“A Reef Of Dead Metaphor”

Andrew Sullivan —  Nov 18 2013 @ 10:35am

That’s how linguist Guy Deutscher characterizes all language. Prospero’s R.L.G. elaborates:

Most of the time we do not realise that nearly every word that comes out of our mouths has made some kind of jump from older, concrete meanings to the ones we use today. This process is simple language change. Yesterday’s metaphors become so common that today we don’t process them as metaphors at all. Primal man, in inventing language, would have only used concrete terms he could stub his toe on, like tree and rock. So tree is not a metaphor, and rock is not a metaphor. As far back as the OED can tell us, they (in their physical meanings) are not metaphorical extensions of some other word.

But if “tree” and “rock” aren’t metaphors, nearly everything else in our vocabulary seems to be.


Previous Dish on the uses and misuses of “literally” here, here, and here.