Hello I’m Jeannette Littlemore and I’m a Professor of English Language and
Applied Linguistics at the University of Birmingham
I work on metaphor and other kinds of figurative language
but what I focus on is metaphor in everyday communication so not
necessarily poetry and literature but just in the way people communicate
much more generally. One thing that I’ve noticed in the way
in which people communicate about COVID-19 is that there's a lot people
use a lot of metaphors when they're talking about progress
towards recovery, the progress with the vaccine, and
one person who particularly likes to use a lot of metaphors, particularly
football metaphors, is Jonathan Van-Tam.
So, he'll talk about things like tracking back or
winning the hard yards or looking at what the defence is doing as
well as the attack and not focusing primarily on the
attack. One of the good things about his use of
metaphor here is it focuses on the team effort
and how it's not just about the people who grab the limelight and
the people who make the big discoveries and how we're all working together.
So there's a couple of reasons why metaphor works really well in this kind
of context.
One is that metaphor's been shown to trigger
emotional responses in the brain, so it triggers a part of the brain called
the amygdala which is responsible for
processing emotion and reasoning
and linking the two so therefore it's really quite impactful.
The other reason why metaphor is very effective
is that it also triggers what's called the motor sensory cortex
so that is basically part of the brain that's responsible for
processing motion and also feelings of the senses.
If, say for example, you hear about something being
being sweet, metaphorically that will trigger a response that's
similar to if you're actually tasting something that's sweet. There's not that
much distinction between the literal and the metaphorical
in terms of the brain response to language
and so when you hear about things like, I don't know, for example,
we're in the last lap of the race, it's almost as if you
mentally simulate yourself being in a race so it has a kind of
effect on the way in which you process
your understanding of the progress towards the virus.
Some people say that you shouldn't mix metaphors - that's something we all
learn in school - that you're not supposed to mix your metaphors, but if you listen
to the way people actually use metaphor we mix them all the time and that's not
actually, that's not a bad thing. That's quite often a good thing because
the thing about a metaphor is it won't give you the whole picture,
it'll only give you kind of like a one angle on the story and in
order to get the whole picture you will often need to bring together
two or three metaphors. So, if you listen to the way in which people
talk about the government response to COVID we have football metaphors,
but we'll also have racing metaphors, particularly,
for example, when the Grand National was on we had a lot of racing metaphors
and then also you'll have things like very
very sort of straightforward like things like the Roadmap to Recovery
and these kind of metaphors all doing a slightly different job but working
together to create the message that needs to
be conveyed. There's been some work into what kind of
metaphors are likely to be most effective.
Generally, creative metaphors are more effective than conventional
metaphors but there's a bit of a sweet spot where
metaphor is concerned. If you go too creative then people just
won't really understand what it is that you're
saying. There needs to be something that people can kind of latch on to
which is why people often use very common kind of what is called source
domains. So source domains would be things like the football or the racing
or the maps and the route planning
in order to describe things which are a bit more abstract.
People need to have a bit of a handle on it in order to get the creativity.
Metaphor is effective in communication
more generally outside politics, outside COVID and
one of the things that's been observed that I’ve observed in my own research
but other people have observed this too is that people use metaphor to express
quite personal quite complex emotional experiences
particularly if they're kind of negative experiences
and it tends to be the case that the more strongly felt the experience the
more creative the metaphor.
One of the studies that we did looking at how people
talked about stressful experiences in the workplace.
We had a guy who talked about how he felt like he was
running on a soapy conveyor belt with a great big, he said actually “a bloody
great big elastic band” pulling him back while people threw sponges at him and so
there you've got this incredibly creative scenario which is kind of based
on the programme It's A Knockout or Jeux Sans Frontieres, where you're
basically put in a ridiculous situation and you're being
made to suffer and this highly physical highly
kind of embodied creative use of metaphor
manages to convey the stress of his workplace situation
far better than if he just said I had a really hard time at work today.
To bring it back to COVID, last night Dominic Raab was talking about
the need to open up quite slowly over the coming weeks
and he used the expression of snatching defeat
from the jaws of a relatively successful vaccine program
so here he's taking a quite well-known metaphor - snatching victory
from the jaws of defeat - and twisting it around and putting a little twist on it
and using it quite creatively. This is an example of
something that would be probably a very successful, quite memorable metaphor - it
sticks in your mind and that's why we use it.