X = Y

If you haven't heard of TED talks, I'm here to bring you good news. The news is, there's an awesome site called ted.com. It has over 1,000 short videos of fascinating talks and performances. They're called TED talks.

You're welcome. 

James Geary, former Europe editor of Time and aphorism writer (definitely did not know that was a thing), did a great talk on metaphors a couple years back. He summarized the way metaphors work in some simple and thought-provoking ways (ie better than me) that are worth quoting. 

He also made a lot of references to Elvis, going so far as to call him the King of Metaphor or some similar nonsense. Elvis is fine, I guess, but I'll leave those quotes out.

Metaphor lives a secret life all around us.

The personification of a concept: Brilliant. Makes you feel infiltrated, doesn't it? Like your brain is just a plaything for this shadowy Metaphor. Does it have intentions for good? I hope so. 

We utter about 6 metaphors a minute.

What! That's awesome! A good fact for small talk. I'll tell skeptics to take it up with Geary.

Metaphor is a way of thought before it is a way with words.

This is actually a great point. I think it's incorrect to think of language as a tool to communicate independent thoughts, though I know there are a lot of theories out there and a lot of ways to think about this. From what I see and understand, though, language is essential to the structure and content of thought; I suppose you can have one without the other in very particular circumstances, if you give both language and thought very loose definitions... Thoughts on this would be appreciated.

He then quotes Aristotle, whom we'll return to sometime hence:

Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.

and elaborates:

When we give something a name that belongs to something else, we give it a whole network of analogies too.

The idea of "giving a name" (especially one that "belongs" to another) is deceptively simple. Again, theories abound. What I can't help but marvel at is the power of our mouths! We can ruin lives by giving names; we can bring down a movement or a nation. That's terrifying. It also reminds me of an English proverb I read recently (probably it is too old to be said anymore, or I am too American to hear it): He that has an ill name is half-hanged. Reputation is just another word for name, right? "Doctor," "alcoholic," "goody-two-shoes." Of course we can restore rightful names, like Robin Hood pries the name "King" from John to give to Richard. Justice and injustice are very much alive and active in the conceptual/linguistic realm. But I digress...

After his overly Elvisy overview, Geary continues in a more scientific mode:

This is the mathematics of metaphor: X = Y.

I love the absurdity of this. That's exactly what metaphor is! And we can't live without it; the illogicalness of it undergirds almost all reasoning, at least in the sense that we use language when reasoning, and language is so heavily metaphorical. Does this make metaphor inherently misleading, or productive but dangerous? Mathematicians out there, please weigh in.

In answer to the question "How do we make and understand metaphor?" Geary described three steps:

1. Pattern recognition -- not just the recognition of obvious patterns but the creation of them too, such as when we see two triangles in the following image:

2. Conceptual synesthesia, demonstrated in the famous bouba/kiki effect. Which of these shapes below would you name Bouba and which Kiki?

If you called the spiky shape Kiki and the blob Bouba, you're among the 95-98% of American students and Tamil speakers who answered the same way. The researchers responsible for the study "suggest that the kiki/bouba effect has implications for the evolution of language, because it suggests that the naming of objects is not completely arbitrary." That's kind of a big deal! Am I the only one who automatically thinks of Adam in the Garden? But we'll get back to Adam and the Kiki/Bouba guys later.

3. Cognitive dissonance. This was the hardest point for me to get. (Watch the thing and tell me what he's saying please?) From what I understand, Geary was comparing the difficulty of separating literal and metaphorical truth to the difficulty of reading the name of a color written in another color. (Which is surprisingly difficult, no matter how many times I try.) 

Geary then gave an interesting example of the effect of metaphor on perceptions of the NASDAQ that I cannot repeat, and gave some quotes I will repeat:

Combinatory play seems to be the essential feature in productive thought. - Albert Einstein

Language is fossil poetry. - Ralph Waldo Emerson

Geary closes with a fascinating mini-lesson in the etymology of cogito ergo sum. Apparently cogito literally means together (co) shake (gito), making the most accurate translation of this oft-quoted Cartesian proposition (though the original phrase was in French) is "I shake things up, therefore I am." Intentional/accurate or not, it's a pretty cool phrase, which Geary makes the most of in his closing metaphor:

The mind is a plastic snowdome: most interesting, most beautiful, and most itself when [...] it’s all shook up. And metaphor keeps the mind shaking, rattling, and rolling [...]

As you can imagine, Elvis allusions abound in the uncut version.