1 PERFECT MIX OR PERFECT MESS?
Lightning pirouetted like a drunken ballerina across purpling clouds and a sky the colour of regret.1
What makes the âballerinaâ sentence painful to read? Its spelling, grammar, and punctuation are flawless, yet the passage is awkward, unconvincing, and would have no place in a literary classic (though it did manage to be published in a contemporary novel).
The problem with the sentence is its metaphors. First of all, lightning moves in straight or jagged lines and cannot âpirouetteâ. Second, most of us havenât had the privilege of seeing a ballet dancer perform while drunk, so we may have trouble imagining what this looks like. Finally, we have no way of knowing whether the colour of âregretâ is green, grey, black, or orange. The pirouetting lightning, the ballerina, and the regret-coloured sky make the passage hard to understand.
Compare the âballerinaâ passage with a metaphoric phrase from Sons and Lovers by D. H. Lawrence:
Another old shop whose small window looked like a cunning, half-shut eye.2
Weâve all seen a half-shut eye and can easily compare this image to the half-closed window of a shop. The shopfront can be understood as a face, and the âcunningâ expression of the eye hints at a secretive, ominous attitude. We immediately suspect that the shop is old and mysterious. Each word in the metaphor conveys imagery and emotional impact.
Both the âballerinaâ and the âhalf-shut eyeâ metaphors have the form of similes. That is, they introduce metaphoric comparisons with the word like, as in more familiar similes such as her cheeks are like roses or weâre like two peas in a pod. However, labelling these examples as similes doesnât help explain why many critics would be horrified by the âballerinaâ example but delighted by the âhalf-shut eyeâ. The examples are metaphoric similes because they include the word like. If like is removed and a drunken ballerina is instead offset with commas, in the first example, and looked like is replaced with was in the second example, the two passages are no longer similes. Removing like or looked like is also a useful exercise because it shows that these words have a relatively small effect on how the metaphors are understood.3 If these words are changed, the âballerinaâ passage is still confusing and the âhalf-shut eyeâ description is still expressive.
In general, the specific words in metaphoric language are less important than the concepts that the metaphors are comparing. Critics often pay attention to metaphoric words instead of concepts, simply because words are easier to identify. Itâs straightforward to decide that a metaphor includes the word like and therefore is a simile. Itâs harder to pinpoint whatâs wrong with lightning that pirouettes or whatâs interesting about a window that resembles an eye.
Even though metaphoric words are easier to study, metaphoric concepts tell us much more about how metaphors work. Every metaphor has conceptual structure that hides certain facts and forces others to our attention.4 Well-chosen metaphors help us imagine people who never lived and events that never happened. Metaphors let us think about black holes, authoritarianism, death, and thousands of other things we canât see or touch.
We could say that metaphors allow us to âgraspâ otherwise nameless notions, âtackleâ difficult problems, and âmove forwardâ in our understanding of the world. Language is âfullâ of metaphors once we âopen our eyesâ. Yet metaphors are almost imperceptible unless something brings them to our attention. For the most part, we notice metaphors only when they go wrong or when they seem so exceptional that we marvel at what they can do.
English speakers often know intuitively that thereâs something amiss with a metaphor, like those in the âballerinaâ passage, but canât pinpoint the problem. Many English speakers are happy to call these âmixed metaphorsâ even if they canât tell exactly whatâs wrong with them.5 Most linguists, on the other hand, define mixed metaphor more narrowly. They tend to consider a metaphor mixed only if it combines, or âmixesâ, two different, incompatible metaphors.6 Rugby coach Craig Bellamy produced a mixed metaphor of this strictly defined type when he complained about a colleague, âHeâs gone behind my back, right in front of my face!â Nobody could be behind Bellamy (as in the first metaphor) and also in front of him (as in the second metaphor), so these two metaphors are contradictory and are âmixedâ in every sense of the term.
For most English speakers, though, the definition of mixed metaphors has been extended to encompass individual metaphors that are simply hard to imagine, like a drunken ballerina, and those that are internally inconsistent, like spinning lightning. These mixed metaphors cause as much trouble as the more traditional kind, so theyâll be included in this book along with the metaphors that linguists usually consider mixed.
Human intuitions about metaphors are not limited to whether or not metaphors are mixed. As human beings, we have the ability to use and understand metaphoric language without conscious awareness of the metaphoric concepts involved. There are nevertheless advantages to making ourselves consciously aware of the metaphors around us. If we know how metaphors work on a conceptual level, we can control their effects. We can avoid using metaphors that are confusing or distracting, and we can design metaphors that do exactly what we want. When we encounter metaphoric language, we can analyse what makes it effective or not. We can avoid being manipulated by subconscious metaphors, and we can accept the benefits of a metaphor while rejecting any aspects we find unhelpful or inaccurate.
