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Today I want to talk about metaphor, and when you’re learning English, or any language, you really have to pay a lot of attention to metaphor. Metaphor is actually overlooked, but it’s a very, very significant part.

Why do you want to use metaphor? Well first of all, it helps you avoid that tedious grammar analysis to try and understand things, and I can tell you in many cases, grammar doesn’t help you understand. The second thing is, it really helps you with your memory, and I’ll come back to why that is, in a minute.

Primarily you have to understand that metaphor is fundamental to all languages; its core to how languages are made up, so you really do have to pay attention to it. There are three types. First of all you’ve got what is commonly used metaphors, so for instance in Chinese you have “杨柳细腰”. We have something very, very similar in English. For instance, we say that somebody has a ‘waspy waist.’ That means, if you think about it, that their waist sort of looks like a wasp. She’s fat at the top, she’s fat at the bottom and she’s very, very thin in the middle. So this is a commonly used metaphor, many people use it; when someone uses it they know it’s a metaphor. We have others. For example, in English, ‘keep me posted’ is a metaphor, and it means ‘give me regular reports, give me regular updates.’ And this comes about from trade in the old days when people were travelling around the world in wooden ships, and they had to tell headquarters what was going on, and the only way to do that was to send a letter. So going to the post office, going to a post box, sending the letter, sending a report back, was a way of keeping people updated. So ‘keeping me posted’ means ‘sending me letters on a regular basis, so I know what’s going on.’ And it’s become a metaphor.

A ‘one-way street’ is another metaphor in English, and it means that there’s no going back when you go down this road, then you must keep going this way. We have one-way streets, you can see by the arrows here, physically of course you could come back, but the metaphor means that you cannot go the wrong way down a one-way street. If you take this path, it’s one way, no turning back.

So that’s a commonly used metaphor, people use it. We also have newly created metaphors and frozen metaphors. So, for instance and example of a newly created metaphor is this one. Meihan received an email the other day and it said, you know, ‘we want to talk about the blanket agreement.’ Well, we don’t do blankets, so what is this agreement about blankets? Well of course, the person had created a new metaphor. They were saying that there’s, you know, a whole lot of things that we need to cover, and we’re going to have one agreement that will cover everything, like a blanket. So, blanket in this case was used to mean something that was covering absolutely everything. The interesting thing about new metaphors is that people make them up all the time, but you might discover that one that gets made up isn’t very useful, people don’t like it, they don’t use it, they don’t pass it on, so it disappears. If lots of people like it and start using it then it becomes a commonly used metaphor. So metaphors commonly get created, then they move into being commonly used, and then, over time they become frozen.

So a frozen metaphor, if you think about it, ‘frozen’ is icy, solid, doesn’t move, this is using the freezing metaphor to explain this idea, but a frozen metaphor is one that is so fixed that people forget that it’s even a metaphor.

To give you an example from Chinese, we have “宽容” And if you look at “宽容” it’s made up of two characters. You have 宽大 and 容器. And this is used to express an idea of someone who is big hearted. They’re a big vessel, they can take a lot, they can be very forgiving. There’s a word in English which is known as magnanimous, so 宽容 means magnanimous, but it means a very big vessel that can take a lot.

You’ve also got 留神 in Chinese, where 神 is something physical, is your spirit, and to leave your spirit inside you actually means to pay attention. So, it’s another example of how you have a physical idea that is used as an abstract idea to explain a concept like attention.

In English we have a lot of these very frozen metaphors as well. A very, very common one that you probably don’t know, is breakfast. It’s actually made up of two different parts: ‘break,’ and fast.’ In English, ‘fasting’ is when you don’t eat for a period of time. Some people fast for days, even weeks. Some religious people can even go months without eating any food, and that is called a fast. So when you break your fast is when you stop fasting and you begin eating. So we’ve used this idea of breaking a fast to talk about breakfast. You’ve had a night, you haven’t had any food overnight because you’ve been sleeping, and in the morning you’re going to break your fast and have a nice big breakfast. So ‘breakfast’ is actually ‘breaking a fast,’ it’s a frozen metaphor.
‘Far too’ in English is also a metaphor, frozen. ‘Far’ is a word that talks about distance, ‘too’ in Chinese means 太. What’s interesting is that ‘Far too’ actually means 远远太. So it’s using distance, a long distance, to make 太 even bigger. So make ‘too’ even bigger. So, how doo we use this? We use this very, very commonly in lots of different English phrases. You have ‘hot,’ ‘far too hot,’ ‘远远太热了’ . You’ve got ‘expensive,’ it’s very, very expensive, it’s far too expensive, it’s over-the-top. And then you have ‘late,’ it’s far too late. So, ‘far too’ is a frozen metaphor using far, we forget that it’s a metaphor and we just use it normally in language every day.

Now the important thing for you as a learner is that you really should pay attention, you should look for the metaphors because this will help you learn. Look for the common ones, the commonly used ones. Look for the frozen ones, especially. Because by being attentive to these, being sensitised to these, it’s really going to help you learn a lot more quickly.

Why is that? Well first of all there are so many things that you cannot analyse with grammar. If you try to use grammar to analyse ‘far too,’ you just can’t do it. If you try to use grammar to analyse ‘keep me posted,’ you can’t do it. You really do need to understand what the metaphor is speaking about in order to understand what’s being said. So it gets rid of a whole lot of useless grammatical analysis. Beyond that, it actually helps you to remember. And this is because our brain needs to see pictures of things, have concrete, very specific things that you can touch, that you can hear, you can see. And a metaphor almost always goes back to a physical thing of some sort. And because you can see that physical thing, hear that physical thing, then it helps you really understand what it means, and that helps your memory. So you remember things much, much more quickly when you understand what the underlying metaphor actually is. So, helping with your memory, helping with your grammar is a very important reason to work with metaphor as much as you possibly can.

Enjoy.