The Big Picture (Figuratively Speaking)
By Stephen J. Flusberg
The world is a complicated place. As the summer approaches, the global economy is careening off the rails while nations continue to wage an all out war against the COVID-19 pandemic. Carbon emissions are dropping for the first time in years as millions of people stay home, and yet we’re still racing toward the deadline for confronting climate change before it’s too late. How can we bottle up this flood of information and communicate a path forward in a way that resonates with enough people to make a difference?
Read quickly and you may have missed the italics sprinkled throughout the previous sentences. This wasn’t a result of over-emphatic writing or poor copy-editing (or both). Rather, we wanted to draw your attention to a critical ingredient in language that often gets overlooked: metaphor.
You probably think of metaphor — talking about one thing as if it were another — as a literary device, associated with poetry (“hope is the thing with feathers”), music lyrics (“you ain’t nothin’ but a hound dog”), or your high school literature class (“Juliet is the sun”). Metaphors, like analogies and similes, invite a comparison between two seemingly unlike topics, adding dramatic imagery and rhetorical flair to otherwise staid and literal prose.
Metaphor can be used to simplify and explain complex ideas by connecting to familiar topics and experience an audience is familiar with. Metaphors are when the characteristic of one object or experience (hound dogs, the sun) is used to explain another (you, Juliet). Elvis Presley crooned “you ain’t nothing but a hound dog crying all the time,” and Romeo mused that “Juliet is the sun.”
“Understanding how metaphors work, where they come from, and how they affect our thoughts and feelings can make us better equipped to tackle pressing problems, as well as help us communicate about complex ideas and challenges.”
Metaphors help us communicate and reason about complex and abstract ideas, enhance our powers of thinking and persuasion, and inform real-world social and cultural issues. Metaphors can be utilized to help us make sense of the world in both positive and harmful ways based on how imagery is deployed. Understanding how metaphors work, where they come from, and how they affect our thoughts and feelings can make us better equipped to tackle pressing problems, as well as help us communicate about complex ideas and challenges. We may be getting ahead of ourselves, though, so let’s take a step back and consider four basic facts about metaphors:
1. Metaphors are everywhere (for a reason)
A recent estimate suggests that about one out of every eight words we read, speak, or hear is metaphorical (Steen et al., 2010). While metaphors are often a reflection of culture, researchers have found universal metaphors that appear across contexts. These include:
- Journey
- Dark to light to express things moving from unknown to known
- War/battle against oneself or something specific
- Motion to describe change or change as a constant
In their 1980 book, “Metaphors We Live By,” linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson documented hundreds of “conventional” metaphors woven into the fabric of the English language (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980). One of their observations was that metaphors tend to appear in families, where many different words and phrases that literally describe one thing are systematically used to talk about another. For example, you might say that because the economy is careening off the rails, we need to get things back on track so that economic activity picks up speed next year until we’re chugging along at a good pace. All of these different words and phrases are instantiations of the very same metaphor: “the economy is a moving train”.
“Metaphors are not something extra added to ‘regular’ language by creative poets and playwrights — they are a direct reflection of how we as humans make sense of and reason about the world.”
Based on their analysis, Lakoff and Johnson concluded that “metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words… on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical” (emphasis in original; Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 6). In other words, metaphors are not something extra added to “regular” language by creative poets and playwrights — they are a direct reflection of how we as humans make sense of and reason about the world. That is why every language on earth, from English to Mandarin, Hebrew to Tzeltal, is brimming with metaphors. And it is why we are able to quickly understand so many metaphors without even realizing we’re doing it.
2. Metaphors originate in common experiences
Sometimes metaphors are created and become part of our vocabulary when someone notices a visual resemblance between something new and something more familiar. That is why there are mouths of rivers, blood oranges, legs of chairs, hourglass figures, dog-eared pages, eyes of needles, and many other examples baked into everyday speech. In this way, even simple metaphors help make communication easier by drawing on common knowledge of what things look like.
Metaphors also connect to physical experiences. Lakoff and Johnson (1980), for instance, suggested that as infants we’re likely to feel physical warmth when we’re receiving affection from a caregiver, leading to the mental association, or conceptual metaphor, that “affection is warmth.” This is why we say things like, “José is warming up to me, but he’s been cold to our coworkers.”
3. Metaphors reveal similarities and differences across cultures
Humans all over the world have much in common: we have similar senses and experience similar sensations, interact with local flora and fauna, create artifacts and art, contract diseases, contend with natural disasters, love, play, and fight. Perhaps it is no surprise that many of the same kinds of metaphors show up around the world in different languages.
Spatial metaphors are especially common. The “time is space” metaphor is present in nearly every language on earth (Boroditsky, 2011), and languages as dissimilar as English, Chinese, and Hungarian all use vertical position in space to denote positive emotions, like when we say “things are looking up and I’m flying high!” (Kövecses, 2005). Body parts are also frequently used in metaphors, thus people in different cultures often have similar intuitions about which ones are metaphorically linked to which abstract concepts, like “shoulder the burden” to carrying the weight of something, or “know it like the back of my hand” to I know it very well, or “under my thumb” to I have control over something (Holmes, Flusberg, & Thibodeau, 2018). In this way, metaphors can reveal common thought patterns that reflect our shared human physiology and experiences.