Itâs only recently that the conceptual underpinnings of metaphoric language have been recognized at all. From Aristotleâs time until the last decades of the twentieth century, metaphor was generally considered a poetic embellishment rather than an essential part of everyday cognition. In 1980, the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson published Metaphors We Live By, a book that changed how many people think about metaphor. Lakoff and Johnson showed that metaphor pervades all language use, not just poetry or literature. Most metaphors, they argued, are so effortless and natural that we use them all the time without noticing. We donât usually think of everyday sentences such as Iâm planning ahead as metaphoric. However, itâs apparent that the word ahead is not strictly literal in this sentence, because the future that weâre planning for isnât physically ahead of us. Lakoff and Johnson argue that examples such as Iâm planning ahead are metaphoric, even though theyâre less noticeable than some of the clever, original metaphors found in poetry. Today, there is disagreement over which words and phrases should be considered metaphoric,7 but even conservative metaphor researchers agree that metaphors occur in everyday language as well as literary language.
Lakoff and Johnson also found that metaphor is anything but superficial embellishment. Metaphors are primarily ways of thinking, not ways of speaking. When we use metaphoric language, it activates complex cognitive (i.e. thought-based) structures called conceptual metaphors. This is what gives metaphoric language its power. For instance, when we say that we âseeâ what someone means, that their meaning is âclearâ to us, or that their explanation âsheds lightâ on a topic, we use words and phrases related to vision, such as see, clear, or shed light, to talk about the comprehension of ideas. According to Lakoff and Johnson, we use words related to vision because we actually think about comprehension in terms of vision. The concepts of vision and comprehension are cognitively connected. The next chapter introduces further evidence for conceptual associations of this kind and describes how these connections affect human language and thought.
If metaphors are conceptual structures, this helps explain why they are sometimes used in ways that can seem confusing or awkward, such as in mixed metaphors. Conceptual metaphors, according to Lakoff and Johnson, are mostly subconscious and unintentional. Since weâre not consciously aware of most of our metaphors, we sometimes use them in ways that wonât make sense to other people. We might, for example, say that we âseeâ what someone is saying, âseeâ that a dog is smelly and needs a bath, or otherwise claim to âseeâ attributes that are actually perceived by other senses. Usually, audiences will understand even an imperfect metaphor.8 Our listeners wonât be confused if we say we âseeâ that a fabric feels soft or âseeâ how a concerto is structured. Using this wording does, however, suggest that weâre not paying attention to our choice of metaphors, and it may distract a listener from the point weâre trying to make.
This book employs research from linguistics and cognitive science to explore why some metaphors seem confusing or peculiar, whereas others are memorable and marvellous. The absurd examples are usually produced by speakers and authors who are apparently unaware of the metaphors theyâre using, as in the âdrunken ballerinaâ passage. The more meaningful examples come from people who consciously and skilfully craft their metaphors, as in the âhalf-shut eyeâ quotation. Finally, some mixed metaphors are used by people who are aware of their metaphors but pretend not to be, for devious reasons of their own.
This last class of metaphors is in many ways the most revealing because it shows how metaphors can be pushed to their limits. Skill with metaphors doesnât always mean making them effortless for the reader.9 Certain speakers and authors like to challenge their readers with unusual metaphor combinations, which can make language memorable, effective, and often humorous. When classical guitarist AndrĂ©s Segovia describes the piano as âa monster that screams when you touch its teethâ, this evocative combination of metaphors wouldnât normally be considered mixed. Even though the toothy image and the sound of screaming come from two different metaphors (specifically, two image metaphors, which are discussed in the next chapter), with a little imagination we can visualize a toothy monster screaming, and Segoviaâs delightful description is worth the effort this takes.
Other skilled speakers and writers use the power of metaphor for more nefarious ends. That is, they intentionally mangle their idioms and metaphors to create malicious humour, such as when Texas State Treasurer Ann Richards described US presidential nominee George H. W. Bush as âborn with a silver foot in his mouthâ. Richards intentionally mixed metaphors by combining the idioms born with a silver spoon in oneâs mouth âbe born wealthy and privilegedâ and put oneâs foot in oneâs mouth âmisspeakâ, in order to suggest that Bush was both privileged and prone to speech errors. By presenting her comment in the guise of a speech error itself (specifically, a malaphor; see Chapter 6), Richards mocked Bushâs own speech errors and added humour to make the insult more memorable.
About 150 years before Richards, another US politician, Congressman John Randolph, made a clever metaphoric criticism of his colleague Senator Edward Livingston:
He is as a man of splendid abilities, but utterly corrupt. He shines and stinks like rotten mackerel by moonlight.10
A great politician might metaphorically be said to âshineâ, and a corrupt one could metaphorically âstinkâ. These metaphoric uses of shine and stink involve conceptual metaphors that are traditionally called GOODNESS IS LIGHT and MORALITY IS PURITY (metaphor naming conventions ...