Metaphors

I’m taking this class called rhetoric. It’s about as tedious as it sounds, but unfortunately this class is the one thing standing between me and graduation. (Literally: I have to get a decent grade and this is the only class where the TA’s are very, very hard graders.) So I kind of have to stick it out, and usually my professor’s lectures are in the realm of stuff I already knew (like logos, pathos, and ethos), stuff I am learning too much about and will never use again (MLA citation to an extreme), and very specific theories and works by very specific philosophers (that I don’t know and have a hard time learning.) But today was the first day my professor said something interesting.

We were talking about language. Language has a certain importance to communications majors that is glossed over if you’re in the Media Production program, like I am. There’s a lot about language to consider when talking about rhetoric, which deals with how people persuade other people about stuff (it’s really more than that, but this is a nutshell discussion here).

Today, in particular, we were looking at how language is a symbol: the word “clock” doesn’t inherently mean a clock, but we all just agreed that those letters and that sound would indicate a thing that tells us the time. And somewhere along the way people also agreed that a “watch” and a “clock” are different things, even though they share a function. (And a watch is technically a clock, but that’s over thinking a bit.)

Anyway, we were talking about how metaphors are used in language, and how to find metaphors in language, in particular in speeches. There are no shortage of speeches that use metaphors, and I use them every once in awhile myself while writing. I’m more familiar with it in fiction but I can recognize it in a speech. But then my professor said this thing that I had never thought of before, that turned metaphors on their head a little in an Inception-moment of mind-blowing awesome:

ALL language is metaphor.

Which is a HUGE deal if you like language and find it fascinating. But my professor sort of brushed it aside for more important class items. But I was stuck on it. I do love linguistics, even if I don’t study it as my major (I don’t love it that much.) I love looking at the structure of language and how it works, how our society became prescriptive towards language (think grammar), and how what really matters to linguists is whether you can be understood or not. If you can be understood, then why? What’s the difference between languages? Do certain languages shape thought, or does thought shape language? What does a language say about a culture? What are the rules of each language?

Fascinating stuff. But I’d never heard language referred to as metaphors, even when I took a linguistics class. Which is strange, because I’d heard language referred to as symbols, but not as a whole. More like, “these words mean this thing even though they LITERALLY don’t mean this thing.” End of story.

But what is a metaphor? My rhetoric class has a paragraph about it. Metaphors are basically when you associate one thing with something else to relate them, even (probably especially) if they aren’t related. So if I say “he was blown away by that film” he wasn’t really, because that would be weird. But we understand that “blown away” means “impressed, amazed, awed” and we sort of leave it at that. Very few people would take that literally.

Language, similarly, is assigning letters and sounds to objects or ideas to create meaning. We know that when someone says “cat” they’re referring to the little furry things that meow. But the word cat isn’t inherently that. If we all agreed that cat meant water bottle, then people would change their association. We actually see these changes in language a lot. Gay used to mean happy, but it now means homosexual due to a change in culture. Meanings change all the time, and new words crop up, and cultures take them on and add them to their language.

And all these words are not inherently the things they describe, but we all understand each other perfectly well unless we don’t speak that language or are unfamiliar with certain words and turns of phrase. Kind of like a metaphor. A very extended metaphor.

It’s amazing how adaptable and changeable language is based on who’s speaking it. There are so many ways to use words, and if they are metaphors, then we don’t even realize what we’re doing. But it’s still an interesting way of looking at language. Find the best way to make someone understand you, pick which words work and which don’t.

If you find this interesting, you should read the following NY Times article “Does Your Language Shape How You Think?” here: