I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World

by James Geary

  Aristotle noted the need for connective tissue in his treatise on rhetoric. “In using metaphors to give names to nameless things297, we must draw them not from remote but from kindred and similar things,” he wrote, “so that the kinship is clearly perceived as soon as the words are said.” For a good metaphor, juxtaposition is not enough; the things juxtaposed must ultimately gel. In Biographia Literaria, the rambling, rambunctious account of his literary beliefs, Coleridge described how this process of metaphorical fusion works.

  Biographia Literaria was originally intended as the preface to a book of anecdotes about Coleridge’s life and times. In typically prolix fashion, though, Coleridge inflated the preface into the book itself. He finished it in 1816 while residing in the Gilman household.

  Coleridge, like Vico, believed the essence of thought was metaphor. He even coined a new adjective for this imaginative blending—esemplastic. “I constructed it myself298,” he wrote of the term, “from the Greek words [esem, meaning ‘one,’ and plastic, meaning ‘to shape’], to shape into one.”

  In his notebooks, Coleridge provides an almost neuroscientific description of how esemplastic power works. It’s almost as if he was thinking of Von Economo cells when he wrote:

  I feel too intensely299 the omnipresence of all in each, platonically speaking; or, psychologically, my brain-fibers, or the spiritual light which abides in the brain-marrow, as visible light appears to do in sundry rotten mackerel and other smashy matters, is of too general an affinity with all things, and though it perceives the difference of things, yet is eternally pursuing the likenesses, or, rather, that which is common [among them].

  In its eternal pursuit of likenesses, the brain spins out a clew of associated commonplaces, which it follows through the metaphorical labyrinth. It shuffles through all possible combinations, explores all possible routes, then brings together those strands that actually lead somewhere. Metaphor is the mind’s great raveling.

  Laudanum was Coleridge’s drug of choice, but Polish science fiction author Stanislaw Lem discovered a far more addictive substance.

  In The Futurological Congress, Lem describes an apocalyptic vision of the future in which all knowledge is derived from hallucinogens rather than direct experience. Persons of faith visit their local “psychedelicatessen” to purchase a dose of genuflix for those moments of spiritual awakening. Algebrine endows users with an encyclopedic knowledge of higher mathematics, while amnesol is just the thing for removing unwanted but persistent memories. Authentium creates instant memories of things that never happened: “A few grams of dantine300, for instance, and a man goes around with the deep conviction that he has written The Divine Comedy.”

  The mother of all psychedelics, though, is surely metamorphine, which Lem praises for allowing partakers to “have an affair with a goat, thinking it’s Venus de Milo herself.”

  In reality, we’re all on metamorphine all the time—and we first get in the habit as children.

  Metaphor and Children

  How Should One Refer to the Sky?

  The Prose Edda, the thirteenth-century Icelandic epic by Snorri Sturluson, is a handbook for aspiring poets wanting to master traditional forms of verse. It provides instruction in the linguistic conventions and poetic etiquette most likely to impress potential patrons. Sturluson, born in 1179 or thereabouts, was the undisputed master of this art.

  Sturluson was descended from the Icelandic folk hero Egil Skallagrímsson. Another family raised him, however. Jon Loptsson, one of Iceland’s most powerful and highly cultured leaders, adopted the young Snorri in order to settle a feud. Sturluson did well for himself, marrying one of the wealthiest women in Iceland and going on to become one of the kingdom’s richest men.

  But, during a stay in Norway, Sturluson became embroiled in political intrigue. He was branded a traitor back home and was assassinated, with an axe, in 1241 by two former sons-in-law.

  The word “saga” is Old Norse for “tale,” and most sagas—including those in the Prose Edda—are glamorized tales of Scandinavian folk history written between the eleventh and fourteenth centuries. The stories are based on an oral tradition dating back to the Viking Age, roughly between 800 and 1100.

