And indeed, the category language is itself very blurry. How many languages are spoken in a polyglot land such as India, China, or Italy? In each case, there are many languages and dialects; moreover, what is the precise distinction between a dialect and a language? The following humorous observation is often attributed to the linguist Max Weinreich: “A language is a dialect with an army”, and there is much truth to it, but it still begs the question; after all, what exactly constitutes an army?
In short, the question “How many languages do you speak?” is not a simple question, and has no simple answer — no more so than do the questions “How many sports do you play?”, “How many movies do you love?”, “How many soups do you know how to make?”, “How many big cities have you lived in?”, “How many friends do you have?”, or “How many things have you done today?”
The Endless Quest for Creative Metaphors
Psychological studies have shown that a mental category, rather than having well-defined and context-independent boundaries, is more like a vast cosmopolitan area such as Paris, which first sees the light of day as a tiny, almost solid, central core (and which, as time passes, will eventually be baptized the “old town”, and which shortly after its birth might well have had walls defining its boundary). The “old town” is the original core from a historical standpoint, but the core can move over time and today it may contain modern buildings and roads. After all, both metropolises and categories evolve; it’s part of their natural developmental process. Both metropolises and categories exhibit a structure that is the result of repeated acts of extension, and in the case of categories, each new extension is due to some perceived analogy. At every moment in the life of a major metropolis or a “mature” category, there is a crucial, central zone that includes, surrounds, and dominates over the original core, and this zone is considered the town’s (or category’s) essence. Further out, one finds an urban ring that is not as dense or as historically important, and then there comes a vast suburban ring, which extends far out from the center while growing gradually less and less densely populated, and which has no precise outermost boundary. Nonetheless, one has a pretty clear sense for when one has gone beyond the edge of the metropolitan area, since fields filled with wheat and cattle are evidently no longer part of a city.
In our analogy, the suburban sprawl corresponds to the most recent, fresh, novel, creative usages of the word, which still strike us as metaphorical. And yet over time, these usages, if they resonate with native speakers, will become so widespread and bland that after a while no one will hear them as metaphors any longer. This is essentially what happened to yesterday’s suburbs, which today strike us as essential parts of the city, so much so that we have great difficulty imagining how the city ever could have been otherwise.
Seldom if ever reflecting on the literal meaning of what we are saying, we casually speak of such things as:
the legs of a table; the spine of a book; a head of lettuce; the tongue spoken by the islanders; the kisses we give; the window of opportunity for doing something; the field one studies; a marginal idea; salaries that fall within a certain bracket; the moons of Jupiter; the voices in a fugue; a product of high quality; someone’s inner fire; the familial cocoon; a heat wave; the bond of love; a couple that splits up; a relationship that is foundering; an athlete who is worn out; a team that is beaten; a roaring wind; a light bulb that is burned out; anger that flares up; a handful of acquaintances; a circle of friends; the friends of Italian cuisine; someone who moves in high circles; the tail of an airplane; the burners on an electric stove; a ton of good ideas; the punch line of a joke; the tumbling reputation of a singer; an idea that one drops; a name that one drops; the high point of a melody; the crest of a fabulous career; a slimy politician; a popular bodice buster; a fleabag of a hotel; a rotten government; a budding romance; a wine’s exquisite bouquet; a belly button; a worry wart; a traffic jam; laundered money; an idea that’s difficult to grasp; the subtle touch of a novelist; a box canyon in which one is stuck; the block one lives on; one’s neck of the woods; a stream of insults; the bed of a river; the arrow of time; an umbrella policy; a haunting melody; a skeleton key…
and of course we could go on forever. The halo of a word gradually moves outwards or, rather, the blurry boundaries of the concept named by a word gradually engulf what were once metaphorical swamps and forests and turn them into apartment buildings, parks, and shopping malls.
Linguist George Lakoff and philosopher Mark Johnson have shown that there are certain systematic tendencies that guide the construction of a number of metaphors in everyday language. Their studies, along with related studies by other researchers, have helped to demonstrate that metaphors, far from being just an elegant rhetorical flourish exploited solely by poets and orators, are the coin of the realm in much of ordinary discourse. For example, time is often characterized linguistically in terms of physical space (in three weeks; at four o’clock; a distant era; the near future; from now on; a tradition that goes back to the seventeenth century), and conversely, space is often represented in terms of time (the first street after the traffic light; the road changes name when it crosses the river; a star twelve light-years distant). Likewise, life is often spoken of in terms of motion or a trip (the path of her success; a sinuous career; the dead end in which they’re trapped), with everyday events as places one passes through (I’m going to see them tomorrow; I’ll come back to that point), and happiness and unhappiness are often represented by the concepts of high and low (raising someone’s morale; to be in seventh heaven; to plunge into despair; to be very down). Abstract notions are often conveyed through comparisons to familiar human activities (her experiment gave birth to a new theory; the facts speak for themselves; fate played dirty tricks on me; life was cruel to her; a religion dictates certain behaviors; his fatigue caught up with him). Complex situations are often cast in terms of a metaphorical fight with a metaphorical adversary (the recession is our enemy; our economy has been weakened by inflation; corruption must be fought; outsourcing kills growth; we are victims of the stock-market crash; we have declared war on the economic crisis; we have won a battle against unemployment, etc.). Systematic families of metaphors such as these abound in human languages and they explain, at least in part, the great richness inherent in even our most casual and informal speech.
