Transcriber: Katie Marsh Reviewer: Elisabeth Buffard
I come here to talk about
metaphor, language and reality...
Not too ambitious.
And I come by my interest in language very naturally,
almost biologically.
My mother, at a time when women were not editors,
was an editor at Fortune magazine.
And she was a stickler
for proper usage and correct pronunciation.
And back when I was 9 or 10 years old,
-- this is one of the first memories that I have
of this particular obsession of hers --
I pointed to an ad in the New York Times and said:
"Boy, you know, that's an amazing ring from Tiffany's".
And she said: "I will disown you, if you ever say
The name of the company is Tiffany. Look, Tiffany and company."
So, that was a sort of early warning.
Later on a more risque moment,
I was in high school at this point, we moved from Greenwich Village
to Nyack New York when I went to high school,
and she came home from Fortune magazine where she worked
and she said in a parlance that was acceptable at the time:
"You know, Danny, I just heard one negro boy say to another:
'Get the fuck up on the bicycle!''
and she said, -- and I was shocked
because I never heard her use this kind of language before --
she said: 'What I'm wondering is what part of speech
the fuck
So that'll give you an idea of the kind of attention
that she paid to grammar and structure.
I want to talk about dead metaphors first.
Dead metaphors, as many of you probably know,
are figures of speech
that are no longer consciously in our minds.
Probably the phrase
is a dead metaphor
because you don't really ... like
you don't really think of corpses or morgues,
or necrosis, or anything like that.
It's just an abstract use of a term from one place to another.
Some other examples:
flowerbed!
You don't really think of a bed, particularly.
You sort of take it on a literal level even though it's not literal.
On the spot! Well... Ok...I guess I...
Out cold.
Last leg... you don't really think of the anatomy.
The jitters... well again, in my case maybe fairly literal,
but usually you don't of think of someone actually shaking.
These are pieces of language
that are fossilized in the language we use everyday
but they are part of what we say, they are part of the way
and frame that our language carries out into the world.
Whether we are aware of them or not.
There are supposedly five stages
in the grieving process for oncoming human mortality.
I don't remember what they are.
I don't really care to think about them.
But I do wanna say that I think there three stages
in the death of a metaphor,
or the life and death of a metaphor.
And the first one is life.
The first one is when somebody coins a phrase in a new way
that says something fresh and original,
you can imagine in whatever language it was, it doesn't matter,
maybe a thousand years ago a boy said to a girl:
"You're so sweet!"
A metaphor itself.
Then he said: "You are my heart!"
And said: "No, that's not good enough,
you are my sweetheart!"
At which point, if the girl liked the boy,
she was very flattered and there was a kind of moment
of recognition of a fresh use of language.
And another example might be again
from some earlier time, some language we don't know any more,
somebody, man or woman, noticed that
at a certain time of the year the days get shorter,
and they get darker, and they get chillier,
and may have seen the sun setting a little bit sooner
than the day before or the week before and they said:
"Oh, it's the fall!"
We say
but we when say
we don't think of a literal physical decline,
but obviously that's where the word came from.
And from my own sort of area
of alleged expertise, journalism and literature,
when the first newspapers were published,
I don't know if you've seen the old-fashioned New York Times
or other such journals,
they had columns of time, bodies of time, metaphorically.
And at the top of them, there were these larger letters
that told you what the story was about.
Well, imagine how pleased, whoever it was,
was when he said: "Oh, that's the headline!"
Again, a dead metaphor.
One that you don't stop to think about consciously
when you use the word
The second stage in the death of a metaphor...
and by the way, this is not a bad death,
it's a good death as you'll see,
but this one is not so great,
this is the indifference that familiarity breeds.
This is where what used to be fresh,
like
phrases like that become cliches
and they become language modules
that we conveniently fit into our conversations,
because they are sort of viral.
What used to be silver dollars
are now kind of worn-out copper pennies.
And in fact,
just to go back again to a couple of other examples
of somewhat dead metaphors.
When you say: "He's on the stepping...
that's a stepping stone to success".
Chances are you don't think of an actual stone.
If you say: "That guy up there on the stage, he's grandstanding".
Well, you know that comes from, I think,
horse racing and large events,
but you mean showing off,
the actual physical image that goes into that word,
is not really present in your mind.
As I've said, the cliches that plague us at this second stage
are overwhelmingly numerous.
This is the ClicheSite online.
As writers, young writers or even middle-aged
or even geezer writers,
you might do well to consult this site,
because it kind of shows you what obstacles to avoid,
what not to fall back on.
All hands on deck, all bets are off, all bent out of shape
This is just the A's, it goes on and on, and it's scary.
But then, lower than the level of cliches,
out of danger, in a way, of being just convenient
are everyday commonplace words that have metaphorical content.
The Grim Reaper comes along, sort of slays the fresh usage,
the cliched usage and sort of ...
makes the figure of speech, basically deceased within the word.
So, that's what a dead metaphor is.
But there are four stages, I lied.
The fourth stage is the buried metaphor,
that is to say, for instance,
the word
Why? Because it's derived from the Greek
I'm sure you all know that, - over,
pherein
And so a
is a carrying over from one sense of the word
to another apt, application.
And that's the way our language is basically made.
With one exception.
