Metaphors and Similes

[pameladlloyd]

I've been thinking about metaphors and similes today.

Writer Justine Larbalestier has been answering writing questions on her blog this month and one of the questions she answered several days ago was about finding "great similes to create good imagery." Normally, I like her humorous approach, but I felt she was so focused on clichéd or over-the-top similes, that she didn't address what I see as the real issue, which is how to discover those fresh similes and metaphors that can help your prose speak to your readers.

Then, this afternoon, I was reading a bit more of The Midnight Disease: The Drive to Write, Writer's Block, and the Creative Brain amd the current topic was metaphor. In the chapter, "Metaphor, the Inner Voice, and the Muse," Alice Flaherty points to research that suggests that we use metaphor far more often than we realize. In one study, researchers found that, on average, English speakers use three thousand original metaphors each week. She also discusses an attempt to catalog metaphors in an Internet database and states that "nearly everything is a metaphor."

Particularly fun to read, too, was her quotation of Samuel Parker, describing metaphors as: "meer products of Imagination, dress'd up (like Childrens babies) in a few spangled empty words. . . . Thus their wanton and luxurious fancies climbing up into the Bed of Reason, do not only defile it by unchaste and illegitimate Embraces, but instead of real conceptions and notices of Things, impregnate the mind with nothing by Ayerie and Subventaneous Phantasmes." (p. 225)

In a class I took, "Linguistics and the Study of Literature," we did analyses of some pretty prosaic passages taken from a variety of fiction and not-fiction sources and discovered that the use of metaphor is pervasive. If I recall the lesson correctly, our linguistics professor held an opinion very similar to Flaherty's, that it is extremely difficult to communicate effectively without the use of metaphor.

I have not deliberately used or avoided the use of metaphor in this evening's post (with the exception of the quoted passage), although they were, of course, on my mind, and I don't believe I've used any similes. It might be interesting to see how many metaphors you think I've used.

[Poll #1340823]

ETA: I counted eight metaphors, using my fairly liberal interpretation of the term. It was fun to see the different ways we think about metaphor. Thank you for sharing your thoughts about this.

Comments

[core-opsis.livejournal.com]

Interesting post. I didn't perceive you as using metaphors at all (I was only counting what you yourself said and not the quotes of the other people--which certainly contained metaphors--"their wanton fancies climbing up...."), but I've also considered this at length, and am aware that most of our language IS metaphorical in nature. Okay...maybe "prose SPEAKING", "FRESH similes"...

George Lakoff has an interesting book called Metaphors We Live By. I've only read a few chapters, but they're pointing in that same direction too....

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Well, as I said, I wasn't deliberately using metaphors. In fact, it was only as I neared the end of the post that I thought of putting up the poll.

I think there were more than just the two you found, though. For instance, I believe my use of the phrase "focused on" counts as a cliché.

[larryhammer]

The fact that metaphoric uses settle into extended meanings and then established denotations makes the line blurry. Yes, "fresh simile" was at one point a metaphor, comparing the subject of the adjective to food, but it isn't now -- that's part of the standard meaning of "fresh". The tricky bit is deciding when that line has been crossed from metaphor to definition.

Insisting that a once-metaphoric use is still a metaphor is akin to insisting that Chinese characters mean their pictographic roots, without acknowledging (as we do with our Phoenician-descended alphabetic letters) that uses drift beyond their origins. Or insisting that Latin-derived words only be used in their original Latin meaning. Or that "fax" is an abbreviation and so banned from Scrabble.

---L.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Yeah, the only metaphors I could find were "fresh simile" and "prose speak"--but as you say, can we even consider those metaphors, if we use them without even thinking about it?

[core-opsis.livejournal.com]

I wonder if we really would want to make "thinking about it" be part of the criteria for something "being a metaphor." Making metaphors seems to me more like something our brains do, as we strive to communicate. Yet I certainly do appreciate Inhammer's comment about metaphors moving from "extended meanings" to "established denotations."

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

At the moment, I'm finding I want a more liberal view of metaphor than otherwise. Just because we use a metaphor so frequently that the metaphor becomes embedded and in the process forms a new meaning for a word does not, in my opinion (at least, not tonight) invalidate its metephorality.

See that? I've coined the new word, "metaphorality." To paraphrase something I read somewhere else recently: I'm a writer, I can do that. ;>

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

I think the linguistic exercise having brought this to my adult attention, I've been fairly liberal in my interpretation of metaphor. I'll waver on the word "approach," but I think that when I say that Justine Larbalestier (http://justinelarbalestier.com/) "focused on clichéd or over-the-top similes," I think I have to count that as two metaphors, the first being "focused on," and the second being "over-the-top." I Also speak of "see"-ing an issue, of research that "suggests," of "catalog"-ing metaphors, etc.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

I see--interesting. Yes, I suppose our language has automatic metaphors, so to speak.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

I like the way you put that. :)

This makes me wonder how many of those metaphors are found in other languages, what the overlap is, and how many are unique to each language. Are there some metaphors that are found in all languages? Are there some found in only few?

How many linguistics theses have been written on this subject, do you suppose?

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

The line may be blurry and each of us might choose a different place to put it, but it still seems to me to be a useful exercise to notice the ways in which our language is shaped by metaphor. The fact that we use some metaphors so intensely that they become so deeply embedded in our speech that we no longer even recognize them as metaphor seems to me to reinforce my point about metaphor, rather than otherwise. But, maybe I'm only seeing what I want to.

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

Interesting!

Tangentially, this has got me thinking about what I call the Commutative Property of Similes. Maybe there's just time for me to write it up as a quick second entry for the day...

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

*dashes over to check journal*

What a wonderful principle. What a great post. How fabulous the poetry your prose inspired. :-D

And I absolutely adore your icon. :)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

The icon is from i_am_sarah, who made the "Nevermore" icon, too :-) She makes really great icons!

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Thank you! I love the background on her journal page, although I suspect from the dearth of visible posts I can see that much of her journal is friends-locked. :)

[asakiyume.livejournal.com]

She does have mainly locked posts; she has another, more open blog called myhappythoughts, but she hasn't updated that one recently.

[pdlloyd.livejournal.com]

Thanks! :)