Metaphors

I've always been a big fan of metaphors, although I never paid much attention to them. I have to admit that it wasn't until a graduate course in the sociology of medicine that I really understood how the language we use to discuss an issue conveys multiple meanings. I was a late bloomer....We were reading Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor." Obviously, it was about metaphors. It was the first time I had thought about terms like "war against cancer" "magic bullets" "battling disease"...like I said, a late bloomer in the language department. But, since then, I've been fascinated with the way we talk about life. In todays NYTimes, David Brooks wrote about just this topic in a column "Poetry for Everyday Life." Research shows that we use a metaphor every 10 to 25 words...Wow, that is a lot of metaphorical speaking.

These are some of his examples...

"George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, two of the leading researchers in this field, have pointed out that we often use food metaphors to describe the world of ideas. We devour a book, try to digest raw facts and attempt to regurgitate other people’s ideas, even though they might be half-baked."

"But when talking about money, we rely on liquid metaphors. We dip into savings, sponge off friends or skim funds off the top."

I know I've talked about my life as a walk in the woods, with sunny clearings and steep hills. I've also tried to out the sand dune metaphor, with shifting landscapes and changing shorelines. Brooks points out that we are not very good at spiritual or abstract thinking, so we need metaphors to provide concrete anchors for our thoughts. We need to compare new things to things we already know, we need to create those connections to make sense in our world. Metaphors are a way of doing that, a way of creating sense. What I really like about this though, is that metaphors are the cornerstone of poetry. It makes us all poets.