On the other hand, thousands of words are used metaphorically without belonging to any systematic family of metaphors. Here is a small set of examples:
they’re all fruitcakes; you’re nuts; it’s Greek to me; while wearing her parental hat; he punted on the term paper; what a mousy person; watertight reasoning; today was another rollercoaster for the stock market; he snowed the committee; my engine is coughing; an old salt; a spineless senator; the company folded; a bubbly personality; they creamed the other team; let the wine breathe; to dress the salad; a rule of thumb; I was such a chicken; a cool idea; nerves of steel; pass the acid test; in round figures; she’s so square; you’re getting warmer; yellow journalism; what a drag; he just didn’t dig; cloverleaf exchange; hairpin turn; make a hit; no soap; she’s really wired today; he swallowed her story; the old man finally croaked; she drove me crazy; carpet bombing; an umbrella clause; a blanket excuse; we just nosed them out; a straw vote; a blue mood; we always horse around; his gravelly voice; they railroaded us…
and on and on.
Calling someone “butterfingers”, for instance, does not belong to any large, overarching system of metaphors, but the image is very easy to relate to, since butter is slick and slippery, and thus, one imagines, a person whose fingers were covered with butter (or even were made of butter) would be completely unable to catch a ball or hold onto anything at all. Therefore, someone who often drops balls that are thrown to them can be easily found in the (metaphorical) halo of the concept of buttery fingers. In summary, we often come up with a label for a complex situation by finding a more familiar concrete situation to which it is analogically linked, and then borrow
ing the standard name of the concrete situation. Such a strategy allows us to create a useful verbal label for a new category of situations.
The act of “metaphorization”, whether it is broad and systematic, like the set of metaphors portraying life as a voyage, or narrow and one-of-a-kind, like “butterfingers” and the other phrases cited in the display above, is a crucial aspect of the way in which we naturally extend our categories. The human mind is forever seeking novelty, and it would never be satisfied with a limited and fixed set of metaphors. One might say that human nature is characterized by a constant, intense drive to go beyond all conventional metaphors, which are often labeled “dead metaphors”, since when a metaphor is used enough, one no longer hears the original imagery behind it and it loses all its sparkle. Categories are extended successively via metaphors that at first are used over and over again in a vivid, evocative fashion, but then, like dough that first needs to settle before rising, they gradually congeal and become inert, and this very fact sparks a quest for a new extension. Each time a metaphor loses its punch, we push the boundaries further out with new metaphors, always with the goal of understanding more directly and intensely what surrounds us, of adjusting to change, and of adding piquancy and novelty to the way we see familiar things.
Concerning the Literal and the Metaphorical
It might seem tempting to establish precise boundaries for each category, just as we do for cities, and to declare that anything that is found outside of those boundaries is not a member, end of story. In order to retain some flexibility, however, one could grant the title of “honorary member” to certain non-members, as long as they were found within a certain distance of the category’s official boundaries; in such specially sanctioned cases, one would put the category’s name in quotes to indicate that this would be an official metaphorical usage. In such a world, then, if someone said, “Ella has a large circle of friends”, it could mean only one thing — namely, that Ella’s friends were neatly arranged in a big closed curve having a fixed radius; to indicate otherwise, one would have to say, “Ella has a large ‘circle’ of friends”, and in order that one’s listeners would realize that the term was not being used literally, one would have to wag one’s fingers in a quote-marky fashion or else say, “so to speak” or “quote unquote” or “metaphorically speaking” or something of the sort.
In a world where this linguistic convention held sway, Galileo would not have seen the moons of Jupiter but the “Moons”, quote unquote, of Jupiter. And no one would ever come home to the cocoon of their family (since the expression would make no sense, unless the family had acquired one prized cocoon, but even then it would be far too small for a human to fit into) but so to speak to the cocoon of their family, or to the metaphorical cocoon of their family. One would no longer give kisses, but one could metaphorically give a kiss to someone or so to speak give a kiss to someone. One would never be under pressure, but quote-unquote under pressure, and as for the so-called pressure, it too would have to be in quotes, unless one were a diver thirty meters below the surface of the sea. And so on and so forth, without end.
Unfortunately, such a solution would give rise to more problems than it would solve. Firstly, those “precise boundaries of categories” — even of the most common categories — are nonexistent, as we’ve shown. And secondly, even were we to imagine that categories could be precisely defined, the problem of identifying their so-called “honorary members” would not be solved. Earlier we suggested that some entity located outside the border of a concept would be granted this title provided it were “sufficiently near” the boundary line — but what is the nature of this conceptual distance that would allow us to measure proximity precisely? What kind of yardstick would we use to measure distances? And would there be precise outer limits for the use of quote marks, beyond which even “quote unquote” would not apply? And would all of this be taught to children in courses on categorization and quotation-mark usage?
