I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World, Page 3

  Often, the most common phrases have the most intricate etymologies36. When someone does something beyond the pale, they are not pushing the boundaries of pigmentation. They are venturing outside the limits of the acceptable by going beyond the wooden stakes (“pale” comes from the Latin palus, meaning “pole” or “stake,” as in the English word “impaled”) that marked the edge of a settlement in the Middle Ages. Fences made of wooden pales often surrounded medieval towns and villages, demarcating the point beyond which it was considered unsafe—or unacceptable—to go.

  Similarly, during the American Civil War, the word “deadline37” referred to the perimeter around a prison camp beyond which any wayward prisoner would be shot. Now, it commonly refers to the precise time and date beyond which an author or journalist will be executed for not handing in a finished manuscript.

  When you take a parting shot at someone, flinging one last insult before you depart, you are reenacting a battlefield technique perfected by the ancient Parthians. The Parthians, who lived near the Caspian Sea around the first century B.C.E., were expert archers and horsemen. They lured enemies into the open by feigning retreat. Then, as their opponents advanced in hot (a metaphor for angry or impassioned) pursuit, they turned in their saddles and picked them off with their arrows, a practice known as the Parthian shot.

  As archaeologist A. H. Sayce, who specialized in deciphering ancient languages, observed in The Principles of Comparative Philology:

  Our knowledge grows38 by comparing the unknown with the known, and the record of that increase in knowledge grows in the same way. Things are named from their qualities, but those qualities have first been observed elsewhere. The table like the stable originally meant something that “stands” but the idea of standing had been noted long before the first table was invented . . . Three-fourths of our language39 may be said to consist of worn-out metaphors.

  These “worn-out metaphors” are incredibly durable, and many of them are consistent across a diverse range of times and places. The use of the verb “to see” to mean “to understand” is an example of how identical seams of etymological meaning run under the crust of very different languages and cultures.

  The “seeing is knowing40” metaphor is present throughout the Indo-European language group. The Indo-European root *weid, meaning “to see” became *oida (to know) in Greek, *fios (knowledge) in Irish, and words like “wit,” “witness,” “wise,” and “idea” in English, all of which originally connoted some sense of understanding as vision. In Aristotle’s metaphorical mathematics, the equation is written:

  Seeing = knowing.

  Other examples of the “seeing = knowing” link include the words “intuition,” derived from the Latin in (at) and tueri (to look), and “speculate,” from the Latin speculari (to watch, examine, or observe). This etymological root also surfaces in common expressions like “I’m in the dark,” “Your argument is transparent” (or murky or opaque), “The explanation is crystal clear,” and “That really sheds light on the problem.”

  The same thing has happened with the verb “to grasp,” which means “to understand41” in English, French, Italian, German, and Polish, among many other languages. Other consistently cross-cultural metaphors include the association of anger with heat, happiness with altitude, and importance with size.

  In Japanese, anger is equated with hot stuff just as it is in English, Arabic, and the Sotho languages spoken in South Africa, though the locus of the combustion is different. English speakers with bad tempers are hotheads, while angry Tunisian Arabic speakers say their brains are boiling42. In the Sotho languages, angry people are described as hot-blooded43 but in Japan44 they have boiling intestines. Even in American Sign Language, anger45 is depicted as a fire or an explosion in the abdomen.

  Languages as different as Chinese46 and English both describe positive emotional states using phrases that suggest height, as in “He is in high spirits” and “I feel really up today.” Even Hungarian47, a language that, along with Finnish, developed independently of the Indo-European group, employs familiar metaphors like “I’m on cloud nine” to convey extreme happiness.

  The equation of size with significance48—as in “It was a big deal” and “It is her big moment”—is present in Zulu, Hawaiian, Turkish, Malay, and Russian as well as English, while the use of the sense of smell to indicate suspicion49—as in “I smell a rat” and “He’s been sniffing around the premises again”—is universal, too, active even in a geographically isolated non-Indo-European language like Basque. Whenever we use words or phrases like these, we are using ancient comparisons or, as linguist Joseph Grady has called them, primary metaphors: “low-level metaphorical associations between concepts, based directly on experiential correlation50.” And people from vastly different times and places always seem to converge on the same figurative correlations.

  Etymology is often said to be the final resting place for dead metaphors, figurative uses of language that we no longer consciously recognize as figurative. But these metaphors are still very much alive and well. Few people may be consciously aware of the etymological origins of common words and phrases, but the essential metaphor-making process of comparing the unknown with the known is still vital and ongoing. This process is the way meaning was, is, and ever shall be made.

  A better way to describe the relative animation of metaphors would be to classify them like volcanoes. (Elvis would no doubt approve.) Active metaphors are those still bubbling with figuration, as in early twentieth-century artist and author Wyndham Lewis’s definition:

  Laughter is the mind sneezing.

  Dormant metaphors, which tend to petrify into clichés, are those whose figurative nature slumbers just below the surface, as in the expression:

  We’re getting in over our heads.

  Extinct metaphors are those whose metaphorical magma will never rise again, as in the phrase:

  I see what you mean.

