Communicating with Metaphors, page 4

What is a Metaphor?, continued

Not every metaphor can easily be decoded backwards.

For example, in a recent Wall Street Journal opinion piece , the following rather prosaic metaphor was employed:

MOSCOW—“This thing is like a snowball,” Hugo Erikssen, the director of Yukos’s international information department, said yesterday during a meeting with a few foreign journalists in a room at the Kempinski Hotel. “It can melt in the sun if the weather improves—or it can grow.”

Had Mr. Erikssen been with me at the state prosecutor’s office on Wednesday, there would have been no question that the snowball was about to gather speed and mass.

While the snowball metaphor is clear enough, it really tells you nothing. Furthermore, assuming you were abreast of the developments in Moscow, but didn’t know anything about snowballs or snow, the metaphor wouldn’t help you understand a snowball. In other words, this metaphor is a one-way trip, and does not lend itself to backwards decoding (unlike the trumpeting swan that sounds like a radiator).

Earlier, I defined a metaphor as “the understanding of one concept in terms of another.” As far as it goes this is okay, but at the risk of being anal I need to point out that a metaphor in a written text is not actually the understanding of a concept in terms of another, but rather the expression of understanding of one concept in terms of another.

This is a subtle but important distinction. Basically a thing, or idea such as a metaphor, is different from its description, or expression. When writing, you will always be providing an expression rather than the underlying idea, although if you are lucky or skillful (or both) your readers may take the underlying idea home with them and ruminate on it in the dark hours of the night.

Try out some of the Stretch Your Brain excercises at the end of the chapter to practice creating metaphors.

Continued next page

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