We could of course imagine introducing second-order quotation marks, which would be used to name entities found in a ring yet further out from the concept’s core than the first-order quote-mark ring. One’s fingers would soon become indispensable aids to one’s mouth in communicating these subtle distinctions. Among the most frequent words and phrases would be “so-called”, “in quotes”, “so to speak”, “metaphorically”, and others. In addition, there would be a whole system for expressing the number of quotation marks needed — second-order, third-order, and so on — in other words, oral or manual “roadsigns” telling the distance to the center of the “city”. It’s “pretty” clear that this “ ‘straitjacket’ ” would soon “give” “ ‘ “royal” ’ ” “ ‘headaches’ ” to anyone who “wore” it, metaphorically “speaking”.
The Categorization/Analogy Continuum
The idea of courses to teach people how to categorize and how to use quotation marks to indicate metaphorical uses of terms seems ridiculous, and for good reason. It’s like imagining that in elementary school we should teach children how to walk, eat, and breathe. The reason we don’t do that is that our bodies were fashioned by evolution to do such things, and it makes no sense to teach a body what it was designed by nature to do. The same can be said about our brains, which evolved as powerful machines for categorization as well as for quotation-mark deployment. But there is no sharp boundary between pure categorization and quotation-mark deployment, for all the reasons just given. A category has an ancient core, some commercial zones, some residential zones, an outer ring, and then suburbs that slowly and imperceptibly shade off into countryside. It’s tempting to say that perceiving something as a member of the “old town” or “downtown” is an act of “pure” categorization, while seeing something as belonging to the outer ring or the suburbs involves a certain amount of quotation-mark deployment — but a bit of thought shows that one passes smoothly and continuously from a concept’s core to its fringes, and there are no clean and clear demarcation lines anywhere. All these concentric layers making up a category in its full glory are the result of a spectrum of analogies of different types, collectively made by millions of people over a period ranging from dozens to thousands of years. These analogies form a seamless continuum; they range from the simplest and easiest to make, giving rise to the concept’s core (so simple and natural that they are not even seen as analogies by an untrained observer), to more interesting and lively ones, giving rise to the suburbs, and finishing up with extremely far-fetched and unconvincing analogies, giving rise to the remote countryside (that is, objects or situations that hardly anyone would consider as belonging to the category in any sense).
Verbs as Names of Categories
More than once in this chapter we have stated that what holds for nouns, such as “desk”, “elephant”, “tree”, “car”, “part”, “idea”, and “depth”, holds just as much for other parts of speech. We already broached this topic in our discussion of some of the charming verb choices such as “nurse the truck” and “patch people’s teeth”, made by children whose categories to nurse and to patch didn’t coincide totally with those of adults. We’ll now go into this idea in greater detail.
It’s not so hard to move from nouns to verbs, firstly because many verbs are tightly associated with certain nouns, and vice versa. To start with an obvious example, anyone who can recognize rain falling on the ground can also recognize that it is raining. The same holds for the category associated with the noun “snow” and the category associated with the verb “to snow”; ditto for “hail” and “to hail”. We move effortlessly back and forth between noun and verb, because the words are identical. But even in cases where there is no phonetic resemblance between noun and verb, there are countless cases where the evocation of a particular verb goes hand in hand with the evocation of a particular noun. When you see a dog and hear it make a sudden loud noise, you are simultaneously perceiving a member of the category dog and a member of the category of situations where something is barking. In muc
h the same manner, given that mouths eat, drink, and speak, we all perceive, many times per day, members of the categories of situations where something is eating, something is drinking, and something is speaking. In the same vein, the sun rises and shines, eyes look and see, birds fly and chirp, cyclists ride and pedal, leaves tremble and fall, and so forth.
Our insistence on the idea that verbs, no less than nouns, are the labels of categories might seem to be merely a fine point of philosophy without any consequence. However, we are insisting on it because the same perceptual mechanisms that allow us to recognize pumpkins, pastries, plows, and pigs also allow us to recognize situations where some marketing, menacing, meowing, or mutating is going on. Once one has had enough experience with situations where menacing is going on, one is able to recognize members of this category, to label them as such, to talk about them with one’s friends, to report them to the appropriate authorities, to describe them if called on as a witness in a court, and so forth. One even learns to recognize, from long observation of how people drive their cars, situations where someone is driving in a menacing fashion, occasionally through hearing just a certain telltale squealing of tires. The fact that the verb “to menace” automatically bubbles up to our conscious mind in such situations is in no way different from the fact that a certain noun bubbles up when we look at a canary, a doorknob, or a pair of pants. These evocations of words are the result of categorization. In the case of verbs just as much as that of nouns, the effortless bubbling-up of a word occurs as a result of a vast number of prior experiences with members of the category in question.
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