  One of the ironies of etymology is that the less conscious we are of a metaphor as a metaphor, the more literal it becomes, a paradox observed by Nelson Goodman: “With progressive loss of its virility51 as a figure of speech, a metaphor becomes not less but more like literal truth. What vanishes is not its veracity but its vivacity.”

  Barfield, always preternaturally aware of buried etymological meanings, neatly mapped out the geology of metaphor when he wrote:

  Every modern language52, with its thousands of abstract terms and its nuances of meaning and association, is apparently nothing, from beginning to end, but an unconscionable tissue of dead, or petrified, metaphors . . . A man cannot utter a dozen words53 without wielding the creations of a hundred named and nameless poets.

  These named and nameless poets are still active, busy wherever new advances, insights, or discoveries require new designations. After the advent of the Internet, for example, we needed a word to describe electronic messages. The old word, mail—from the French malle, meaning a “bag, sack, or wallet”—had served us well, so we just put the word “electronic” in front it. Hence, e-mail, a surprisingly accurate term since an e-mail is essentially a tiny sack of electrons encoding information.

  The new designations coined by metaphorical thinking can also be applied retroactively to things that already have names but can be even better described. Hence, once e-mail was in circulation, the ancient word “prayer”—which comes from the same etymological root as “precarious”—became knee-mail.

  Scientists are also prolific recyclers of terminology. Louis de Broglie won the Nobel Prize in Physics in 1929 for his theory of electron waves54, a term he borrowed from acoustics. De Broglie loved chamber music, and he imagined atoms as musical instruments that emitted different tones with different wavelengths, just as each instrument in an orchestra transmits sound in different wavelengths.

  Even economics—the driest of all the sciences, a parched landscape of jagged flow charts and desiccated statistics—is drenched in metaphors, many of which describe money in terms
of fluid dynamics.

  Liquidity is the ability to quickly convert assets into cash. A firm is solvent when it has plenty of liquid assets. Cash flow occurs at the confluence of revenue streams. A company floats shares in an initial public offering. Dark pools are platforms that allow share trading without revealing prices, even to the participants, until the trades are completed.

  Banks get bailed out when they are too big to fail. Governments prime the pump by pouring money into the economy. When you need money, you can tap a friend, sponge off relatives, dip into savings or—if you’re prepared to be unscrupulous—skim a little something off the top. When growth is buoyant, a rising tide lifts all boats. When options are underwater, though, checking your investment portfolio feels like snorkeling into a shipwreck.

  The word “broker55” is a fluid metaphor, too, derived from the Anglo-French brokur (or broacher), the person in a tavern who tapped kegs of wine or beer. Today, brokers are still in the business of tapping liquidity for clients or, perhaps just as often, draining it from them.

  The blandest words, the ones we think about the least, invariably have deep, twisted etymological roots. The term “stock” is a case in point. In the thirteenth century, the English Exchequer needed some method of tracking payments to the Treasury. The receipt had not been invented yet, but without proof of debits and credits there was no way to settle disputes.

  So Treasury officials came up with tally sticks, narrow strips of hazel wood that were notched to indicate various amounts of money. A notch about the width of a man’s thumb, for example, represented £100; a notch about the width of the little finger represented £20; and, in what has to be one of the most poetic of all financial phrases, a notch about “the width of a swollen barleycorn56” represented £1.

  After a tally stick was appropriately notched, it was split down its length into two halves, each of which bore corresponding markings. One half of the stick, known as “the stock,” was given to the person who deposited the money with the Exchequer. Treasury officials retained the other half of the stick, known as “the foil.” Whenever an account was audited, the sundered halves of the stick were matched up again to see if they tallied. Our use of the term “stock” is derived from this practice, as is the term “teller,” or “tallier,” which comes from the Latin talea and originally referred to a plant cutting or a thin piece of wood.

  Ralph Waldo Emerson, an avid amateur etymologist, once said that money was “as beautiful as roses.” In his essay “The Poet,” Emerson described language itself as a kind of etymological artifact, or “fossil poetry57.” But before language was fossil poetry, it was fossil metaphor, as Emerson wrote:

  The poets made all the words58, and therefore language is the archives of history, and, if we must say it, a sort of tomb of the muses. For though the origin of most of our words is forgotten, each word was at first a stroke of genius, and obtained currency because for the moment it symbolized the world to the first speaker and to the hearer. The etymologist finds the deadest word to have been once a brilliant picture. Language is fossil poetry. As the limestone of the continent consists of infinite masses of the shells of animalcules, so language is made up of images or tropes, which now, in their secondary use, have long ceased to remind us of their poetic origin.

  The metaphors entombed in even the simplest words are not mere etymological curiosities. These fossils still breathe, exerting a potent but largely unnoticed influence on us. We don’t normally feel the long, slow grinding of Earth’s tectonic plates, but still the ground shifts beneath our feet. Economics is one of the places where the secret life of metaphor breaks the surface, and where its ruptures and ructions can have powerful aftershocks.

  Metaphor and Money

  How High Can a Dead Cat Bounce?