  The Prose Edda is different, though. In addition to the usual tales of derring-do, Sturluson offers tips for court poets, known as skalds, seeking royal patronage. By far the most important thing for skalds to know was how to make a proper kenning.

  A kenning is a metaphorical circumlocution consisting of paired nouns or a noun phrase. For example, in ancient Icelandic verse, a sword is not a sword but an “icicle of blood301”; a ship is not a ship but the “horse of the sea”; and eyes are not eyes but the “moons of the forehead.” Similarly, the earth302 is “the floor of the hall of the winds” or “the sea trodden on by animals,” while fire303 is “destroyer of timber” or “the sun of houses.”

  The Prose Edda contains lists of the most popular kennings for the characters populating various myths and legends. So it’s also a kind of Burke’s Peerage and Gentry for the gods and goddesses, heroes and villains of ancient Icelandic lore.

  The word “kenning” comes from the Old Norse verb kenna, which is also a “seeing = knowing” metaphor, meaning “to know, recognize, or perceive.” The etymology survives in words meaning “to know” in various Scandinavian languages as well as in German and Dutch. Kenna is also the source of the English “can” as well as the somewhat arcane “ken,” as found in the expression “beyond my ken,” meaning “beyond my knowledge.”

  Though invented by ancient Icelandic bards, kennings are still quite common. Simple phrases such as “house plant,” “head ache,” “brain storm” and “pay wall” are all basic kennings, however prosaic, as is “pain in the ass,” as in you are not you but a “pain in the ass.” My personal favorite is “prairie schooner,” a kenning for the covered wagons in which nineteenth-century settlers sailed into the American West.

  Kids are skilled skalds, too, and simple kenning-like re-namings are often among the first metaphors they produce. I remember standing at a window with my eldest son, Gilles, when he was about two. He pointed to the sun and blurted out “big sky lamp,” a classic kenning if there ever was one.

  My other son, Tristan, came up with a clever kenning after we got a kitten one Christmas. Inspired by the burrito-like sandwiches he liked for lunch, he christened the little plastic bags we used to remove the cat’s droppings from the litter tray “crap wraps.”

  Further evidence for the primacy of kennings in the evolution of metaphor comes from bonobos304, considered the closest living primate to humans. Bonobos communicate through hand gestures as well as vocalizations, and at least one bonobo, Kanzi, can make metaphors.

  Primatologist Sue Savage-Rumbaugh taught Kanzi to communicate using a keyboard made up of geometric symbols. He can comprehend hundreds of spoken English words and, through the keyboard, can use hundreds of others. By combining the symbols on his keyboard, Kanzi can also make simple kennings. He produced a kenning for “duck,” for example, by combining the symbols for “water” and “bird.”

  Children share with bonobos an instinctive metaphor-making ability. Every parent can recite the adorable metaphorical things their offspring say. Developmental research routinely finds that kids produce metaphors with alacrity and ease. In one study, a child described a flashlight battery305 as a “sleeping bag all rolled up and ready to go over to a friend’s house”; another described a hairbrush as “a park with grass”; another described baldness as having a “barefoot head.”

  Most early childhood metaphors are simple noun-noun substitutions, or proto-kennings. These metaphors tend to emerge first during pretend play, when children are between the ages of twelve and twenty-four months. As psychologist Alan Leslie proposed in his theory of mind, children at this age start to create metarepresentations through which they imaginatively manipulate both the objects around them and their ideas about those objects. At this stage, metaphor is, literal
ly, child’s play. During pretend play, children effortlessly describe objects as other objects and then use them as such. A comb becomes a centipede306; cornflakes become freckles; a crust of bread becomes a curb.

  Metaphors like these are endearing but rudimentary, based exclusively on perceptual similarities among physical objects. Around the same time Gilles came up with his “big sky lamp” kenning, he paused during dinner one evening, lifted a sprig of broccoli from his plate, contemplated it for a minute, and exclaimed: “Tree!”—a classic Aristotelian case of giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.

