Do Metaphors Reveal The Contradiction At The Heart Of Our Language?

As a fiction author, I have to nail my colours to the mast of metaphor. For who would want to read a novel which read something like "He did this. Then he did that"? without any metaphors and similes and images to bring the action alive? Even speechmakers resort to metaphors rather than just providing a literal presentation of the message it is they want to transmit. Hell, some scientists indulge in metaphor to communicate their abstruse mathematical equations when translating them to effects in our reality.

And yet, we have to acknowledge a fundamental paradox at the heart of our reliance on metaphors in what it says about language itself. Metaphors and similes express things in terms of something else. These two things cannot be the same, can't be mere homonyms for one another, otherwise what would be the point (other than a very short list of two). Now we have form for this, seeing as our dictionaries which provide and define our vocabularies for us, also define words in terms of other words, which themselves can be looked up and, well defined in terms of other words in the dictionary. (You can look up words to find their etymological roots, usually Anglo-Saxon/ Norman-French, Greek or Latin, but sometimes words have shifted away from these original root meanings, like a decaying half-life, so you are non the wiser: 'screen' means both to hide something behind it, as well as to project something upon it, fundamentally contradictory).

The dictionary definition of our words forms a perfect closed circle, except for the constant change of word usage which means it's still closed, but considerably less than perfect. There is no basecamp of primordial words from which all other words derive. There is supposedly an Ur language, the first ancestor of human language, but we don't know what it was. So there is no rooting magnetic core at the heart of language against which all words can be defined. And when we employ metaphors, we face a similar lack of solidity. Take the humble simile, describing something as 'like' or 'as' something else: his aspirations were as vaporous as a plane's contrail. Aspirations are an abstract concept, therefore in a physical or material sense they can't be like anything else. But that's okay, we're saying they're vaporous anyway, like the short-lived exhaust trail of a passing airplane. And there's the nice bonus of aspirations being aimed skywards to raise us from our current state, matching something skywritten by the plane. But both aspiration and contrail have other associations; the pollution of the burned plane fuel; the hanging contrail evidencing a plane that is no longer in sight; the possibly political, social or advertising fostering of one's aspiration. Is aspiration a noble mental construction, or does it share the more bodily drives of ambition or appetite? So in fact the humble simile more approaches a Venn  Diagram - what they share where they overlap, still leaves great chunks of their structure that have nothing to do with each other.

A Venn Diagram yesterday

Because the overlap of shared meaning is a fraction of the two wholes, this makes metaphors rather hard to land perfectly. In focusing on the shared meaning between the two words, it calls for an obliteration of the other shades of meaning and association of the two words. Many metaphors don't stack up to an even cursory reading. I have just read and reviewed two novels in which most of the metaphors were nonsensical yoking of images together - one of the authors was, I think, doing this deliberately, although I couldn't see to what end.

So is the conclusion that language is eternally and internally referential without ever being able to settle on a single definitive interpretation of a sentence's meaning? Well in one sense yes, but while this is useful in fiction where we are appealing to the imagination of forms that don't necessarily accord to the evidence of our eyes and our understanding of reality, it's not terribly useful in spoken communication (or increasingly in communication online) when we are trying to transmit ideas or an argument unambiguously.

In his book "You Are Not Human", Simon Lanchester asserts that the origins of our alphabet used important notions of man's reliance on hunting, on different animals and tools for the kill, to give shape and name to the earliest letters. This makes sense when you think of the earliest cave paintings being chockfull of images of animals and their hunters who looked to imitate their habits in order to get up close to them (imitating their calls, dressing up in same animal skins etc). Therefore there was a close relationship between letters, the sounds those letters made when combined into words and what those words were actually expressing: letters about animals and hunting, forming words aggregated into sentences that were talking about hunting. However, when those alphabets were taken on and transformed by seafaring nations like Phoenicia and the Ancient Greeks, they became stripped from this meaning. The earliest surviving records of these alphabets are found mainly listing mercantile inventories. The magical imaginations behind the hunting/animal alphabet are replaced by a far more prosaic numbering and categorising based alphabet. The sound of our words no longer bear any relationship to the meaning of those words. And this is why we are yoked to the notion of metaphor. We don't have the word to express directly in order to convey the precise meaning, so we have to try and illustrate its meaning in terms of something else is shares a partial quality with.

Animals still have a formative role in our language, just consider children's alphabet primers, how many of those 26 letters are illustrated with an animal - 'Z' is for zebra etc. But we have severed the animals from our former reverence for them as expressed in our very language. Now we have a mercantile and categorising relationship to animals, as food, pets, predatory threats to our farms or huntable just for pleasure, so that our very language both provides a threat to animal survival and, as Lancaster argues, to our fellow man as we dehumanise groups through animal metaphors, 'Rats', 'Dogs', 'Pigs', 'Vermin', 'Snakes', 'Worms' etc.

Five Sunsets Over The Ramparts - 500 word story

The Sun swatted its interrogatory disc from the face of the earth and gave a clipped nod. As Night stepped forward, the wrinkled penumbral clouds of its rolled up sleeves exposed the warrant of its dark intent.

The Sun had completed its final round and was coming off shift. As it dipped down into the trench of the horizon, it paused to lay a ribboned shaft across the arm of Night arriving in relief. ‘All quiet today, but it’s all going to come down on your watch, it’s palpable in the air’. Night nodded curtly and grimaced as he started his vigil. 

