A few months ago, I wrote an article about the book Metaphors we live by By GEORGE LAKOFF and MARK JOHNSON, citing it as an excellent book about the pervasiveness of metaphors in our everyday language and a very good read in general. Metaphors are a wonderful way of framing our experience and reframing our views of the world around us. We actually teach how to create and utilize metaphors because we know it will enrich your expressiveness when communicating with those around you.

This is a long post, so this is a few quicklinks to parts of the entry:

• BP Oil Spill Metaphor (Video)
• Facebook (Images)
• You are Here (Image and text)
• Politics and Current Affairs Metaphors (Text)

Metaphoric speech is so pervasive, it seems to go by undetected. For example: Your words seem hollow. I couldn’t grasp your explanation. My mind just isn’t operating today. The seeds of his great ideas were planted in his youth. Life has cheated me. Her ideas have finally come to fruition. He had a raise but fell in status. Do you follow my argument?

Just how useful is it to use metaphors like this in everyday speech? Where else can they be used? Are they able to transcend culture and time? These questions are very subjective.

Normal Conversation

It is useful to use metaphors in everyday speech, as long as you are calibrating for whether you are making sense to your listener. If the metaphor or analogy isn’t making any sense or they are coming too fast or too oblique, then the listeners will be in a spin (another metaphor – confusion, as they spin through thoughts, looking for a valid reference to your metaphor). If they do go into some confusion, they may not be very attentive for a while as they try to find meaning and establish in their minds what is being said to them. (The spin or confusion we call Trans-Derivational Search in NLP)

Where to use Metaphors?

Training and presentations are a great place to use a well thought out and well tested metaphor. Therapists, trainers, presenters, managers, project stakeholders, company owners, sales people, communicators, writers, teachers, mentors, parents, team leaders all use and could use better metaphors. I do say well tested, especially when relating it to teaching to see how well it stands up with usage. Errors that can happen with a mixed metaphor (more than one meaning or ambiguity within the metaphor leads to an unfortunate misinterpretation).

There is a limit to the extent that a metaphor can be taken too, but if the similarities between the two objects or concepts can be focussed on, then the metaphor will work. For example, if a human organ is analagous to a factory, then some parts of the description may work – products (produced by the organ to pass to antoher organ or system), waste (is produced to be processed by another organ), cleaning (may undergo cyclic flushing or resting), workers (within the organ may be present such as microbes, bacteria), but we should not expect that the ‘factory’ is square, has a car park for the workers and one for visitors with a pie and coffee van arriving every morning at 9. The richness of a metaphor in teaching is that the educator/trainer could ask questions like – Could we sell the factory? What would happen if the workers in this factory all went on strike or got the same illness? What if the cleaning or resting doesn’t get done? These great extensions of the metaphor could work very well for health workers who advise or train for instance.

Can they transcend culture and time?

Again, yes and no – it depends. They are sometimes the only way or most efficient way to communicate a concept, and sometimes the meaning is lost through cultural differences, the audience, and time periods…. For example, depending where you are reading this, you may have different reactions:

This may be normal for some people’s mothers, but absolutley off the wall for others’.	Everyone knows Facebook?, This would be lost on those without the Internet, or some seniors.
You have to know the passion of a biker and have a concept of heaven, even if you don’t believe in a heaven.	toufoula is a youth group dedicated to help improve the quality of life of young children suffering from cancer and blood diseases in Lebanon, so the metaphor is country specific and focussed.

Can metaphors also create limited views?

Absolutely, they can and this is why they need to be well tested and thought out for use in a communication, training, emails, presentations and the like, where the thought may remain for some time. An example is the early Brain as a Computer Metaphor: The brain (and, by implication, the mind) have been compared to the latest technological innovation in every generation. The computer metaphor is now in vogue. Computer hardware metaphors were replaced by software metaphors and, lately, by (neuronal) network metaphors. However, this metaphor has a few problems – the first is that people have different concepts of what a computer is and the computers themselves have many different capabilities depending on the era, their architecture and in somce cases, their purpose. I am glad I am not a Windows 95 system because I would have to reboot every time I got dressed or ate something. The second is that according to fMRI scans, many processes are accessed and initiated upon stimulii received and different parts of the whole body get involved more than originally understood. The metaphor sells our mind short. For some time, the brain as a computer metaphor prevailed and people thought that you could ‘read’ what people were doing sequentially, and we now can prove that this is rarely true. This is the basis for many NLP teachings on Strategies and is still taught today in some circles because of metaphor that was not updated.

So, a metaphor can be very powerful to both create an understanding for a concept, but also potentially some limitations. Take care with your metaphors.

Can you convey complex concepts with metaphor?

Lakoff and Johnson in their book provided convincing evidence that metaphors may actually be people’s primary mode of mental operation. They argued that because the mind is “embodied” — it experiences the world through the human body in which it resides — people can’t help but conceptualize the world in terms of bodily perceptions based upon their personal experience. This is true of the use of conepts like up, down, forward, behind and other spatial concepts for a start. It should come as no surprise that humans attempt to understand vague, abstract, or complex concepts in terms of these more familiar experiences too.

