How To Design a Metaphor

“Pretty much every metaphor designer is inspired by Metaphors We Live By (1980), by the Berkeley linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson at the University of Oregon. It’s the classic look at how metaphors structure the way we think and talk, and once you’ve read it, you can’t help but agree that, at a conceptual level, life is a journey, and arguments are wars (you take sides, there can be only one winner, evidence is a weapon).”

“It was the Princeton psycholinguist Sam Glucksberg who in 2003 argued that metaphors are really categorisation proposals. Provocations, you might call them. You’re suggesting that one thing belongs with another.”

“Words such as ‘pump’ and ‘shark’ aren’t just the names of individual things; they also speak to generalities. They have what Glucksberg calls ‘dual reference’. He points out others that have become conventionalised metaphors. ‘Butcher’ refers to ‘anyone who should be skilled but is incompetent’, ‘jail’ to ‘any unpleasant, confining situation’, ‘Enron’ to ‘any dramatic accounting scandal’, and ‘Vietnam’ to any ‘disastrous military intervention’.”

“An alternative theory comes from the psycholinguist Dedre Gentner at Northwestern University in Illinois, who describes metaphor as a ‘mapping’ between two concepts. On this view, understanding comes about in two steps. In the first, the most obvious shared structural properties between the concepts are matched. In Schön’s paintbrush metaphor, what’s matched up is that pumps move liquids and so do paintbrushes. In the second step, other comparisons are made. That’s when the researchers wondered if the empty spaces between the brush’s bristles might be as crucial to paint delivery as the vacuum of a pump is to water movement. (They are.)”

“These two competing theories pose a question: do people interpret new metaphors more easily when the comparison between two domains is apt – that is, when the two elements seem to fit with each other? ‘Love is a tree’ might be an example of an apt metaphor, whereas ‘a child is a machine’ seems less so. Why is that? Perhaps it’s because, at a conceptual level, love is easily seen as something organic and sheltering, whereas putting machines and children together in one image triggers conceptual dissonance. (I’ve certainly found that people don’t like that pairing.) Or do we grasp metaphors more readily when at least one of the concepts is very familiar? This question suggests a further one: to what degree is the aptness that you perceive in the metaphor just a measure of how long it’s been around?”