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

by James Geary

  14. “Giving the thing a name . . .” Aristotle. The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle. Introduction by Edward P. J. Corbett. New York: Modern Library, 1984, p. 251.

  15. “Juliet is the sun.” Romeo and Juliet, Act II, Scene ii, Line 3.

  16. “When something that can scarcely be conveyed by the proper term . . .” Cicero. De Oratore Volume 2. Translated by H. Rackham. London: William Heinemann, 1942, p. 123.

  17. The Arabic word for metaphor is isti’ara, or “loan.” Al-Jurjani, Abdalqahir. The Mysteries of Eloquence. Ritter, Hellmut, ed. Istanbul: Government Press, 1954, p. 9.

  18. The variety of metaphorical meanings for the word “shoulder.” Deignan, Alice. “Corpus-based Research into Metaphor.” In: Researching and Applying Metaphor. Cameron, Lynne, and Low, Graham, eds. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1999, pp. 185–189.

  19. Participants exposed to a bare illuminated lightbulb performed better at solving spatial, verbal, and mathematical problems. Slepian, M. L., Weisbuch, M., Rutchick, A. M., Newman, L. S., and Ambady, N. “Shedding Light on Insight: Priming Bright Ideas.” Journal of Experimental Social Psychology 46, 2010, pp. 696–700.

  20. “Metaphor permeates all discourse . . .” Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976, p. 80.

  21. “My love is like a red, red rose.” This is the first line of Burns’s lyric “A Red, Red Rose.”

  22. “A sign of genius . . .” Aristotle. The Rhetoric and the Poetics of Aristotle, p. 255.

  23. “Atoms are unlimited in size and number . . .” Cited in: Jones, W. T. A History of Western Philosophy: The Classical Mind. New York: Harcourt Brace Jovanovich, 1970, p. 76.

  24. “No collision would take place . . .” Lucretius. On the Nature of the Universe. Book II, 220–225. Available at http://classics.mit.edu/Carus/nature_things.html.

  25. Poincaré was “short and plump . . .” In: Newman, James R. The World of Mathematics. Volume 2. Mineola, NY: Dover, 2000, p. 1374.

  26. “During the complete repose of the mind . . .” Poincaré, Henri. The Foundations of Science. Lancaster, PA: Science Press, 1946, pp. 393–394.

  27. Elvis the Pelvis. “Elvis the Pelvis” is an example of synecdoche, a type of metaphor in which one distinctive part of a thing is used to represent the whole. Another example of synecdoche is “Old Blue Eyes” as a reference to Frank Sinatra. Metonymy is closely related to synecdoche but substitutes an attribute for the thing itself, as in the use of “crown” to signify a monarchy or “Washington” to refer to the U.S. government.

  28. “Abuses of speech.” Hobbes, Thomas. Leviathan. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 1998, p. 21.

  29. “Use words metaphorically . . .” Ibid., p. 21.

  30. “Reasoning upon [metaphor] . . .” Ibid., p. 32.

  31. “A philosopher should abstain . . .” Cited in: Gentner, Dedre, and Jeziorski, Michael. “The Shift from Metaphor to Analogy in Western Science.” In: Metaphor and Thought. Ortony, Andrew, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 448.

  32. “If we would speak of things as they are . . .” Locke, John. An Essay Concerning Human Understanding. Book 3, Chapter 10. Available at http://oregonstate.edu/instruct/phl302/texts/locke/locke1/Essay_contents.html.

  33. “When a new thing . . .” Barfield, Owen. History in English Words. London: Faber and Faber, 1962, p. 20.

  34. The first use of “hot” as a metaphor. Williams, J. “Synaesthetic Adjectives: A Possible Law of Semantic Change.” Language 52, 2, 1976, p. 475.

  35. The first use of “bridge” as a metaphor. Zharikov, S., and Gentner, D. “Why Do Metaphors Seem Deeper than Similes?” In: Proceedings of the Twenty-Fourth Annual Conference of the Cognitive Science Society. Gray, W. D., and Schunn, C. D., eds. Fairfax, VA: George Mason University, 2002, pp. 980–981.

  36. Common phrases with intricate metaphorical etymologies. See: E. Cobham Brewer’s The Dictionary of Phrase & Fable, William and Mary Morris’s Dictionary of Word and Phrase Origins, James Rogers’s The Dictionary of Clichés, and Walter W. Skeat’s Concise Dictionary of English Etymology.

  37. Deadline. Gentner, Dedre, and Bowdle, Brian. “The Psychology of Metaphor Processing.” In: Encyclopedia of Cognitive Science. London: Nature Publishing Group, 2002, p. 21.