  Stocks do the most amazing things. They soar, surge, climb, leap, and perform all kinds of other superheroic statistical feats. Sadly, they also plummet, slide, plunge, drop, and fall, subject as they are to gravity and similar dismal laws.

  Flick on the business news and you’re in for a smorgasbord of financial metaphors. Gasp in horror as the bear market grips Wall Street in its hairy paws; then cheer as fearless investors claw back gains. Watch in amazement as the NASDAQ vaults to new heights; then cringe as it slips, stumbles, and drops like a stone. Wait anxiously to see if the market will shake off the jitters, slump into depression, or bounce back.

  Finance and economics are the ultimate numbers games, yet commentators from Helsinki to Hong Kong59 instinctively use metaphors to describe what’s going on. Here are just a few of the more outlandish ones you might have come across in the financial news:

  Stock prices took a rollercoaster ride60 and ended up in the subway.

  Optimists saw the makings of a baby bull, but nay-sayers warned it could be a bum steer.

  The question every trader will be asking himself this week is: Just how high can a dead cat bounce?

  “Dead cat bounce” is the term used to describe the feeble, temporary uptick in share prices that can follow a sudden, precipitous fall. The etymology of this particular metaphor is unclear, but one hopes it did not involve dropping an actual cat from a great height and measuring its rebound after impact. Still, this and other examples of the figurative language commonly used in economics (boom, bust, or bubble anyone?) demonstrate that metaphor is at work in this seemingly most stolid of disciplines.

  According to Deirdre N. McCloskey in The Rhetoric of Economics, “The most important example of economic rhetoric61 . . . is metaphor. Economists call them ‘models.’ To say that markets can be represented by supply and demand ‘curves’ is no less a metaphor than to say that the west wind is ‘the breath of autumn’s being.’ ”

  Pundits and prognosticators don’t use just any old figurative language, though. When describing the stock market, they consistently use specific types of metaphors for specific types of price movements. Psychologist Michael W. Morris and collaborators studied a slew of financial commentaries and identified two primary market metaphors.

  What they call “agent metaphors” describe price movements as the deliberate action of a living thing, as in “the NASDAQ climbed higher” or “the Dow fought its way upward.” In contrast, “object metaphors” describe price movements as non-living things subject to external forces, as in “the NASDAQ dropped off a cliff” or “the Dow fell like a brick.” The researchers found that “agent metaphors tend to be evoked62 by uptrends whereas object metaphors tend to be evoked by downtrends.” An interesting correlation, perhaps, but what does it have to do with the price of tea in China?

  Morris and his colleagues observed that agent and object metaphors have very different effects on those exposed to them: “Agent metaphors imply63 that the observed trend reflects an enduring internal goal or disposition and hence it is likely to continue tomorrow . . . Object metaphors do not imply that it reflects an internal force that will manifest itself again tomorrow.”

  To human beings, “agents”—anything to which we attribute human feelings, motives, and motivations—are special, so special, in fact, that attributing agency to stock price movements through agent metaphors can actually affect our financial decisions64.

  Because a metaphor like “the NASDAQ climbed higher” suggests a living thing pursuing a goal—after all, only something that is alive, and determined, can climb—people expect the upward trend to continue. If, for example, house prices are relentlessly described as climbing higher and higher, homeowners might unconsciously assume that the steady ascent is unstoppable. They might feel confident in, say, taking out mortgages they really can’t afford in the expectation that soaring property values will eventually make unsustainable debt look like a smart investment. If prices have minds of their own, they can continue to rise through sheer willpower alone. This kind of thinking helped trigger the 2007 subprime mortgage crisis.

  Something entirely different is suggested by object metaphors like “the NASDAQ dropped off a cliff.” When something
drops off a cliff, it tends to keep falling. And when it hits bottom, it usually remains exactly where it landed. So, if stock prices are described in passive terms as dropping, plunging, or plummeting, investors might be unconsciously prompted into panic selling, imagining that the decline is irreversible. This kind of thinking pushes investors to sell en masse when prices fall, at precisely the time when logic dictates they should be buying since stocks are becoming cheaper. This is exactly what happened during the Great Recession of 2008–2009.

  Morris tested the influence of agent and object metaphors by asking a group of people to read a clutch of market commentaries and then predict the next day’s price trend. The researchers controlled whether participants were exposed to agent metaphors for rising prices or object metaphors for falling prices. Sure enough, those exposed to agent metaphors had higher expectations that the price trends they read about would continue the next day.

  Economists call this phenomenon expectancy bias. Once we spot what we think is a trend—a steady increase in house prices, for example—we involuntarily expect that trend to continue, an expectation aided and abetted by agent metaphors. This bias originates in the brain regions that are active whenever a stimulus repeats itself. These modules are largely responsible for our ability to detect patterns, an ability crucial to our physical survival—and to the evolution of metaphorical thinking.

  Our brains are always prospecting for pattern65. Behavioral studies show that, when exposed for just a few minutes to alternating visual stimuli on the left and right sides of a display, infants as young as two months old instinctively shift their eyes to the next expected spot in the sequence. By the age of three months, infants are able to anticipate far more complex patterns.