SunWinks! June 29, 2014: Aboard the H.M.S. Metaphor

Dear SunWinkers!

Where are all the haikais? I expected to be inundated with poo-kus. Well, there are no deadlines at SunWinks! Get them in when you can—it’s never too late.

Important note: if SunWinks! and Writing Essential Group are to survive and thrive, it is imperative that you do your part by sharing these columns with your communities on WordPress, Facebook, Twitter, StumbleUpon, Pinterest, Google+, whatever. We can’t build a community without your help.

On to today’s topic: Metaphor. That stampeding of hooves you hear is the self-described “non-poets” running as fast as they can in the other direction. I get the same reaction every time I mention that word: “I just don’t understand poetry.”

The inescapable fact is that you pretty much cannot write a poem without using metaphor in some form or fashion. But here’s the thing: you also pretty much can’t talk without metaphor. Metaphor is one of the building blocks of language. Teachers and public speakers know the value of metaphor. Our speech is chock full of metaphor whether we’re aware of it or not. “Stampeding of hooves” above is a metaphor—so is “running as fast as they can etc.”. Metaphors are the stock in trade, the coin of currency (there are two more metaphors!), of any writer who strives to be more colorful than dishwater (that’s a simile).

I picked up a wonderful book the other day called Loose Cannons, Red Herrings, and Other Lost Metaphors by Robert Claiborne [New York: W.W.Norton & Co., 1988]. With hundreds of stories of familiar words and expressions, Claiborne makes the point abundantly and delightfully that our language is not just full of metaphors, but built from them. Unfortunately, the metaphorical basis of many of these fanciful figures are either lost to obscurity, or they were coined via metaphors in another language before they ever came into English.

For example, to ruminate is to ponder something at length, turn it over in your mind. The word ruminate literally means “to chew the cud” and carries that meaning as well to the present day: cows and other cud-chewing creatures are known as ruminant animals. The metaphor also endures in the language, interestingly, in such expressions as chewing the fat and let me chew on that for a while.

A stool pigeon is somebody who betrays the gang. When the passenger pigeon was hunted to extinction around the turn of the 20^th century, hunters would nail a live pigeon to a stool, whose cries for help would attract other pigeons which were then easily shot.

The word pupil comes from the Latin papilla, meaning “little girl.” Now what on earth would a little girl have to do with the little black dot in the middle of your eyeball? The simple and fanciful connection is that when you, a girl or woman (the gender is beside the point, really, an accident of the gender of the original Latin word) look deeply into someone’s eyes, the pupil is the area in which you see a little girl looking back at you. And more straightforwardly, a pupil has also come to mean a little boy or girl in school.

Many words come via metaphors from the Bible and Aesop’s Fables (e.g. “sour grapes”). The stormy petrel, a sea bird, is named after St. Peter, because when the petrel skims across the surface of the water and paddles its feet as it does so, it looks like it’s walking on water.

Knowing the metaphorical inspiration for an expression can make it much richer. I’ve been thinking having an ax to grind just meant having a pet peeve. Not so. It was invented in 1810 by Charles Miner, a Pennsylvania congressman and newspaper publisher. In an editorial, he told the story of how, as a boy, a passing stranger asked if he could use the family grindstone. Charles obliged. The stranger asked him if he was a strong enough boy to turn the grindstone, and Charles was delighted to demonstrate. The stranger praised and flattered Charles for his strength and skill, all the while sharpening his ax, but once the ax was sharp, the stranger turned and walked off without a word of thanks. Miner, referring to certain politicians, made the point that if someone is overly agreeable, flatters you, and plies you with drinks, he probably has an “ax to grind,” in other words, an ulterior motive.

Some of these origin stories are so fanciful as to stretch credulity, but they’re fun to think about anyway. In 1946, inhabitants of Bikini Atoll were evacuated so the United States could test the new hydrogen bomb there. Not too many years after, the two-piece bathing suit exploded onto the fashion scene, as it were; Claiborne suggests that it got the name bikini because it revealed the most powerful forces known to man.

Which brings us to:

The Prompt

Write a little story, like an Aesop fable, or one of Kipling’s Just So Stories, about an expression, a favorite one from the language or one you make up. Tell us how the expression came about and how the expression came to mean what it means now, and be as fanciful and imaginative about it as you can.

Here are some suggestions, which you may take with a grain of salt:

• take with a grain of salt
• go back to one’s roots
• what’s your beef (complaint)?
• cold feet
• cut (or made up, as a story) out of whole cloth
• face the music
• go whole hog
• everything but the kitchen sink

 

Post your response on your blog. If it’s a WordPress blog, tag it WeSun. Or put it in a Note on Facebook or some such functionality, something you can link to. Then comment to this post with the link.

© 2014 Douglas J. Westberg. All Rights Reserved. Please share, reblog, link to, but do not copy or alter.