  38. “Our knowledge grows . . .” Cited in: Wheelwright, Philip. The Burning Fountain: A Study in the Language of Symbolism. Bloomington and London: Indiana University Press, 1968, p. 181.

  39. “Three-fourths of our language . . .” Ibid., p. 120.

  40. The etymological roots of “seeing is knowing.” Sweetser, Eve. From Etymology to Pragmatics: Metaphorical and Cultural Aspects of Semantic Structure. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1990, p. 9. See also: Kovecses, Zoltan. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. Oxford: Oxford University Press, 2002, pp. 218–219.

  41. The verb “grasp” means “to understand.” Kleparski, Grzegorz A. “Hot Pants, Cold Fish and Cool Customers: The Search for Historical Metaphorical Extensions in the Realm of Temperature Terms.” Studia Anglica Resoviensia 4, 2007, p. 115.

  42. Tunisian Arabic speakers say their brains are boiling. Wilkowski, Benjamin M., et al. “Hot-Headed Is More Than an Expression: The Embodied Representation of Anger in Terms of Heat.” Emotion 9, 4, 2009, p. 464.

  43. In the Sotho languages, angry people are described as hot-blooded. Kleparski, Grzegorz A. “Hot Pants, Cold Fish and Cool Customers: The Search for Historical Metaphorical Extensions in the Realm of Temperature Terms,” pp. 100–118.

  44. Japanese metaphors for anger. Matsuki, Keiko. “Metaphors of Anger in Japanese.” In: Language and the Cognitive Construal of the World. Taylor, John R., and MacLaury, Robert E., eds. Berlin: de Gruyter, 1995, pp. 137–151.

  45. Anger in American Sign Language. Taub, Sarah F. Language from the Body: Iconicity and Metaphor in American Sign Language. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 2004, p. 3.

  46. Chinese metaphors. Yu, Ning. “Metaphorical Expressions of Anger and Happiness in English and Chinese.” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 10, 1995, pp. 59–92.

  47. Hungarian metaphors. Kovecses, Zoltan. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction, p. 168.

  48. The equation of bigness with significance. Grady, Joseph E. “A Typology of Motivation for Conceptual Metaphor: Correlation vs. Resemblance.” In: Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics. Selected Papers from the Fifth International Cognitive Linguistics Conference, Amsterdam, July 1997. Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr., and Steen, Gerard J., eds. Amsterdam: John Benjamins, 1999, p. 80.

  49. The use of the sense of smell to indicate suspicion. Ibarretxe-Antuñano, Iraide. “Metaphorical Mappings in the Sense of Smell.” In: Metaphor in Cognitive Linguistics, p. 32.

  50. “Low-level metaphorical associations between concepts, based directly on experiential correlation.” Grady, Joseph. “Cross-linguistic Regularities in Metaphorical Extension.” A talk delivered at the Linguistic Society of America Annual Meeting, Los Angeles, January 9, 1999.

  51. “With progressive loss of its virility . . .” Goodman, Nelson. Languages of Art. Indianapolis: Hackett, 1976, p. 68.

  52. “Every modern language . . .” Barfield, Owen. Poetic Diction: A Study in Meaning. Middletown, CT: Wesleyan University Press, 1973, p. 63.

  53. “A man cannot utter a dozen words . . .” Ibid., p. 69.

  54. Louis de Broglie and the theory of electron waves. Gamow, George. Thirty Years That Shook Physics: The Story of Quantum Theory. New York: Dover, 1966, pp. 80–81.

  55. The word “broker.” My thanks to Jason Zweig for his insights into the etymology of the words “broker” and “stock.”

  56. “The width of a swollen barleycorn.” Cited in: “Thirteenth-century Tally Sticks.” The U.K. National Archive Web site, http://www.nationalarchives.gov.uk/museum/item.asp?item_id=6. See also: Dyson, George. “Economic Dis-Equilibrium: Can You Have Your House and Spend It Too?” The Edge Web site, http://edge.org/3rd_culture/dysong08.1/dysong08.1_index.html.

  57. Langua
ge as “fossil poetry.” Emerson, Ralph Waldo. Selected Prose and Poetry. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1969, p. 130.

  58. “The poets made all the words . . .” Ibid., p. 130.

  59. Commentators from Helsinki to Hong Kong. Smith, G. P. “How High Can a Dead Cat Bounce?: Metaphor and the Hong Kong Stock Market.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 18, 1995, pp. 43–57. See also: Schmidt, Christopher M. “Metaphor and Cognition: A Cross-Cultural Study of Indigenous and Universal Constructs in Stock Exchange Reports.” Intercultural Communication 5, 2002, http://www.immi.se/intercultural.

