Tuesday 1st October 2013 - The uses (and death) of metaphors

I am interested in words, phrases and expressions. I do the Guardian cryptic crossword on Saturdays (or attempt to) and I have a go at the crossword in the Times Literary Supplement most weeks (although that needs recourse to a Dictionary of Literature for completion, at least in my case).  The English language is a delight to work with, given the words that have come into it from so many different sources - Romance as well as Germanic languages, exotic expressions from other parts of the world and so on. I sometimes get an unusual word on my mind and have to try to avoid using it - I recently had to restrain myself from using the word 'adumbrate' ( meaning to provide an outline or shadow of - in the case I was talking about, the shadow of an argument).

Today it was a matter of metaphors.  I was chairing a meeting of senior colleagues about future strategic plans and priorities.  We were considering how to foster future discussion of the issues that we were starting to formulate our own thinking on.  At the end of the meeting, as part of my summing up, I pointed out that we had played around with three metaphors in our discussion.
1.  A metaphor of gardening.  We were planting the seeds of ideas, others would need to nurture them to bring them to full glory.
2.  A metaphor of childbirth and obstetrics.  We would be the midwives for 'baby projects' that would become independent of us in the fullness of time.
3.  A metaphor of cooking.  We were marinating the ingredients and later others would need to apply the cook's skill to create the final dish.
None of these is particularly original, but they played a useful purpose in our discussions - in part because they can lead into consideration of alternative outcomes.  For example, we might plant the seeds but others may regard the seedlings as weeds and pull them up.  We need to label the young plants with a picture of what they may become to encourage others to pay attention to them and develop them.

That was a discussion amongst colleagues.  One reflection I have on the writing of students today is that they rarely use metaphors.  They never draw parallels between what they are writing or talking about and some other set of entities or situations.  Some metaphors are clichéd (those we used today clearly are in many ways), but others can be very creative and original.  Yet students have not been encouraged to think or write in that way.

Perhaps the explanation lies in schools.  A colleague the other day said his daughter was being taught to identify metaphors in her English class, and her basic view was that they were 'lies'.  If students today view the use of metaphors as something that only occurs in difficult poetry or old prose studied in the classroom that is a great pity.  Our writings of the future will be diminished by this.  The landscape of texts and discussions will be flatter, and will not have the landmarks that draw the eye to particular places or arresting images.