As the Sun sags and droops at the end of the day, it no longer has the power to illuminate the sky with its glow and drags its fading light like a soiled wedding trail through the dust. It feels guilty that the sky is leached of its cerulean and azure, to be but briefly replaced by reds and oranges and bruised purples. A similar purging of certain colours as was happening down on the ground too, as flags of one colour effaced flags of another, until Night descended rapidly to shroud it all unseen beneath its black cloak. 

The Sun gazed upon the shoulders and torso of the blue sky which cradled it. All day the blue had been permeated by smoke trails launched into it, profaning its unbroken blue plane. They looked like trails of tears. But as the sky gyrated and sloughed the Sun off like a robe to step out of its raiment, the Sun no longer cared since it would pass over to become Night’s concern now. Though as the clouds pressed themselves hard up against Night’s bosom so as to become sheer, so the smoke trails too failed to scar his dusky countenance. The pent up perturbations were far worse when they finally fell from his tenebrous countenance and fell to earth, since the whole sky lit up with coruscations. As if in fierce tribute to himself, mocking the radiance he brought during the day with brief fulgurations, before they were enclosed and eclipsed by the darkness once again. 

As the Sun set on another day, it shook its head sadly in the knowledge that when it rose the next morning, there would be nothing left for it to kindle and shine upon to light the way in this place. Night had triumphed over it yet again with its perpetual extinguishing of life. 


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I wanted to write something to express my disgust with the international just standing by while innocents die in gaze in utterly unjustifiable numbers. I was trying to go for something on a global scale and decided to plump for the sun and the darkness of night, with all the associations of light/dark these bring. Our words Orient and Occident stem from the Latin for sunrise & sunset, while the term 'Levant" comes from the French also referring to the rising sun. Additionally the terms Middle and Far East show represent the vestiges of colonialism that these parts of the realm were only defined by their proximity or otherwise to the powerful empires of Britain & France. These imperial powers caused the long embittered entrenchments of communities in the Middle East and now they sit on their hands unwilling to try and seek both immediate and long term solutions. I blogged on the root cause problems behind the situation in Palestine back in 2012 and nothing has changed only worsened. If they manage to sort out a cease fire, unless they deal with these deep-rooted problems the region will go through all this again in a short while, just as I said it would back in 2012. 

How Schoolboy Physics Improbably Came To Lie Behind My Work In Progress

I hated Physics at school. Even though I loved Chemistry.

Partly because the Physics teachers weren't cool, in their creased corduroys and pipe tobacco scarcely concealing their body odour. Chemistry teachers seemed normal even ranging to cool. One of them played a high level of semi-professional cricket.

Then there were the classroom-labs themselves. In Chemistry your head could sink to the surface of the bench where your eyes would rest on the exciting potential contained within the bottles of acids and alkalis ranged there. In Physics, what did you have as an equivalent? Gas taps for bunsen burners, which was odd since I don't remember ever doing an experiment involving heat in Physics. Oh yeah, there was Boyle's Law I think...

So probably it came down to the fact that I understood Chemistry, whereas Physics I couldn't make head nor tail of. I could never get to grips with solenoids and circuits because I had no idea what electricity or magnetism actually were. Where they came from. And I could never get past that incomprehension of first terms. The only part of Physics I understood was radioactivity and let's face it, that's chemistry anyway!

I was obviously aheaded down the path of Arts curricula rather than Sciences, but was advised by sciency older cousins to continue with Physics to exam level rather than Biology. I was happy to duck out of Biology before I had to take up a dissecting scalpel, so I took their advice.

But then I had to confront the same conundrum as before. A complete dearth of understanding of the subject. I was advised by the same cousins that both curriculum and exam exactly mirrored the very good textbook, Abbott's Ordinary Level Physics 4th Edition. They counselled me, all I would have to do is learn the textbook from cover to cover (except the radioactivity section, cos I understood that).

And so I did. Like times tables and Latin suffixes, I learned every page by rote. Still didn't understand a single blasted word, but I could regurgitate it in an exam. I achieved a bang middle of the road unspectacular Grade B and took my path down the Arts subjects English & History and promptly forgot every bit of Physics I had committed to surface memory. They wouldn't let me do Chemistry without either Physics or Maths, so my third A-Level was the lamentable pseudo-science that is Economics which I hated then and now looking at Governments and Bankers, doubt that it is any kind of credible academic discipline whatsoever.

After University, somewhere along the line I started reading the odd bit of popular Science. I really can't remember how I developed an interest, but it could just have been down to Stephen Hawking, whose book "A Brief History Of Time" was a real best seller that adorned bookshelves probably unopened up and down the land. I stumbled my way through it and gleaned very little understanding. But I continued plodding along with Richard Dawkins and Steven J Gould, about 2 or 3 titles a year max.

I had a trans-Atlantic flight and decided to give "A Brief History Of Time" another go for its duration. This time I grasped most of it, until the String Theory stuff right at the end which made my head feel like it was full of spaghetti.

From that point on, Physics held less fears, though I couldn't claim to understand all of it . But Stephen Hawking had cured me of my antipathy towards Physics through his wonderful writing. Complicated thoughts expressed with crystal precision and unafraid to offer a metaphor to aid understanding. Quantum Mechanics and sub-atomic particles seemed to offer me as a writer some wonderful metaphors I could employ in my writing and gradually this has all coagulated into the idea for my current work in progress. Based around the notion thrown up by Quantum Physics, that the observer influences what he/she observes, whereby my main character is involved in surveillance for his job.

And the weird thing that emerges from this new project? I bought a copy of my old school textbook, Abbott's 4th Edition and I will be reading it for research. I wonder how much will come back to me and how much I may understand this time round.