  60. “Stock prices took a rollercoaster ride . . .” Cited in: Smith, G. P. “How High Can a Dead Cat Bounce?: Metaphor and the Hong Kong Stock Market,” pp. 43–57.

  61. “The most important example of economic rhetoric . . .” McCloskey, Deirdre N. The Rhetoric of Economics. Second edition. Madison: University of Wisconsin Press, 1998, p. 40.

  62. “Agent metaphors tend to be evoked . . .” Morris, Michael W., Sheldon, Oliver J., Ames, Daniel R., and Young, Maia J. “Metaphors and the Market: Consequences and Preconditions of Agent and Object Metaphors in Stock Market Commentary.” Organizational Behavior and Human Decision Processes 102, 2, 2007, p. 178.

  63. “Agent metaphors imply . . .” Ibid., p. 177.

  64. The rush to assumption in financial decision-making. Bechara, Antoine, and Damasio, Antonio R. “The Somatic Marker Hypothesis: A Neural Theory of Economic Decision.” Games and Economic Behavior 52, 2005, p. 359. See also: Zweig, Jason. Your Money and Your Brain. London: Souvenir Press, 2007, p. 60 and p. 69.

  65. Our brains are always prospecting for pattern. Huettel, Scott A., et al. “Perceiving Patterns in Random Series: Dynamic Processing of Sequence in the Prefrontal Cortex.” Nature Neuroscience 5, 5, 2002, pp. 485–490. See also: Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1994, p. 412.

  66. The “interpreter.” Wolford, George, et al. “The Left Hemisphere’s Role in Hypothesis Formation.” The Journal of Neuroscience 20, 2000, pp. 1–4.

  67. A fleck of brain tissue roughly the size of a large match head. Edelman, Gerald M. Bright Air, Brilliant Fire: On the Matter of the Mind. London: Penguin Books, 1994, p. 17.

  68. “Brains operate . . . not by logic . . .” Edelman, Gerald M. Second Nature: Brain Science and Human Knowledge. New Haven and London: Yale University Press, 2006, p. 58.

  69. “Education by Poetry” delivered at Amherst College in 1930. Parini, Jay. Robert Frost: A Life. London: Pimlico, 2001, p. 265.

  70. “I have wanted in late years . . .” Frost’s essay “Education by Poetry” is available at http://www.en.utexas.edu/amlit/amlitprivate/scans/edbypo.html.

  71. “Bug perceivers.” Lettvin, J. Y., Maturana, H. R., McCulloch, W. S., and Pitts, W. H. “What the Frog’s Eye Tells the Frog’s Brain.” Proceedings of the IRE 47, 11, 1959, pp. 1940–1959. Reprinted in: McCulloch, Warren S. Embodiments of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1965, p. 254.

  72. “Not only spots of light . . .” Embodiments of Mind, p. 237.

  73. “The frog does not seem to see . . .” Ibid., p. 231.

  74. “That the eye speaks to the brain . . .” Ibid., p. 251.

  75. “A better chance of making a shot . . .” Gilovich, T., Vallone, R., and Tversky, A. “The Hot Hand in Basketball: On the Misperception of Random Sequences.” Cognitive Psychology 17, 1985, p. 296.

  76. “A general misconception of chance . . .” Ibid., p. 296.

  77. “If random sequences are perceived as streak shooting . . .” Ibid., p. 312.

  78. Heider and Simmel’s animated film. Heider, F., and Simmel, M. “An Experimental Study of Apparent Behavior.” American Journal of Psychology 57, 1944, pp. 243–259. You can watch Heider and Simmel’s film on YouTube, at http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=sZBKer6PMtM.

  79. Physiognomic perception. Marks, Lawrence E. “On Perceptual Metaphors.” Metaphor and Symbolic Activity 11, 1, 1996, pp. 44–45.

  80. “You see A cause the motion of B.” Scholl, B. J., and Tremoulet, P. D. “Perceptual Causality and Animacy.” Trends in Cognitive Sciences 4, 8, 2000, p. 299. This and other classic Scholl shorts can be seen at http://www.yale.edu/perception/Brian/demos/causality-Basics.html. Scholl has updated the Heider and Simmel film, too, in color. You can see it at http://research.yale.edu/perception/animacy/HS-Blocks-QT.mov.

