6.2.3 Meaning and Metaphor

How are you feeling today? Are you feeling up or feeling down? If you’re feeling low, try doing something fun to lift your spirits. Take care of yourself so you don’t fall into a depression.

An old theory suggested that languages are primarily referential; that is, each language contains a set of vocabulary terms that correspond to elements in the natural world. According to this theory, language functions as a mirror of reality. We have seen in the last section, however, that different languages divide up the natural world in different ways, from the natural domains of color and plants to the human domains of life and death. Moreover, humans use language to talk about abstract issues like mood, social relationships, and communication itself. It is fairly easy to use our terms for spatial organization to talk about the location of concrete objects like arugula on somebody’s face. But what about more abstract issues? How do we talk about becoming friends with someone? How do we discuss an argument we’re making in a term paper? How do we talk about how we’re feeling today?

Mood is like color insofar as the human physiology of mood structures a set of near-universal basic categories including happiness, sadness, anger, fear, disgust, and surprise. And yet, because mood occurs on a spectrum, it is divided up in different ways by different cultures. Consider “schadenfreude,” a German word combining the roots for “damage” and “joy.” Schadenfreude refers to taking pleasure in another’s misfortune. There is no equivalent word in English.

We don’t just use language to identify the emotions we’re feeling. We also talk about the process of developing an emotion, how one mood leads to another, and how we can prevent ourselves from feeling a certain way. These are mysterious and abstract processes. How do we do this? We use metaphor. A metaphor is a linguistic idiom where we use what we know about something concrete to think and talk about something abstract. Cognitive linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that metaphor is the primary way we create complex meaning in language (1980). In terms of mood, we use our concrete language of direction to talk about our abstract experience of mood. A positive mood is understood as up, while a negative mood is considered down. If you’re feeling really happy, you might say you’re on top of the world. If you’re really sad, you might say you’re down in the dumps. In fact, the word for prolonged sadness, depression, literally refers to a sunken place or the act of lowering something.

Metaphor is one of those things that you don’t notice until you start paying attention to it. And then you realize that it’s everywhere: in the way you think about time, number, life, love, physical fitness, work, leisure, sleep, and thought itself, just to name a few highly metaphorical topics. Just about any abstract area of experience is structured by metaphorical thinking. Here are three common metaphors in English, with examples.

LIFE IS A JOURNEY

He took the wrong path in life.
As you move ahead, you should follow your dreams.
When I left home, I came to a crossroads in life.
If you work hard, you’ll arrive at a sense of accomplishment later in life.

LOVE IS SWEET

She’s my sweetheart.
The newlyweds went on a honeymoon.
Sugar, would you pass the salt?
Our love was sweet, but then it went sour.

ARGUMENT IS COMBAT

The candidate launched a personal attack against her opponent.
His position on taxes is indefensible.
Armed with facts, she won the argument.
His criticism really hit the mark.

There are thousands and thousands of metaphors in English. Many abstract domains rely on a combination of various metaphors used to describe different aspects of the experience. You can think of love as sweet (as above) but also as a journey (as in “Will the couple go forward together, or will they go their separate ways?”) or as combat (as in “He slew me with his come-hither glance”).

Metaphor is found in all human languages. Some specific metaphors, like the directional metaphors used to describe mood, are found in many, many cultures. A study by Esther Afreh (2018) found that the king of Asante (in Ghana) frequently uses metaphorical language in his public speeches, including such familiar ones as “life is a journey,” “life is a battle,” “ideas are food,” “knowing is seeing,” and “death is sleep.” Though the speeches were delivered in English, Afreh notes that these metaphors also exist in Akan, the local language of the Asante people. Alongside her analysis of the English-language speeches, she notes many proverbs and phrases in Akan that use the same metaphors.

As with our discussion of categorization in the last section, metaphor is both relative and universal. Lakoff and Johnson argue that our common human biology structures our experiences of things like emotion and life. When you’re feeling really sad, you might literally feel like lying down, and when you’re really happy, you might jump with joy. We may use the notion of a journey to structure our understanding of life, social relationships, and time in general because in our everyday life, we move forward in space to pursue objects and activities.

Sometimes the reasons for cross-cultural similarities are not so directly linked to human biology. English and Chinese have similar metaphorical systems for talking about moral issues. In both languages, the adjective meaning “high” is associated with things that are lofty, noble, or good, while the adjective “low” is used to describe things that are mean, contemptible, or evil (Yu 2016). Alternatively, it is also possible in both languages to describe moral behavior as “straight,” while immoral behavior can be termed “crooked.”

On the other hand (to deploy a useful metaphor), different cultures do rely on different metaphors to talk about some domains of experience, metaphors that emphasize certain aspects of those abstract topics. Consider the English notion that “time is money.” This is a metaphor, pure and simple, but many English speakers believe it to be absolutely true. You can spend time, waste time, save time, and invest time. So time does seem like money in capitalist cultures. But time is not literally money. Nor is time a journey or a horizontal line in space, though these are common ways of thinking about time in the English language. Time is just time, an abstract idea. Certainly Whorf did not find the Hopi talking about time as money. English speakers think of time in terms of money because they live in a society in which time is treated as money, a society that tends to monetize nearly everything, from land and labor to advice, attention, and even body parts like human sperm.