The Supposedly Clarifying Role of Metaphor

You go through your school life with your English teachers (Bless) telling you what a  Metaphor is - and for the rest of your days, it is more than likely; you will view metaphor as one, or all of the following:a)      Metaphor expresses similarities, used mainly in poetic flourish or by politician in rhetorical persuasion.
b)      Metaphors occur when a word is allotted to not what it normally designates but to something else.
c)      You are given to understand by the teachers that there are pre-existing similarities between what words normally designate.
So you leave school with a sense that metaphors are, well, kind of linguistically deviant -  for they are saying one thing while meaning another. Anyway shouldn’t language if used in its proper sense be literal. Eh well, no.A butterfly flutters by - always pleasing to see a butterfly in the garden. And the butterfly is in the garden because there is a fence at the end of our little patch which make our garden into a container. And if I look beyond I can see the local park contained by trees and a fence, and our neighbourhood contained by A249 and the B111.  We think in terms of containers because our bodies are containers. This applies to even the most revered authors.Shakespeare’s sonnet (73) reads:“Deaths’ second self, that seals up all the rest.”
Rest here is a state, the preposition in naturally indicates that the state is conceptualised as a bounded region in space.  Now consider the words ‘seal up.’ You can only seal something up in a bounded region of physical space. Because a state is normally metaphorically conceptualised as a bounded region in physical space. Shakespeare can extend the metaphor to death sealing up everyone in the state of rest.Why is all this important?  Because metaphors are not just literary tropes. The fundamental role of metaphor has always been to transfer from the source to the target domain - much of our reasoning is therefore metaphorical and despite what many would have you believe, body based.

There are distortions in language and there is a need to clarify, to elucidate concepts, to convey precision, determinacy,  and literalness in order to improve our understanding. Most people have an ideal conception of language as utterly precise, determinate, literal and perfectly unequivocal and ambiguity is a challenge to this ideal theory of language. So we employ metaphor. For in metaphor we have the capacity  to evince or arouse feelings, as distinct from conveying information. Or so we believe.

Read Peter Cheevers' fiction published by Ether Books