Analogy and metaphor are central to scientific thought. They figure in discovery, as in Rutherford’s analogy of the solar system for the atom or Faraday’s use of lines of magnetized iron filings to reason about electric fields (Nersessian, 1984 ; Tweney, 1983). They are also used in teaching; novices are told to think of electricity as analogous to water flowing through pipes (Gentner & Gentner, 1983) or of a chemical process as analogous to a ball rolling down a hill (Van Lehn & J . S. Brown, 1980). Yet for all its usefulness, analogical thinking is never formally taught to us.

It might be better to ask, can you not avoid using metaphor to teach anything?

How to learn about creating metaphors

It is amazing that the typical learning facitilites rarely teach how to create metaphors, use analogies, create similies and the like. We actually do teach these components on our course during the foundation levels. (Look under the heading Language and Influence). Metaphors (and analogoes, similies) are all great for story telling, therapy, training and presenting. Despite the advice that it might appeal only to the more linguistically inclined student teacher, we actually teach it successfully to all our students.

A Metaphor for perspective

“Every picture is worth a thousand words, but the right metaphor is worth a thousand pictures” – Daniel Pink, 2008

The view of Earth form Mars often puts a perspective on things, especially if we consider that every army that ever marched, every baby that has been born, every glass of milk that was spilt, and every sleepless night has happened on this little dot, at a point in time in the history of the universe. Since life first appeared on Earth 3.5 billion years ago, over 10 billion species have come into existence (and this figure is the roughest of estimates). Somewhere between 10 million and 30 million species (of which scientists have counted only about one-eighth) currently reside on the planet. In other words, for every 1,000 species that have ever existed probably fewer than 10 are alive in the twenty-first century. Life is a continuous process of extinction and diversification, where only the fittest life forms survive in a world where, according to Darwin, they are “bound together by a web of complex relations” (1963, p. 54). Central to these “relations” are the ecological niches, the millions of different “fits” and functional interdependencies that plants and animals have with each other in their ecosystem. And looking through all the 6+ billion people that currrently inhabit the earth at this moment, somewhere amongst them is you and I.

Other metaphors to ponder

Metaphors abound in political and current affairs

Elections in Australia

It is great to see political writers keep to a theme of metaphors, where this one is about clothing, dressing, material, stitching, fashion, changing and a reference to magazines where these are discussed: The special glow of power – July 2, 2010 – Julia Gillard’s transformation is a metaphor for how she’s trying to change the government….. Think of it this way. The Rudd government’s clothes became torn and unfashionable. Gillard is trying to repair them, grab the odd new garment, and use accessories to the hilt – which can work wonders on the right wearer. So we are seeing a retreat on the mining tax and, soon, new climate initiatives. If Rudd had come out in such raiment, he wouldn’t have looked good. One of Gillard’s toughest tests is restitching the government’s asylum seeker policy. New political leaders always get into the women’s mags. It can work a treat – or not. Sometimes both. Tony Abbott had a humanising interview, all about his down-to-earth wife and attractive daughters. But a few words about virginity had him fighting off the old stereotype for weeks…. Among the ”celebrity Gillard” snippets, an article on ”20 intriguing things you didn’t know about Julia” reports that ‘’she has a personal stylist but has very little interest in fashion” and ‘’she doesn’t remember her natural hair colour”.

Obama’s Metaphors

Obama’s “reset button” metaphor: which is more correct, “restart,” “reboot,” or “reset”? …reset is a hardware thing , and reboot is a software thing. You can reboot without reseting , but if you reset, then you have to boot.

Gulf of Mexico Oil Spill

This video helps explain what BP was actually doing in terms of addressing the catastrophe in the Gulf of Mexico and employs a clever use of simple metaphors to get the message across. This was originally posted on Michelle Laurie’s Blog

What the Bleep Do We Know – Study Guide and Manual for Navigating Rabbit Holes.

Our core assumptions about the universe are embedded in the metaphors we use. Ecophilosopher Joanna Macy explores five central metaphors through which people in different spiritual traditions see the world: world as battlefield, world as classroom, world as trap, world as lover, and world as self. We have added to this list: world as machine.
Resource: For more information about Joanna Macy’s work, see www.joannamacy.net

WORLD AS BATTLEFIELD

“Many people see the world as a battlefield, where good and evil are pitted against each other and the forces of light battle the forces of darkness. This ancient tradition goes back to the Zoroastrians and the Manichaeans. . . . There is the sense that you are fighting God’s battle and that ultimately you will win. William Irwin Thompson called this kind of certainty and self-righteousness ‘the apartheid of good,’” Macy tells us.

WORLD AS CLASSROOM

“A more innocuous version of the battlefield image,” Macy offers, “is the image of the world as a classroom, a kind of moral gymnasium where you are put through certain tests which would prove your mettle and teach you certain lessons, so you can graduate to other arenas and rewards. Whether a battlefield or a classroom, the world is a proving ground, with little worth beyond that.

Bibliography

• CHARLES DARWIN On the Origin of Species by Means of Natural Selection, or the Preservation of Favoured Races in the Struggle for Life,. 1869. Reprint, New York: The Heritage Press 1963.
• DEDRE GENTNER AND MICHAEL JEZIORSKI The shift from metaphor to analogy in Western scienceIn A . Ortony (Ed .), Metaphor and Thought (2nd ed) (pp . 447-480). Cambridge, England : Cambridge University Press.
• BULLOUGH, R.V., Jr. & Stokes, D.K. (1994). American Educational Research Journal, 31 Analyzing personal teaching metaphors in preservice teacher education as a means for encouraging professional development. (1), 197-224.

Book References