And that exception is rudimentary primal words,
like
sort of even you trace them back etymologically,
always meant what they mean,
whether in Anglo-Saxon or Latin, or they are very close to it.
Now I've just said, haven't I, that they are not metaphorical.
Later on I'm gonna take that back in a more grandiose
and probably somewhat deranged way
and say that they are metaphorical.
But right now, let's say they are not.
They are the bricks out of which our language is built
and from that point on, the bricks become
complicated architecture and buildings.
Our language is ... our living language,
walks on a graveyard of buried... dead and buried metaphors.
And it draws its strength and spirit from them.
And it's important to know, I think,
what those spirits are, what those ghosts are.
All these brings up for me two big questions,
all this talk about buried dead metaphors and
the quality of implication:
how aware are you
of the metaphorical figurative content of what you say?
That's a first big question.
Is it part of what you say, whether you know it or not?
Ralph Waldo Emerson said that
language is fossil poetry. And if he is right,
it means that when we speak in ordinary terms,
the fact is that we are speaking greater volumes than we realize.
Take the word
The word
as most, and many of you probably know.
If you are an astrologer, I mean
you kind of know that cancer means crab,
because it's one of the signs of the zodiac,
but in fact if you are not, even if you are an astrologer,
if you have the misfortune to have to talk about the illness ,
you may the word
that it contains this root,
but it's perfect, especially for certain forms of the illness.
First of all, according to some human standards, it's ugly.
Secondly, the kind of branching and reaching out
that you can see that it does,
is very fitting for the form that this illness takes.
Anyway, there is a large body of thoughts that says
that using word like
unless you are saying:
doesn't convey its root meaning.
I think it does, I think whether you know it or not
it's almost a species-like quality
that our words are loaded and filled with these ancient origins.
Let me give two examples. John Milton, in "Paradise lost",
talks about the eviction of Satan from heaven
and he describes him in hell finding cast down,
fallen angels as
And ... so.. we know what
it means devastated, sad, depressed,
but it's from a Latin combination of words:
abIacio
So, Milton knew Latin, he was a great Latin scholar,
so he chose that word on purpose and it's literally true.
Satan and his angels -- and his henchmen --
have been thrown down from heaven,
so when we read that he is abject
if you've had Latin and if there's any inspirational part of this talk,
it would be ... what your grandfather said or grandmother:
"Please, study Latin!"
You know how fitting inappropriate that one single choice of the word is.
Another example, a little lighter, a little riskier.. maybe.
The word
It sounds spanish, and in fact it is brought over from the Spanish
and it refers to the vegetable.
Well, there are differences of opinion about the derivation of avocado,
but the one I like the best,
well I think it's also the most respectable in its way.
It says it's from the Aztec word,
which I couldn't even bother to try to spell for you,
but you can hear the sort of similar sound,
āhuacatl
Ahuacatl
And I will leave the rest to your enjoyment,
but before we go on, I will tell you that
testicle itself means
(Laughter)
from the Latin.
So I agree with Gregory Dawes who says that
"to suggest that words always carry with them
something of what may have..."
- I disagree with him, he says it's an etymological fallacy --
And to quickly go to the next gentleman,
a Hungarian who loves English, named Zoltán Kövecses,
he says "the
namely, that what is deeply entrenched, hardly noticed,
and thus effortlessly used is is active in our thought."
This is where I stand.
Folks.. you hear politicians say:
"Some folks wanna shot down the government".
Well it's a very friendly word, but let's say he doesn't agree,
he is using it sarcastically, he may mean to be friendly,
but in fact it's a sarcastic word with an edge in it.
So we need to be aware of what our language is saying,
andI guess the more you study, the more direct you can be,
the more precise you can be, the less you'll be misunderstood.
Disagreements about ideas are one thing,
misunderstandings are often brought about
by a misuse or a wrong use of language.
Second big question, what are we talking about?
That a very big question. We are talking about an effort
of the human mind to convey reality.
In my opinion now I gonna take back
what I said about cloud, and snow, and foot.
Every single word that we utter is a kind of metaphor.
We take from the outside, external world, we bring it inside.
We put it into language, in a way it is
also a
We have a kind of existential arrogance,
we can't hear what a dog can hear,
we can't see what a hawk can see,
we can't feel what a spider can feel.
Our reality is anthropocentric one.
And so the idea that language can convey everything,
even though it's an amazement and really a complex thing.
As you can see even in mathematical thought
we have these amazing abilities to convey ideas about
numbers, and space and language.
It's a kind of noble, but tragic misunderstanding.
Because beyond the confines of our senses,
beyond the confines of our language ,
there is probably something else.
And I think that two things give us glimmers of that Something else.
One is science: we know electrons are passing through us now,
we see the Higgs boson,
things that we never thought we'd be able to see.
And the other - is poetry.
Poetry distorts, compresses, expands language to the point
where we may get a glimmer of something else,
something we hadn't really thought about.
And we get chills, just the way we do from great science.
So we knock against the walls of our senses and our words.
I don't think we''ll ever get through,
but still that language is an amazement
and it would behoove of all of us to know more about it.
We are at the end about the other reality,
we are left with a mystery,
we don't know what's beyond what we can understand or see.
And the word
because it comes over from the Latin:
carried-over -
Thank you very much.
(Applause)