  Young children are such prolific metaphor producers because their pattern recognition circuits, not yet confined by conventional categorizations, are working full blast. So kids routinely come up with a profusion of metaphorical comparisons, but only a few of them are on target.

  In one study, researchers told children ranging in age from preschoolers to college students a brief story—about someone who was very quiet, for example, or someone who was very sad. They then asked them to provide an appropriate simile to end the story307. Preschoolers produced by far the most metaphors, but many of those metaphors—“quiet as a nose” or “sad as a shirt”—didn’t make much sense. While young children are very good at giving things names that belong to other things, they are less adept with more complex forms of figurative language.

  Children, like adults, are skilled in metaphors based on perceptual similarities. Psychologist Ellen Winner presented children between the ages of three and ten with a variety of objects—blocks of various shapes, odd kitchen gadgets, a clothespin, some crayons—and offered three possible names for each object: the literal name, an anomalous name (an upside-down mop was called “a toaster,” for example), and a metaphorical name (the upside-down mop was called “a flower”308). Even three-year-olds successfully selected the metaphorical names as more accurate than the anomalous ones.

  But children can also be oblivious to the less obvious perceptual similarities contained in metaphors. I once observed my five-year-old daughter Hendrikje playing in the garden with one of her dolls. She laid the doll down among some plant stems and began covering it under a blanket of dried leaves and grass. When I asked Hendrikje what she was doing, she said, “It’s time for my doll’s nap in the flowerbed.” Unaware of the metaphorical meaning of this kenning, Hendrikje interpreted “flowerbed” literally.

  One study found that this literal streak is common when kids are confronted with more complex metaphors. Children listened to short stories that ended with either a literal or metaphorical sentence. In a story about a little girl on her way home, for example, the literal ending was “Sally was a girl running to her home,” while the metaphoric ending was “Sally was a bird flying to her nest309.”

  Researchers asked the children to act out the stories using a doll. Five- to six-year-olds tended to move the Sally doll through the air when the last sentence was “Sally was a bird flying to her nest,” taking the phrase literally. Eight- to nine-year-olds, however, tended to move her quickly across the ground, taking the phrase metaphorically.

  Children’s understanding falters even more as metaphors become more conceptual. Researchers presented children between the ages of six and twelve with the metaphorical sentence “After many years of working at the jail, the prison guard had become a hard rock310 that could not be moved.” They then asked them to paraphrase the sentence.

  The youngest children said the guard had been physically transformed into a rock, or that the prison itself was somehow full of rocks. The eight-year-olds recognized that the guard himself was like a rock in some way. But they, too, focused on the physical, suggesting the guard had muscles that were as hard as rocks. Only those aged ten and above realized that the guard had become psychologically like a rock—insensitive and unfeeling.

  In the 1960s, Solomon Asch and his collaborator Harriet Nerlove explored the evolution in children of what they called “double function terms,” words like “warm” and “cold” and “bitter” and “sweet” that Asch had previously identified as describing the psychological characteristics of people as well as the physical properties of things. They theorized that we use physical terms to describe psychological states owing to a direct experience of similarity. The first person to describe someone as “cold,” they suggested, sensed a resemblance between an object (a block of ice, perhaps) and a human being.

  To trace the development of double function terms in children, Asch and Nerlove311 presented groups of kids with a collection of different objects—ice water, sugar cubes, powder puffs—and asked them to identify the ones that were cold, sweet, or soft. This, of course, they were easily able to do.

  Asch and Nerlove then asked the children, Can a person be cold? Can a person be sweet? Can a person be soft? While preschoolers understood the literal physical references, they did not understand the metaphorical psychological references. They described cold people as those not dressed warmly; hard people were those with firm muscles. One preschooler described his mother as “sweet” but only because she cooked sweet things, not because she was nice.

