moviegoers found the absurdity of this event disappointing and reflective of the decreased quality of the series.”

I can’t speak to the decline in quality these scenes may or may not represent, but both these metaphors are fantastic and reflective of the endless inventiveness of the metaphor-making mind.

Metaphor, I.B.M.’s Watson, and Jeopardy

James Geary
5 Comments
Categories: Aphorisms, metaphor

It’s funny how the things that turn out to be important are somehow never the things you thought would turn out to be important, like the importance of a Jeopardy-playing computer program to what it means to be ‘human’. Tomorrow, the face off between I.B.M.’s Watson computer and the two best human Jeopardy players will be broadcast—and Watson is expected to win. This is technologically a big deal, as explained brilliantly in this Mashable article,  because of the awesome computing power needed to get computers to parse the puns and allusions characteristic of Jeopardy answers. It’s humanistically a big deal because, until tomorrow (maybe), playing Jeopardy was one of those things that only humans were thought to do well. Before Watson, only homonids were thought to be any good with homonyms.

What does this have to do with metaphor? Well, the kinds of things Watson and his human opponents will be parsing tomorrow are the same kinds of things that go into metaphors: loose associations, punning relationships, sidelong and sidereal correlations. Until now, computers have not been very good at making these kinds of intuitive connections, as the wealth of useless information thrown up by the simplest Google search demonstrates. If Watson can do it, though, that is one giant leap for computerkind…

There has been research, usually involving the painstaking compilation of crucial keywords, designed to teach computers to understand metaphors. Watson may well turn out to be the first proof of concept. And there is no reason, theoretically at least, why computers shouldn’t understand metaphors. The one crucial ingredient is context.

You don’t have to look to computers for examples of poor metaphor comprehension. Children are pretty poor at comprehending complex metaphors, too, at least until they reach adolescence. As children’s knowledge of the world grows, though, so does their metaphorical range. The same is true for adults. Any metaphor is comprehensible only to the extent that the domains from which it is drawn are familiar. If you have the context, you can figure out the meaning.

The lack of essential context is what perplexed the crew of the Starship Enterprise when they encountered the Tamarians in the “Darmok” episode of Star Trek: the Next Generation. The Tamarians speak a language no one has yet been able to fully decipher. The Tamarian tongue is so elusive because it is so allusive, consisting entirely of metaphors from the alien race’s mythology and history. In Tamarian, for example, “cooperation” is expressed by the phrase “Darmok and Jalad at Tanagra” because Tamarian folklore includes the tale of Darmok and Jalad, two warriors who banded together to fight a common foe on the island of Tanagra. Other Tamarian metaphors include “Darmok on the ocean” for loneliness, “Shaka, when the walls fell” for failure, “The river Temarc in winter” for silence, “Sokath, his eyes open” for understanding, and “Kiteo, his eyes closed” for refusal to understand. In comprehending metaphor, context is king. There’s absolutely no reason why a computer can’t do it.

And it’s funny how books you’d almost forgotten turn out to be unexpectedly relevant, like The Body Electric, which, like this piece on Watson in the NYTimes, explores how computers could be considered living things—given the right senses and enough context.

Metaphor and Martha and the Vandellas

James Geary
1 Comment
Categories: Aphorisms, metaphor

I heard Martha and the Vandellas in concert a couple of months ago and they really knocked my socks off. And it just so happens that one of their hits, Heat Wave, is one of the best examples of a metaphor for love, as explained in this Q&A on the Marie Claire website…

7 Strange Places to Meet a Metaphor

James Geary
1 Comment
Categories: Aphorisms, metaphor

“It is the East, and Juliet is the sun!” is one of Shakespeare’s most famous lines and one of the most well known metaphors in literature. But metaphor is much more than a mere literary device employed by love-struck poets when they refer to their girlfriends as interstellar masses of incandescent gas. We all use metaphor all the time. They turn up in the strangest places and influence us in surprising and often oddball ways.

Financial commentary
Stock prices soar, climb, leap, and perform all kinds of other superheroic statistical feats—all metaphors implying that stock prices are living things pursuing goals. Exposure to these metaphors leads people to expect the trends they describe to continue. If house prices are relentlessly described as climbing higher and higher, homeowners unconsciously assume the steady rise is unstoppable…

Your physical environment
People holding a hot cup of coffee are more likely to describe someone as ‘warm’ than people holding a cold cup of coffee. People sitting on a hard chair are more likely to be ‘tough’ negotiators than people sitting on a soft chair. People who seal their written recollections of a traumatic event in an envelope achieve greater emotional closure than those who do not seal their memories in an envelope. Metaphors transfer physical experience to psychological experience.

Product design
We evolved to rapidly recognize and respond positively to anything with large, wide eyes and a small nose and mouth—anything that looks like a baby. This instinctive positive emotional response can be transferred via visual metaphor to anything that looks like a face, even a car grill. People rate cars as cuter and more desirable if their front grills have been manipulated to look baby-like.

Military names
An analysis of the names given to Israeli military operations between 1948 and 2007 found that more than 60% of them alluded to either the natural world or the Bible, metaphorical names intended to suggest that the campaigns were either forces of nature or sanctioned by a higher power. Operation Enduring Freedom anyone?

Advertisements
One ad has stuck in my mind since I first saw it in the 1970s: Prudential’s “Get a piece of the rock.” The image of Gibraltar is a powerful metaphor of safety, control, and security. An insurance company is not just an insurance company, but a rock of stability in turbulent times.

Physical experience
Anger is metaphorically described as heat in every culture. “She’s about to blow her top,” “He’s all steamed up,” “She’s a hot head,” and “In the heat of the moment” are all variations on the ‘anger is heat’ metaphor. In fact, the experience of physical heat is processed in the same brain region as emotional heat. Many metaphors piggyback on the language of physical experience.

Historical metaphors
In his State of the Union address, President Obama described the challenge of creating new industries and new jobs as “our generation’s Sputnik moment,” referring to 1957 when the Soviet Union put the first satellite into space. Historical metaphors create associations that influence our decisions, often without our conscious knowledge. So it’s important to carefully choose your metaphors, and to be vigilant about those used by others. There’s a big difference between making a giant leap for mankind and re-arranging deck chairs on the Titanic.

For more on metaphor, check out I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World.

I is an Other is published today…

James Geary
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Categories: Aphorisms, metaphor

… and here’s a little preview:

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us. We utter about one metaphor for every 10 to 25 words, or about six metaphors a minute. Metaphor conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions. In the mouths of politicians, metaphor subtly nudges public opinion; in the minds of businesspeople, it spurs creativity and innovation. In science, metaphor is the preferred nomenclature for new theories and new discoveries; in psychology, it is the natural language of human relationships and emotions.

Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words.

New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphor influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways. Metaphor has finally leapt off the page and landed with a mighty splash right in the middle of our stream of consciousness. That impact is making a big splash in the field of psychology, through metaphor therapy.

For the rest of this piece, check out the book excerpt in Ode.

Want more? Buy I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World