When Metaphors Fly Under the Radar

You know how sometimes when you're reading, you'll come upon a word or phrase you've seen all your life, and see it in a whole new light? All the sudden, you really see it, as if you had just learned it for the first time. I do this all the time. I'll see the word "rooster" and think, "Oh...they're called that because they roost." When I moved to Louisiana, where people often have real, hinged shutters for their windows in case of hurricanes, I realized shutters are named for what they do--they shut.

A while back, did this with the word "past", as in, "That's all in the past." The word is a noun here, but this time it looked more verb-y to me. I realized "past" sounds like "passed", and started wondering if that's actually where it came from. Turns out it does, at least according to this amazing amateur etymological dictionary.  Before the late 1500's, people said an event from a previous time was "passed", and they eventually compressed it into "past". The newer word is generally used as a noun, so we don't recognize the sense of motion conveyed by "passed". Looking at the word's history reveals that it's based on a metaphor, which treats the passage of time as something physically moving by us. Time past is time passed.

In fact, this metaphor is so common, it's hard to see it as a metaphor at all. We say things like, "That's all behind us now" without ever realizing that we're speaking metaphorically. But we are--what's in the past isn't really behind us in a spatial sense, any more than people in higher tax brackets are physically above us. But time is a tough thing to think about, so it's a handy shortcut to think of it in terms of space or motion; as something that moves through space. Even when we think of the past as a noun, we're still thinking in spatial metaphors. We imagine the past as being like a place, even though though it really isn't in any simple sense (yes, Einstein showed that space and time are two sides of the same coin, but that's not exactly intuitive to most of us.)

So, we think of time as something moving by us or as a place.  That's two spatial metaphors for time, and there are probably a bunch more. Why do our minds work this way? Why do they use spatial analogies to make sense of more subtle abstract concepts? It makes sense if we consider that way back when brains first evolved, they weren't used for abstract thinking. They were for helping animals move around in space. A fish's brain, for example, is mostly for coordinating its senses with its movements, so it can swim around, find food, and avoid predators. Brains were originally very much about the physical world. So, it's no surprise that when some animals started thinking abstractly, they used the framework already in place for navigating through space. In the case of humans, we started thinking of time as being analogous to space.

We think of other abstract things in spatial terms, too. Good is up, and bad is down, even though good things aren't necessarily above bad thing. "That guy is the lowest of the low," we say, even if he's 6'5". Status is also seen in terms of up and down. We say a colleague "rose" in the corporation, even if--spatially speaking--they merely moved sideways down the hall. We speak of people falling from grace, lifting themselves out of poverty, and being part of the upper crust. The metaphor is so natural, it's hard to even realize it is a metaphor. It's even hard to avoid using spatial terms. Try saying that someone has high status without using a spatial word like "high".

Of course, we think with other metaphors besides spatial ones. In addition to thinking of goodness in terms of "up" (her reputation was above reproach), we also think of goodness in terms of cleanliness (her reputation was spotless). Conversely, bad is not just down, it's also dirty. A swindle is a dirty trick as well as a lowdown thing to do.  Anger is heat, or internal pressure: "She's boiling mad."  A test can be "hard" even if the questions are printed on silk, and a rock-solid bodybuilder can be "soft" on his children.  It goes on and on. Once you start noticing this sort of thing, you see it everywhere. Proofreading this post just now, I noticed that I had used the word "hard" for "difficult" twice in the previous paragraph. I was unconsciously using metaphors to talk about how we use unconsciously use metaphors!

Language is full of metaphors (even though language is not bucket-shaped, and can't literally be full of anything.) And it's not just the clever new metaphors that poets try to come up with, but old, fossilized ones that no longer strike our fancy. When I say I'm looking forward to getting a new computer, nobody says, "What an interesting way to put it!"  Maybe they reacted that way the first time someone said it, but I doubt it.  The "time = motion or path through space" metaphor is probably wired into our brains.  But language is full of other metaphors that probably did seem clever at one point, and go unnoticed now. The first time someone said "She's very bright", instead of "She's very intelligent", it may have seemed like a catchy turn of phrase. After a while, the new metaphor (luminosity = intelligence) turned into a standard, alternate meaning of the word "bright".

This is one way the meaning of words evolves. Think about the words "past" and "passed" again. Pass came from the Latin word passus, meaning "step" (this is also where the word "pace" comes from).  In Old French, it came to mean "walk", and in medieval English it came to mean "move by."  That's what it still means in modern English, but it can also mean other, more abstract things.  Today, if we say we passed an exam, we probably just mean we didn't fail it. We can say it without thinking in terms of moving past the exam to other things, but that's where the usage came from, and realizing it gives us a brief glimpse of the way our ancestors conceptualized the word.

