Tropes: metaphor and its cousins

The figures of the previous three lessons — anaphora, antithesis, asyndeton — operate on syntax: they rearrange the connective shape of sentences. The figures of this lesson operate on meaning: they substitute one concept for another, or one part for the whole, or one image for an abstraction. These are the tropes (Greek tropos, “turn”), and metaphor is their queen.

Aristotle, in chapter 21 of the Poetics, calls metaphor the greatest thing by far, because it is the one figure that cannot be taught: it is the mark of genius, for to make good metaphors implies an eye for resemblances. Two and a half millennia later, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson’s Metaphors We Live By (1980) showed that the eye for resemblances is in fact ordinary: every natural language is built on entrenched conceptual metaphors (TIME IS MONEY, ARGUMENT IS WAR, LOVE IS A JOURNEY) that we use without noticing. The C2 writer’s task is to navigate the three states of metaphor — dead, live, and zombie — and to deploy fresh metaphors that earn their freshness.

For the Russian-speaking C2 student, metaphor is the trope where calque from Russian is most dangerous and least visible. Russian and English share many conceptual metaphors (LIFE IS A JOURNEY is common to both) but realize them in different surface idioms, and the C2 writer who translates the Russian idiom literally produces a metaphor that is either mixed, dead, or unintelligible.

Theory: tropes and their domains

Quintilian distinguishes tropes from figures: tropes change a word’s meaning, figures rearrange how the words sit together. The distinction is useful for diagnosis: a misfiring metaphor is different from a misfiring antithesis, and the cure is different.

The three states of metaphor — dead, live, zombie

Dead metaphors

A dead metaphor is one whose origin has been fully absorbed; the speaker uses it without registering its metaphoricity. The leg of the table is dead — no English speaker hears leg as a transfer from anatomy when shopping for furniture. I see what you mean is dead — KNOWING IS SEEING is so entrenched that see is felt as the literal verb for understand. Dead metaphors are not a stylistic problem; they are the substrate of language. Trying to avoid them produces unreadable prose.

Live metaphors

A live metaphor is one the reader still feels as a transfer. James Baldwin, in “Notes of a Native Son” (1955):

I had grown up in the church. There was, therefore, no shock, when at the funeral, our minister rose to say, in the great voice that had carried me through every disaster I had survived, “We have come together this morning to bid farewell to one whose journey through this world has now reached its appointed end.”

The phrase whose journey through this world has now reached its appointed end is conventional — LIFE IS A JOURNEY is one of the most entrenched conceptual metaphors in English — but Baldwin’s whole essay then makes the metaphor literal in the figure of his father (whose actual journeys through Northern and Southern American geography structure the piece). The metaphor becomes live again by being lived. A live metaphor is not necessarily a freshly invented metaphor; it can be a familiar metaphor that the surrounding prose reactivates.

A fresher instance, from Susan Sontag’s Illness as Metaphor (1978):

Illness is the night-side of life, a more onerous citizenship. Everyone who is born holds dual citizenship, in the kingdom of the well and in the kingdom of the sick. Although we all prefer to use only the good passport, sooner or later each of us is obliged, at least for a spell, to identify ourselves as citizens of that other place.

The metaphor — illness is a country, the well and the sick are two kingdoms with a border, the body holds two passports — is sustained for the length of the paragraph and then for the length of the book. This is extension, the move that takes a metaphor and follows it through. Sontag does not say the night-side of life and move on; she extends the figure into citizenship, passports, identification — each new step honoring the original frame.

Zombie metaphors

A zombie metaphor is a dead metaphor that has been reanimated accidentally, usually by being placed next to another zombie or live metaphor that clashes with its source domain. We will rebuild the bedrock of our coalition is zombie: bedrock (geological) and rebuild (architectural) operate on the same surface but in incompatible source domains. The result is a mixed metaphor — a kind of zombie crowd, each animated body bumping into the others.

A famous mixed-metaphor specimen from political speech: We have stood shoulder to shoulder to fight for these values, and we have weathered the storm together, and we will continue to be a beacon to the world. Three live frames in three clauses (military formation, weather, lighthouse) with no thread between them. The reader’s eye sees only the surface idioms; the conceptual machinery is junked.

The zombie warning sign: if your metaphors come from three different source domains in the space of a paragraph, you have a zombie problem.

Conceptual metaphor — Lakoff’s contribution

George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, in Metaphors We Live By (1980), proposed that metaphor is not a special poetic device but the default mechanism by which human beings think about abstract domains. ARGUMENT IS WAR is the canonical example: we attack a position, defend a thesis, concede a point, shoot down an argument, find a weakness in someone’s defense, win or lose a debate. The surface idioms come from a single underlying mapping: ARGUMENT (target domain) maps onto WAR (source domain).

Other entrenched American conceptual metaphors:

• TIME IS MONEY (spend, save, waste, invest, budget, cost, profit from time)
• LIFE IS A JOURNEY (on the right track, at a crossroads, dead end, milestone, journey, path)
• IDEAS ARE FOOD (food for thought, swallow that, half-baked, raw data, digest a book)
• LOVE IS A JOURNEY (we’re going nowhere, this relationship is a dead end, we’ve come a long way)
• MORE IS UP (prices rose, the temperature dropped, sales are high)
• THE MIND IS A CONTAINER (hold a thought, store memories, my mind is empty, full of ideas)

The C2 implication is twofold. First, when you write English you are working within these conceptual metaphors whether you notice or not. Second, freshness in metaphor comes from one of three operations: (a) using a familiar conceptual metaphor in an extended way (Sontag’s citizenship of illness), (b) deploying a less-entrenched source domain (e.g., ARGUMENT IS DANCE rather than WAR), or (c) inventing a new mapping that the reader has not seen.

