Communicating with Metaphors, page 2

What is a Metaphor?

You may already understand metaphors, but I’d like to provide a definition anyhow.

One simple definition is that a metaphor is the understanding of one concept in terms of another, preferably when there is some similarity or correlation between the two concepts.

For example, consider the sentence

When Clair called the angry policeman a ‘twit’ it just added fuel to the fire.

This employs a straightforward metaphor that compares a raging fire to the policeman’s anger. The point is to gain a feeling for the degree of anger by comparing it to the known behavior of a fire that has had fuel thrown upon it (the fire flares up, as does the policeman’s anger).

The metaphor that compares someone’s anger to a raging fire is so commonplace as to be a cliché. For it to work, the image of a fire flaring when fuel is added to it must have meaning. (Quite possibly there have some people who have never actually witnessed a live fire as opposed to a placidly burning Yule log simulacrum on television for whom this is the case.)

Since readers often mentally gag when they encounter clichés, it’s nice to try for some originality in your metaphors. For example, here’s Michael Chabon’s description of a knuckleball:

Then, when he could throw it straight and hard, he taught himself to throw a knuckleball, a slow pitch that travels without spinning, and makes its way toward the hitter like a butterfly over a bed of flowers, fluttering.

This is a nice, graceful metaphor that provides a mental picture of something one could pretty much picture without the metaphor (the knuckleball) by comparing it to a butterfly. But the metaphoric description enriches the experience. I bet you can visualize the pitch as Chabon has described it, and I’ll bet you’ve never thought of it as a butterfly before.

When using a metaphor you must be careful that the concept used for elucidation has meaning for your readers. Suppose I rewrote the sentence containing the fire metaphor as follows:

When Clair called the angry policeman a ‘twit’ it just added iterations to the loop.

This might have meaning to readers who understand computer programming, but probably wouldn’t be very helpful to anyone else. (Also, maybe it’s just not a very good or expressive metaphor even if you do know computer programming terminology!)

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