Looking at language and thought this way is fascinating to me because it adds so much depth (another spatial metaphor). This viewpoint lets you look under the surface, to see the cogs and gears underlying our words and thoughts. Plus, there's always that pleasure of finding connections. I never though about "past", "pass", and "pace" as being related until just a few days ago, but the discovery was rewarding, and my view of how English speakers think and speak will always be just a little richer for it. Well...richer in a metaphorical sense, anyway.

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A couple of good reads about this stuff:

Body of Thought: How Trivial Sensations Can Influence Reasoning, Social Judgment and Perception

Stephen Pinker, The Stuff of Thought

Huck Finn and the Learned Astronomer

It's lovely to live on a raft. We had the sky up there, all speckled with stars, and we used to lay on our backs and look up at them, and discuss about whether they was made or only just happened. Jim he allowed they was made, but I allowed they just happened; I judged it would have took too long to make so many. Jim said the moon could 'a' laid them; well, that looked kind of reasonable, so I didn't say nothing against it, because I've seen a frog lay most as many, so of course, it could be done. We used to watch the stars that fell, too, and see them streak down. Jim allowed they'd got spoiled and was hove out of the nest.

-Mark Twain, The Adventures of Huckleberry Finn

It's hard for modern city dwellers to really appreciate the stars. Only the brightest ones shine through the city lights. You have to work, traveling far from town on a clear night, to find the kind of sky that would have enveloped Jim and Huck as they slipped down the dark, 19th century Mississippi river. We forget what a truly overwhelming sight it is to see the whole dome of the sky filled with lights and buttressed by the arch of the Milky Way.

The Milky Way  Gemma Stiles

On the other hand, today we can appreciate the stars another way, trading the nightly spectacle for the modern scientific vision of what the stars really are, and how they work. We don't have to rely on naked eyesight, or blind speculation, the way Huck and Jim did. Our telescopes can spot objects millions of millions of times fainter than what we can see with our naked eyes, showing us that the most spectacularly starry night reveals only a fraction of the stars that are really out there. Today we can find out, in a way Huck and Jim never could have, what the stars really are. These days, any attentive schoolchild knows that the stars are all varieties of suns, and that they are only dim because they are so incredibly far away. We know the moon and stars are two different kinds of things, and falling stars still another. But this knowledge also requires effort - painstaking scientific observation, trips to libraries or planetariums; time set aside for reading. The stars don't yield their secrets easily.

In the poem I Heard the Learned Astronomer, Walt Whitman describes attending a lecture on stars. Finding the numbers and theories sterile, he walks outside to gaze on the stars firsthand. Whitman obviously feels that trading the nightly spectacle for hard facts and complex theories is a losing proposition. No doubt he would have preferred Huck's or Jim's poetic vision of the stars to that of the "learned astronomer". He does have a point - scientific explanations are not substitutes for raw experiences like the sight of a starry sky on a summer night; or for poetic comparisons like the idea that the moon laid the stars. But what he misses is that science only kills the poetry of experience if we extend it so far as to obstruct other views. We don't have to let it. We don't have to trade visceral experience or metaphor for science, because it isn't a tradeoff situation. We can have all three; if we realize they serve different purposes. The trick is too assign each to its own realm, without letting any take over. Better yet, we can find out how each realm fits in with the others, and find a point of view that transcends all three. Of all the secrets of the stars, this one may be the hardest to appreciate.

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This post is lifted from a book I tried to write a few years ago:  Here's the original in context.

More old writings about the same ideas here:  The Scientific vs. the Romantic View of Nature

Puttin' On Airs

OK, so I got one reasonably polished essay up on this blog.  Which is good, but I don't think I'll be doing that more than every couple of weeks (and that's optimistic).  The rest of the time, this will be more like a journal of the ideas that intrigue me, rather than some sort of well-developed column.  I'll let people know on Facebook if I write something I think they might like reading, and the rest of the time, I'll just use this blog as what Thoreau called "a meteorological journal of the mind".  At least, I think that's what he called it.  I never read the obscure work he said that in; I got the quote from Annie Dillard, who probably did read it.  Maybe sometime I'll write about how much intellectual bluffing goes on in this world.  Lots of writers just throw out a reference like that, and if you get the false impression that they are a minor Thoreau expert, well, that's your loss and their gain.  I'll try to avoid that sort of thing, but I do think the Thoreau quote is a great metaphor for the the unpredictable eddies and swirls of people's minds.  Actually, metaphor is what's on my mind--metaphor and word histories, and what they say about how we think. So that's what I'll talk about in my next post.