I am forever intrigued by the human ingenuity of language. How we confuse to explain (the understatement) or laugh to process change (humor). We combine sounds broken up into units called 'phonemes' and turn them into rich, textured, changing language.

I say 'changing,' but some aspects stay the same, and these are almost more intriguing. Like our understanding of our environment, how we process data and turn it into knowledge is eased by our creation and use of metaphors. James Geary's excellent study, I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor, helps us see metaphors in plain sight.

Look at and listen to the language around you and you will discover a moveable feast of metaphor. Let me run this idea by you; ideas do not have legs (neither do tables or chairs, by the way) but 'run' is used metaphorically to request a brisk consideration of a proposal. Similarly, combs do not have teeth; books do not have spines; and mountains do not have feet.

A blanket of snow. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Is it our ego-centric nature that we perceive things as they relate to us, our body parts, and the domestic world? Not so fast, argues Geary; it is more likely to have evolutionary undertones:

From an evolutionary perspective, it is far safer to automatically attribute agency to inanimate objects that behave like living things than to mistake a living thing for a seemingly inanimate object. The swaying in the trees may just be a breeze or it could be a wild beast, coiled and ready to strike. You can misperceive the breeze as a beast or the beast as a breeze. Which mistake would you rather make?

Of course, metaphor originates in the senses. "Metaphor is a way of thought long before it is a way with words," states Geary clearly, but it would be nothing without embodiment in words.

Over centuries, metaphor has been seen as a kind of cognitive frill, a pleasant but essentially useless embellishment to 'normal' thought. Now, the frill is gone. New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphorical thinking influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways.

The influence of metaphors, often unrealized by its users, is what Susan Sontag brashly attacked in her seminal work Illness as Metaphor and what Philosophers John Locke and Thomas Hobbes attacked three centuries earlier. Locke wrote in 1689:

If we would speak of things as they are, we must allow that all the art of rhetoric, besides order and clearness, all the artificial and figurative application of words eloquence hath invented, are for nothing else but to insinuate wrong ideas.

Running water. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Metaphor as a tool of language rebounded in the 19th century with the Romantic poets and, argues Geary, in the innovative poetics of Arthur Rimbaud, whose A Season in Hell contained sensual imagery, unseen connections, and tenuous but distinct comparisons. (Hell itself is a metaphor, a place we imagine in terms we know because rational knowledge of hell is impossible.)

Rimbaud used the phrase "I is an Other" to introduce his concept of the poet as a visionary and himself as a "Seer." (Seeing as a way of understanding is also a metaphor.)

'I is an other' is more than the Seer Letters' grandest dictum. It is metaphor defining maxim, its secret formula, and its principal equation. Metaphor systematically disorganizes the common sense of things—jumbling together the abstract with the concrete, the physical with the psychological, the like with the unlike—and reorganizes it into uncommon combinations.

"All the world's a stage / And all the men and women merely players / They have their exits and their entrances," William Shakespeare, "As You Like It." London Opera at Covent Garden. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

The limitations of our consciousness are such that we can only really understand (even believe) what we perceive. So, we align what we know to our perceptions (giving us spatial memory and meaning to simple things like walls and corners).

In Britain, there was a concerted effort to change the rhetoric around Covid from the trite war metaphor to a more appropriate forest fire metaphor. The proponents of the #ReframeCovid argued that the fire metaphor clearly defined the roles of the healthcare workers (firefighters) and community (managing their safety), as war metaphors tend to reduce the power of the individual, leading to fear and anxiety.

"There are constant outbreaks to extinguish..." said Italian commentator Paolo Costa about Italy's Covid crisis. Photograph by Ellen Vrana.

Geary doesn't argue for more or less the use of metaphor; he is concerned that we see our propensity for using it and fathom our habit.

How did fathom come to mean 'to understand,' as in 'I can't fathom that' or 'She's unfathomable'? Metaphorically, of course. You master something—you learn to control or accept it—when you embrace it, get your arms around it, and take it in hand. You comprehend something, you grasp it, take its measure, get to the bottom of it—fathom it.

Accompany this eye-widening study of language with a compendium of language The Greeks Had a Word For It, Poet David Whyte's reimagining common words, my studies of the limits of words and the limits of knowledge, and Rebecca Solnit's written push to expand the boundaries of the unsayable.