That said, there is considerable variability in the metaphors favored by different languages, which can help shed light on the diversity of thought and experience across cultures (Kövecses, 2005). While American football metaphors are quite common in the United States, a New Yorker might get a blank look from their international business partners if they said, “I’m calling an audible,” or “we can’t afford to punt on this deal,” or “we really need to put it through the uprights.” And we’re still trying to make sense of our British colleague’s cricket-themed metaphorical discussion of sticky wickets and hitting for six.
It might seem “obvious” that the future is ahead and the past behind you. But time is an abstract concept, after all, and is only metaphorically linked to our physical experiences in space. In fact, the Aymara people in South America talk about the past as being in front of them and the future behind them (Núñez, & Sweetser, 2006). After all, they might say, we see the past in our memories — much like we can see what’s in front of us — while the future, like everything behind us, is hidden from view. Seems obvious, right?
When using metaphor to build understanding of complex issues, it is important to root your metaphor in the culture and experience of the audience, otherwise your message may not resonate or backfire.
4. Metaphor can enhance (or constrain) our thinking
Metaphors are effective because they allow people to use what they already know to modify or improve their understanding of something they know less about. As metaphor scholar Elena Semino explained in an interview for this project: “Metaphor basically involves seeing one thing in terms of another. When you have a topic that is complex, seeing it in terms of something else that might be more accessible, less complex, more image-rich, can help people deal with complexity.”
For example, many people think that violent crime is a problem associated with bad actors. But some communities have made progress by treating violence as a virus that spreads, drawing on methods from epidemiology to block its transmission between people (Kotlowitz, 2008). The metaphors we use can influence how people think about problems and solutions.
Metaphor scholar Teenie Matlock shared an example from her research looking at metaphors and the internet: In 1995, when the internet was a new innovation just becoming accessible to everyday people, colorful motion metaphors were used to help people understand how to use this new, highly technical tool. For example, metaphors like ‘I searched the web’ and ‘Netscape took me to a website’ were used to build an understanding of the internet as a navigation resource, giving agency to search engines as tools that take you places.
Matlock recently conducted this study again and found that these same metaphors were not as prevalent because more people know what the internet is for and how to use it. Now, people are more likely to use the basic motion metaphor of “go,” rather than something like “Google took me to a website” because they are more comfortable navigating online. Matlock’s research suggests that metaphors can be used to help people understand the purpose for a new innovation or technology and how it works. Certain metaphors might not be as necessary or relevant as people become more comfortable with the innovation.
Visual metaphors can also be used to communicate about complex issues and potential solutions. For example, artist Mary Mattingly uses a mix of photography, performance, and portable architecture and sculptures to convey the urgency and challenges associated with climate change.
In “Life of Stuff” and “Pull” we see the heavy burden consumer culture creates for humanity grappling with a changing climate.
In her architectural sculptures, Mattingly helps the viewer imagine a world where we are all nomads having to carry our things on our backs due to climate change. For example, “Triple Island” helps us imagine a future of living in a changed climate. It helps the viewer imagine solutions to make the world habitable. The piece pushes visitors into a physical space to help us imagine a future of climate change and what we will have to do to adapt. In this sense, life will be like an individual island. According to the projects website:
“It celebrates the opening of the new park by taking into account the geographical history of the site. It is built on the East River from landfill and was recently flooded during Hurricane Sandy. It is a scalable and amphibious ecosystem that acts as a temporary habitat for residents. As a public experiment, Triple Island is an approach to living in a future New York replete with an acceleration of environmental challenges. We want it to address the importance of decentralizing our basic resources by creating a regenerative living system that provides food, power, shelter, and water for its inhabitants from natural systems.”
Setting the stage
By now, we hope you appreciate that the realm of metaphor is a rich and fertile landscape. Metaphor is more than a decorative literary device, but also a key to understanding the nature of the human mind. In the humanitarian sector, metaphors are just as key and just as rich in shaping our advocacy and stories. Social change communicators should be attuned to the connections they draw, and the images they conjure.
The essays that follow dive deeper into the world of metaphor, language, and thought, using research from psychology, neuroscience, linguistics, and the social sciences to address these questions and more.
References
Boroditsky, L. (2011). How languages construct time. In Space, time and number in the brain (pp. 333–341). Academic Press.
Brown, T. L. (2003). Making truth: Metaphor in science. University of Illinois Press
Holmes, K. J. Flusberg, S. J., & Thibodeau, P. H. (2018). Compound words reflect cross-culturally shared bodily metaphors. Cognitive Science
Kotlowitz, A. (2008). Blocking the transmission of violence. New York Times Magazine, 4
Kövecses, Z. (2005). Metaphor in culture: Universality and variation. Cambridge University Press.
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago, IL: University of Chicago Press.
Lilienfeld, S. O., Lynn, S. J., Ruscio, J., & Beyerstein, B. L. (2011). 50 great myths of popular psychology: Shattering widespread misconceptions about human behavior. John Wiley & Sons.
Núñez, R. E., & Sweetser, E. (2006). With the future behind them: Convergent evidence from Aymara language and gesture in the cross-linguistic comparison of spatial construals of time. Cognitive science, 30(3), 401–450.
Steen, G. J., Dorst, A. G., Herrmann, J. B., Kaal, A. A., & Krennmayr, T. (2010). Metaphor in usage. Cognitive Linguistics, 21(4), 765–796
