Of Matters Metaphorical

A categorical and historical topic that's rhetorical

Aug 03, 2024

*Virgil Reading The Aeneid to Augustus, Octavia, and Livia* by Jean Baptiste Joseph Wicar, c. 1790 (public domain - Art Institute Chicago)

In the last edition of Off the Clock, our topic was similes. For those who love the playfulness of words and rhetorical devices, it must have been like being a kid in a candy shop.

Today we will embark on another journey down a rhetorical path to find ourselves in the land of metaphor.

A metaphor is defined as “a figure of speech in which a word or phrase literally denoting one kind of object or idea is used in place of another to suggest a likeness or analogy between them.”

Metaphors are the language of poetry, making complex ideas easier to understand by using a comparison familiar to the reader. When used in prose, they deepen the reading experience as they’re unexpected, unique, and attention-grabbing.

If you’re developing any communication (an email, a speech, an essay) and you’d like to include metaphors, it takes a bit of work. But the effect, if done well, is worth the effort.

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Cliché metaphors are trite and overused (armed to the teeth, bad to the bone, heart of gold) and mixed metaphors are nonsensical (seeing the handwriting on the wall, he decided to nip it in the bud).

Memorable and effective metaphors require creativity, a solid understanding of the language, and a wide view of topics.

For my money, Lewis Lapham, whom we memorialized this week in the main newsletter, wrote beautifully, frequently using metaphors in his essays in Harper’s and Lapham’s Quarterly.

Here are some memorable ones.

“Books I regard as voyages of discovery, and with an author I admire I gladly book passage to any and all points of view or destination—to Rome during the lives of the Caesars, to Shakespeare’s London, to Berlin and Harlem in the 1920s. I don’t go in search of the lost gold mine of imperishable truth. I look instead to find the present in the past, the past in the present. To discover within myself the presence of a once and future human being.” (“Homo Faber”)

“Fear itself these days is America’s top-selling consumer product, available 24-7 as mobile app with color-coded pop-ups in all shades of the paranoid rainbow. Ready to hand at the touch of a screen, the turn of a phrase, the nudge of a tweet… (“Petrified Forest”)

“In 1964 America’s snow-white homecoming queens hadn’t yet drifted downstream on their parade floats into the saturnalian whirlpool of 1968, but the country’s moral fabric was said to be showing signs of wear and tear—Bob Dylan and the Beatles singing on the radio; the birth control pill in the hands of cocktail waitresses, nymphs, and satyrs hanging out around the birdbaths on suburban lawns. Concerns bearing on the lure of sex were headline news, which was why The Saturday Evening Post, in those days still a national voice of bourgeois stability, was sending its scouts in all directions to look for signs of the great god Pan slouching toward Nashville to cut a record with Circe and the three sirens.” (“Transits of Venus”)

“The work of the brain is receiving the presents; the art of the mind is unwrapping them. Playing with them on what the French eighteenth-century philosopher Denis Diderot likens to a clavichord fitted with ‘sensitive vibrating strings’ of memory. Raveling and unraveling them on what Charles Scott Sherrington, twentieth-century English neurophysiologist and Nobel laureate, likens to ‘an enchanted loom where millions of flashing shuttles weave a dissolving pattern, always a meaningful pattern though never an abiding one.’” (“Enchanted Loom”)

“In 1964 I was slow to take the point, possibly because I was working at the time in a medium that McLuhan had listed as endangered—writing, for The Saturday Evening Post, inclined to think in sentences, accustomed to associating a cause with an effect, a beginning with a middle and an end. Television news I construed as an attempt to tell a story with an alphabet of brightly colored children’s blocks, and when offered the chance to become a correspondent for NBC, I declined the referral to what I regarded as a course in remedial reading…I’m content to regard the Internet as the best and brightest machine ever made by man, but nonetheless a machine with a tin ear and a wooden tongue.” (“Word Order”)

The metaphor is the magic carpet that brings us soaring over the towering city of imagination, our stories made that much more visible and exciting by virtue of its perspective.

May your writing and thinking be filled with them.

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There’s so much to learn,