wiggle room

They say humans became intelligent beings when they started possessing the capability of language. But I think human brain is still a pretty primitive thing, even after thousands--or hundreds of thousands, depending on who you talk to--of years of evolution, the best way we can understand things is still through words directly related to how we see, touch, feel, and concrete objects like plants, animals, natural or man-made things that we can see, touch, feel, etc. Much of our language is then layered upon these tangible entities to convey more abstract ideas and concepts, or to infer different meanings out of these "figurative speeches," or so called "metaphors."

A metaphor can be a single word, such as "chairman"--the person who gets to sit in the meeting room is usually the head of an organization (here "head" is another example of metaphor), or a phrase ("piece of cake," "emotional rollercoasters"), but is usually one or two simple and easy to understand sentences (otherwise it beats the purpose of using metaphor) such as "Life is like a box of chocolates. You never know what you're gonna get." (from Forrest Gump, the movie). 

It can refer to plant ("couch potato"), or animal ("road hog"), be romantic ("You can't break my heart, it melted when I first saw you"), or downright insulting ("John is a real pig when he eats"). It can be imaginary ("pie in the sky"), or fact based ("It rains cats and dogs"-- Some say back in the medieval England when roofs were made of thatches and dogs and cats and other animals all lived on it, so when it rained they all slipped and fell). A lot of them are humorous ("A camel is a horse designed by a committee"), or inspirational ("Failure is the condiment that gives success its flavor"). And this one is political and timely: "When we read the budget proposal from the Senate, you find the Vatican is not the only place blowing smoke this week."--by Republican Congressman Paul Ryan during Vatican's selection of a new pope last week.

And it's definitely culture related. If you look closely, many phrases and expressions we use here: "hit the road," "strike a deal," "blow me away," "the idea was shot down," "Congress doesn't buy what the President proposes," "that's a sexy concept," ... expose an action (borderlining on violence) and sex and commerce packed society America is in today. Looking East, you find the many "eat" related terms in the Chinese language that ought not have anything to do with having food: 吃驚--taken by surprise, 吃苦--laboring, 吃虧--being taken advantage of, 吃罰單--getting a ticket..., indicating eating has been an important part of Chinese culture. One may argue there are quite a few eating related sayings in English language as well: "eat crow," "have cake and eat it too," "you are what you eat,"... So this could mean (of course) eating is an important part of all cultures universally.

Poems and literature by design use plenty of metaphoric expressions in their compositions. Robert Frost's poem "The Road Not Taken" (from which Dr. Scott Peck's famous book "The Road Less Traveled" gets its title) uses the forking of a trail to reflect the choice we make in life that leads to different and irretrievable paths. The Chinese poem verse "感時花濺淚 恨別鳥驚心" mixes flowers with "splashing tears," birds with "spooked heart," without much logical sense, but very effectively stirs up the deep emotions in us it intends to.

Even science and mathematics, the crown jewels of human intellectual exercise, use plenty of metaphors to present its theories and explain how things work in the world. "Imagine" the atom model that we were taught in school to help understand the very basic unit that forms the universe. It consists of a nucleus in the middle and electrons circling around it, like satellites orbiting a planet...  Did anyone actually "see" this with their eyes? Nope, not that it is so infinitesimally small that no man-made scope can capture it, but even if such scope exists, the moment we think we get it, it's no longer there, according to quantum mechanics theory... Also imagine without the help of the graphs and diagrams of lines, squares, triangles, waveforms, etc., how could we even get in the door, let alone understand the intricacies of Geometry and Trigonometry, sine and cosine, Fourier analysis, wave equation, etc., that form the basis of modern aeronautics, electronics, and other technologies and their applications?

I remember one thing the college professor who taught us Thermodynamics kept saying during his class: "If you speak abstractly, that means you don't understand." (Unfortunately this is about the only thing I remember from his class). I believe a great communicator is one who, after getting a firm grip (another metaphorical expression) of an idea, can re-package and re-deliver it with plain language--using examples, analogies, and metaphors, instead of jargons, theorems, and dry reasonings--so others can "get it" too.

Plato, the great Greek philosopher, actually used a visual metaphor to explain the central feature of his Theory of Ideas this way: Most human beings live as if in a dim cave. We are chained, and facing a blank wall, with a fire at our backs. All we see are flickering shadows playing across the cave wall, and this we take to be reality. Only if we learn to turn away from the wall and the shadows, and escape from the cave, can we hope to see the true light of reality.

A metaphoric speech urging you to get out of a metaphoric world, don't you find that interesting?

Religion is yet another field of human endeavor that's fraught with metaphors and symbolism. Take Christianity for an example: the Garden of Eden, the Trees of Life and Knowledge of Good and Evil, the Fall of Man, many of Jesus' sayings ("I am the vine and you are the branches," "you are the salt of the world"...) and parables (the wise and the foolish wedding maids, the mustard seed and the yeast...), the whole Old Testament as the "shadow" of the "fulfillment" of the New Testament, etc. Now here comes the rub: “Half the people in the world think that the metaphors of their religious traditions, for example, are facts. And the other half contends that they are not facts at all. As a result we have people who consider themselves believers because they accept metaphors as facts, and we have others who classify themselves as atheists because they think religious metaphors are lies.” -- Joseph Campbell, a comparative religion scholar. What I think both the atheists and the religious fundamentalists miss is the power of metaphor. One laughs at it (how can a virgin bear a child?), and the other takes it so seriously (the world must be created in 6 literal days). Relax, people, let's give each other some mental wiggle room to imagine, muse, and approach the truth through things we can relate to--through metaphors, that is. 

Finally, here is a "creative metaphor" for your enjoyment:

l(a

le
af
fa

ll
s)
one
l

iness

Have you figured it out? This is actually a short poem by E.E. Cummings, and is a "double metaphor." He associates loneliness with the falling of a leaf, and also visualizes the experience by isolating letters as they fall down the page. In plain one line writing, it would be: l(a leaf falls)oneliness.

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Some famous metaphor quotes:

"A good conscience is a continual Christmas." -- Benjamin Franklin

"A hospital bed is a parked taxi with the meter running." -- Groucho Marx

"Art washes away from the sould the dust of everyday life." -- Pablo Picasso

"All our words are but crumbs that fall down from the feast of the mind." -- Khalil Gibran

"All religions, arts and sciences are branches of the same tree." -- Albert Einstein

"I'm a little pencil in the hand of a writing God, who is sending a love letter to the world." -- Mother Teresa

“Quantum theory provides us with a striking illustration of the fact that we can fully understand a connection, though we can only speak of it in images and parables.” -- Werner Heisenberg, Nobel Laureate physicist, co-founder of the field of Quantum Mechanics