  Asch and Nerlove observed that only between the ages of seven and ten did children begin to understand the psychological meanings of these descriptions. Some seven- and eight-year-olds said that hard people are tough, bright people are cheerful, and crooked people do bad things. But only some of the eleven- and twelve-year-olds were able to actually describe the metaphorical link between the physical condition and the psychological state. Some nine- and ten-year-olds, for instance, were able to explain that both the sun and bright people “beamed.” Children’s metaphorical competence, it seems, is limited to basic perceptual metaphors, at least until early adolescence.

  Max Black’s theory of associated commonplaces suggests why children struggle with more complex metaphors. To understand how an upside-down mop is like a flower, a child has only to understand that the two things look alike. The metaphor is right there on the surface, easy to see. To understand how a prison guard is like a rock, however, involves understanding how a physical state resembles a psychological state, a much more difficult thing to see, especially when you have no experience of how harsh environments can make people emotionally callous.

  Children have trouble understanding more sophisticated metaphors because they have not yet had the life experiences needed to acquire the relevant cache of associated commonplaces. They won’t understand how a prison guard can become a hard rock until they have had a few run-ins with rock-hard people themselves.

  In his studies of early childhood development, psychologist Jean Piaget312 found the same thing. He gave kids between the ages of nine and eleven a list of ten proverbs, such as “Little streams make mighty rivers” and “When the cat’s away the mice will play.” He also gave them a selection of sentences in random order, some of which expressed the meaning of the proverb in a different form. The children had to read the proverbs and find the most appropriate matches, which they consistently failed to do. The kids’ performance improved, though, when they were provided with an appropriate context for the proverb. They did even better, a later study found313, when shown pictures of possible proverb interpretations and asked to choose the right image.

  I had firsthand experience of this childhood metaphor deficit with Tristan, that kenning connoisseur and budding skald, when he was eleven and had to write an essay about the poem “Nettles314” by Vernon Scannell for a school entrance exam:

  My son aged three fell in the nettle bed.

  “Bed” seemed a curious name for those green spears,

  That regiment of spite behind the shed:

  It was no place for rest. With sobs and tears

  The boy came seeking comfort and I saw

  White blisters beaded on his tender skin.

  We soothed him till his pain was not so raw.

  At last he offered us a watery grin,

  And then I took my billhook, honed the blade

 
And went outside and slashed in fury with it

  Till not a nettle in that fierce parade

  Stood upright any more. And then I lit

  A funeral pyre to burn the fallen dead,

  But in two weeks the busy sun and rain

  Had called up tall recruits behind the shed:

  My son would often feel sharp wounds again.

  School entrance exams are, to use a kenning, the bane of eleven-year-olds. (The word “bane,” incidentally, comes from the Icelandic bani, meaning “to slay or wound.”) I had been working with Tristan for almost a year to prepare for the tests. I doubt that I was much help with math, but I thought I could make a real contribution with literature. We went over dozens of poems and stories, and metaphor was one of the literary devices we discussed at some length.

  The assignment for the essay was to explain what “Nettles” is about. Tristan answered that the poem is about a boy who is stung by nettles behind the shed and whose dad cuts down the nettles and burns them, but they grow back. So far, so good.

  “Nettles” is indeed about a boy who is stung by nettles. But it’s also about a father’s desire to protect his son—from actual nettles and from all the metaphorical nettles that await the boy in later life. At the end of the poem, the father realizes he will never be able to do this. Tristan completely missed the poem’s metaphorical significance. Those associated commonplaces were just not in place for him yet, and they may never be—unless he himself becomes a father one day. Needless to say, he didn’t do so well on the test.

  Cognitive scientist Dedre Gentner, who has done extensive research on metaphor and children, constructed a time line of metaphorical development in young people315 based on a sliding scale of increasingly complex similes. She presented three different age groups—five- to six-year-olds, nine- to ten-year-olds, and college students—with three different kinds of similes.