  81. Living things are special. Frith, Chris. Making Up the Mind: How the Brain Creates Our Mental World. Oxford: Blackwell, 2007, p. 148.

  82. Sarah, the chimpanzee. Premack, D., and Woodruff, G. “Does the Chimpanzee Have a Theory of Mind?” Behavioral and Brain Sciences 4, 1978, pp. 515–526.

  83. Sarah’s analogical abilities. Gillan, D. J., Premack, D., and Woodruff, G. “Reasoning in the Chimpanzee 1: Analogical Reasoning.” Journal of Experimental Psychology–Animal Behavior Processes 7, 1, 1981, pp. 1–17. See also: Holyoak, Keith J., and Thagard, Paul. Mental Leaps: Analogy in Creative Thought. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1995, pp. 47–48.

  84. “Uptrend stimulus trajectories . . .” Morris, Michael W., et al. “Metaphors and the Market: Consequences and Preconditions of Agent and Object Metaphors in Stock Market Commentary,” p. 179.

  85. Dragging bulls and bears into it. Jason Zweig observes that our contemporary market menagerie really consists only of bulls and bears, but dozens of animal metaphors—lambs and rams, pointers, setters, wolves, foxes, and on and on—populated the early English stock exchange.

  86. “People making sense of stock charts . . .” Morris, Michael W., et al. “Metaphors and the Market: Consequences and Preconditions of Agent and Object Metaphors in Stock Market Commentary,” p. 178.

  87. “Unexamined metaphor . . .” McCloskey, Deirdre N. The Rhetoric of Economics, p. 46.

  88. They do not attribute intentions or emotions . . . Heberlein, Andrea S., and Adolphs, Ralph. “Impaired Spontaneous Anthropomorphizing Despite Intact Perception and Social Knowledge.” Proceedings of the National Academy of Sciences 101, 19, 2004, pp. 7487–7491.

  89. “I laughed my socks off.” Haddon, Mark. The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-time. London: Vintage, 2004, p. 19.

  90. “When you describe something . . .” Ibid., p. 20.

  91. “I think it should be called a lie . . .” Ibid., p. 20.

  92. “The test of a true metaphor . . .” Addison, Joseph. “Pleasures of the Imagination.” Spectator 411, 1712, p. 21. My thanks to Alberto Manguel for alerting me to Addison’s observation.

  93. People consistently rate metaphors with vivid, concrete imagery as most memorable . . . Metaphor and Thought. Ortony, Andrew, ed. Cambridge: Cambridge University Press, 1993, p. 326.

  94. “Every metaphor, provided it be a good one . . .” Cicero. De Oratore, Volume 2, pp. 125–127.

  95. The policeman, the burglar, and ASD. Happé, Francesca, et al. “ ‘Theory of Mind’ in the Brain: Evidence from a PET Scan Study of Asperger Syndrome.” NeuroReport 8, 1996, p. 198.

  96. Participants in the study did not get the irony of the story . . . Irony is another form of metaphorical thinking, since it involves saying one thing but meaning another. If you mutter “Another lovely day” as you step from your front door into a violent thunderstorm, you are using metaphor by giving your actual opinion an expression that belongs to something else.

  97. Social language “is riddled with figurative phrases . . .” Baron-Cohen, Simon. Mindblindness: An Essay on Autism and Theory of Mind. Cambridge, MA: MIT Press, 1997, p. 142.

  98. “In decoding figurative speech . . .” Ibid., p. 27.

  99. “How is it possible . . .” Leslie, A. M. “Pretense and Representation: The Origins of ‘Theory of Mind.’ ” Psychological Review 94, 1987, p. 412.

  100. Functional and perceptual similarity. McCune-Nicolich, Lorraine. “Toward Symbolic Functioning: Structure of Early Pretend Games and Potential Parallels with Language.” Child Development 52, 3, 1981,
pp. 785–797.

  101. “It’s like a machine for putting in petrol.” Gibbs, Raymond W., Jr. The Poetics of Mind: Figurative Thought, Language, and Understanding, p. 399.

  102. The definition of syncretism. Piaget, Jean. The Language and Thought of the Child. London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1960, p. 158.

  103. The truth is “quarantined.” Leslie, A. M. “Pretense and Representation: The Origins of ‘Theory of Mind,’ ” p. 415.

  104. “Not representations of the world . . .” Ibid., p. 417.

  105. “Pretence is . . .” Ibid., p. 416.

  106. Mirror neurons. Rizzolatti, G., and Craighero, L. “The Mirror-Neuron System.” Annual Review of Neuroscience 27, 2004, pp. 169–192.