Metaphor Gets Everywhere
Metaphor is everywhere. As I.A. Richards put it,
That metaphor is the omnipresent principle of language can be shown by mere observation. We cannot get through three sentences of ordinary fluid discourse without it.[1]
I.A. Richards’s point shows up nowhere better than in the writings of plain language propogandists. Here’s the puritan Richard Baxter (1615-91), reacting against the excessive figuration of the early 17th century sermon:
Truth loves the light, and is most beautiful when most naked. It is a sign of an envious enemy to hide the truth; and a sign of a hypocrite to do this under pretence of revealing it: and therefore painted, obscure sermons (like the painted glass in the windows that keep out the light) are too often the mark of painted hypocrites.[2]
‘Naked truth’, surely half-dead by Baxter’s time[3], is compellingly and even erotically refreshed; the ‘painted glass’ simile is itself a piece of revealing, not obscuring, painted glass. And he goes beyond metaphor in his figurative virtuosity: the double zeugma of ‘painted’ is an adroit and convincing use of a trope – more than one meaning of a word used in turn – most often used facetiously[4].
George Orwell, not anti-metaphor but very much in favour of muscular concision, has the following in his rightly famous Politics and the English Language essay:
... prose consists less and less of words chosen for the sake of their meaning, and more and more of phrases tacked together like the sections of a prefabricated hen-house ...
... the writer knows more or less what he wants to say, but an accumulation of stale phrases chokes him like tea leaves blocking a sink ...
The inflated style is itself a kind of euphemism. A mass of Latin words falls upon the facts like soft snow, blurring the outlines and covering up all the details.
[The writer] feels that he has something to say – and yet his words, like cavalry horses answering the bugle, group themselves automatically into the familiar dreary pattern.[5]
In each case the regular-script phrases beginning with the word ‘like’ – all strictly similes – are unnecessary and could be dropped, on one of Orwell’s own rules:
If it is possible to cut a word out, always cut it out.[6]
Just as well he didn’t especially in the first and third quotations, for me among the most memorable passages in the essay. Metaphor (broad or narrow sense) is more than an obstinate gate-crasher – it can captures the heart of an otherwise word-bound theme.
[1] Philosophy of Rhetoric 92
[2] Baxter (1655) The Reformed Pastor, cited in Hawkes (1972) Metaphor 29
[3] First recorded in English in a 1585 poem The Cherry and the Slae, but with then-familiar classical precedents.
[4] e.g. He took his hat and his leave.
[5] Orwell (1946, in A Collection of Essays Harvest 1981 pp. 159,165,167,168), the last slightly truncated; Orwell’s emphases in regular script in the first, other emphases (bold and italic) are mine. The 'stale phrases' that 'choke' the writer are also an implicit metaphor.
[6] op. cit. 170