Language is constituted by metaphor
Metaphor is not a mere trick of language, as is commonly thought. It is the very constitutive ground of language. Metaphor is meant here as the use of a term for one thing to describe another because of some kind of similarity between them or between their relations to other things. A metaphor is always a more familiar metaphier being applied to an unknown metaphrand.
It is by metaphor that language grows. The common reply to the question “what is it?” is, when the reply is difficult or the experience unique, “well, it is like—.” In laboratory studies, both children and adults describing nonsense objects (or metaphrands) to others who cannot see them use extended metaphiers that with repetition become contracted into labels. This is the major way in which the vocabulary of language is formed. The grand and vigorous function of metaphor is the generation of new language as it is needed, as human culture becomes more and more complex.
Language is thus, as Ralph Waldo Emerson put it, “fossil poetry,” as the fifth stage of perception shows. A random glance at the etymologies of common words in a dictionary will demonstrate this assertion. To want something is to be empty—want and vacant come from the same root. Speaking of all desires as “appetites” brings us back to the same metaphor. A villain, as the Marxists have pointed out, is a person without property. Man is a general human being, as Feminists point out, because of the gender bias in our language. A humorous story of sexual nature is a “dirty joke” because ascetics and puritans have left there own programs embedded within modern speech; but Saxon words for bodily functions are “dirtier” than Norman words because of a plurality of puritan-economic prejudices. All of these concrete metaphors increase enormously our powers of perception of the world about us and our understanding of it, and literally create new objects. Indeed, language is an organ of perception, not simply a means of communication.
References
- Jaynes, Julian. (1976). The Origin of Consciousness in the Breakdown of the Bicameral Mind Chapter 2 Consciousness (Epub p. 57). New York, NY: Houghton Mifflin Company.
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