Web Activity 11.10 Varieties of metaphor

Consider the metaphorical use of language in the examples below, and think about how they relate to the theories discussed in Chapter 11. Together with your classmates, discuss your own experience of these examples through the lens of the psycholinguistic research on metaphor. You may want to address the following questions: What knowledge or linguistic experience is required to be able to come up with a plausible interpretation for these metaphors? Do you have the sense that you have to do more mental work for some than others? Why do you think this is the case? Do some metaphors seem to rely more heavily than others on having deep knowledge about a particular subject? (Think, for example, how a child might understand them.) Do some metaphors rely on having certain sensory experiences? Or on rich lexical knowledge? Do the cognitive demands of the language contribute to their aesthetic or intellectual impact? Discuss how your interpretations differ from those of your classmates, and why this may be the case.

1. Dew is a veil.

2. The mind is a computer.

3. Her boyfriend is a snowflake.

4. Rumors are cancerous.

5. Scientific research is a glacier.

6. His religious beliefs are an anchor.

7. A figure skater is a muscular butterfly

8. Doubt lurks in the basement of your mind.

9. We’ve come to a crossroads.

10. Her beauty is a prison.

11. To date Peter is to enter the Bermuda Triangle.

12. Anxiety is the dizziness of freedom. (Søren Kierkegaard)

13. Never date a woman you can hear ticking. (Mark Patinkin)

14. Chains do not hold a marriage together. It is threads, hundreds of tiny threads, which sew people together over the years. (Simone Signoret)

15. Follow the grain in your own wood. (Howard Thurman)

Examples 12–15 are drawn from:

Grothe, M. I Never Metaphor I Didn’t Like: A Comprehensive Compilation of History’s Greatest Analogies, Metaphors, and Similes. Harper Collins Publishers. 2008