Simile — the marked metaphor

Simile carries the same conceptual transfer as metaphor but marks it with like or as. This makes simile safer (the reader is alerted to the transfer) and often weaker (the metaphor is not asserted, only suggested).

From Toni Morrison’s Beloved:

Her face was poison.

That is a metaphor. The simile form would be Her face was like poison — which is weaker because it admits the comparison rather than asserting the identification.

When does simile work better than metaphor? When the vehicle is too far from the tenor for an outright identification to land. Morrison can write Her face was poison because the prose has already established the violence and disorientation that warrant the identification. A more distant comparison — Her face was an algorithm — needs simile, or needs many pages of preparation, because the leap is unfamiliar.

David Foster Wallace’s similes in Infinite Jest and the essays sit at the opposite extreme: the vehicle is often comically distant from the tenor, and the simile carries the strain explicitly. Like a hen pecking at a pile of seed that doesn’t seem to be diminishing at all even though the hen keeps pecking — the deliberate over-length of the vehicle is the joke and the technique.

Metonymy and synecdoche

Metonymy names a thing by something associated with it. The White House announced — the institution named by its building. Wall Street is rattled — the financial sector named by its geographic spine. The crown decreed — the monarchy named by the regalia.

Synecdoche is a special case of metonymy where the relationship is part-whole. All hands on deck — sailors named by hands. I’ve got wheels — a car named by wheels. Get me the suits in the conference room — corporate lawyers named by their attire.

Both tropes are pervasive in American journalism. Detroit recovers, Silicon Valley pivots, Wall Street rallies, Washington reacts — each is metonymy. The reader does not parse the figure; the institution-by-place naming is built into the genre. The C2 writer’s task is to deploy these tropes idiomatically (not the President’s House announced — the metonymy is locked to White House) and to recognize when an over-used metonymy has gone dead enough to feel as cliché.

Production exercise

Pick a familiar conceptual metaphor — TIME IS MONEY, LIFE IS A JOURNEY, ARGUMENT IS WAR. Write a paragraph (4-6 sentences) that extends the metaphor through at least three steps, each step inheriting and elaborating the source domain.

Constraint: do not let a different source domain bleed in. If you start with TIME IS MONEY, every metaphor in the paragraph must come from finance — no journeys, no food, no war.

Read the result. If a single sentence reads as zombie (an accidental crossing into another domain), revise.

When tropes work vs misfire

Common Russian-speaker mistakes

1. Calque from Russian conceptual metaphor. Russian ARGUMENT IS WAR is very close to English, but the surface idioms differ. We will dispute his position is grammatical English but does not deploy the WAR metaphor the way we will challenge his position or we will attack his argument does. The Russian idiom поднять вопрос (literally “raise the question”) works in English; постановить вопрос (literally “put the question”) calques poorly. Verify each idiom in an English corpus before deploying.
2. Mixed metaphor by Russian-speaker over-flourish. Russian rhetorical tradition tolerates and even prizes ornate metaphorical layering. American prose does not — one source domain per paragraph is the working norm. The Russian-speaker draft tends to stack three or four metaphors per paragraph; the cure is the source-domain audit.
3. Personification that reads as childish. Russian permits personification of abstract nouns more freely than English. Justice cries out from the steppes is a Russian rhetorical move; the English equivalent reads as either parodic or melodramatic in argumentative prose. Reserve personification for poetry, literary essay, and deliberately heightened registers.
4. Synecdoche misfires by gender drift. Russian gendered nouns sometimes shift the synecdoche; English is mostly genderless and synecdoche tracks function (hands on deck, not seamen on deck and not crewmen on deck). The cure is to mimic the locked English idiom, not to translate from Russian.
5. Latinate vocabulary inside a fresh metaphor. A live English metaphor wants Anglo-Saxon vocabulary at the moment of transfer. The pinnacle of his disappointment is a Latinate-Romance mash that does not land; the bottom of his disappointment lands. The Anglo-Saxon noun keeps the metaphor concrete.
6. Reading a dead metaphor as if it were live. Russian-speaker drafts sometimes over-explain entrenched English metaphors as if their metaphoricity needed elaboration. Time, which is, of course, like money in many ways, must be spent wisely is over-explained; We must spend our time wisely trusts the dead metaphor to carry without comment.
7. The Russian как бы hedge becoming an English simile. Russian как бы (sort of, kind of) is a verbal hedge; when calqued as English like in similes it produces decorative similes that do no work (his face was, like, kind of like a storm). Cut.

Summary

• Metaphor exists in three states: dead (absorbed), live (felt), zombie (accidentally reanimated by clash).
• Lakoff’s conceptual metaphors (TIME IS MONEY, LIFE IS A JOURNEY, ARGUMENT IS WAR) structure the source domains English speakers draw on; freshness comes from extending or replacing the entrenched mapping.
• Simile marks the transfer with like or as; metaphor asserts the identification outright.
• Metonymy names by association; synecdoche names by part-whole. Both are pervasive in journalism.
• The single most common C2 misfire is the mixed metaphor — three source domains in one paragraph. The cure is source-domain audit.
• Read Baldwin, Sontag, Morrison aloud — fresh metaphor in American prose is what these writers do at the sentence level.

Next lesson: Plain vs Latinate style — the two great traditions in English prose, the Saxon and Romance vocabularies behind them, and the writers who have made each their home.