Piece of cake
Metaphors are humans’ best friends since we started thinking. You use it to say that some is like something else without the need to use “like” or “as”. Metaphor is the queen of the figures of speech, they are direct, handy, relatable and adaptable. You can use your creativity to the extent you want, adapting them to your audience and its tastes. The apple of every writer’s eye, Shakespeare’s devoted companion, every language’s culture bearer. Everybody can either choose to invent one or use traditional ones, we also use them everyday without even notice: you’d say “Life is a rollercoaster” to indicate that life is turbulent for instance, or that somebody is “a diamond in the rough” to indicate the unnoticed value and potential in a very brilliant person.
Metaphors paint our speeches with limitless generous images in countless combinations, they are poets’ and writers’ best friends! Then why are they disappearing?
A can of worms
In an article for Aeon, Heather Altfred and Rebecca Diggs mark the problematic decline of metaphors and directly link it with the dramatic crisis of creativity of the last two or three decades:
“Sven Birkerts, the editor of the literary magazine AGNI and the author of The Gutenberg Elegies (1994), explained to us how he views the link between metaphor and imagination, saying that Metaphor requires a perceptual power and ability, a re-seeing, a re-analogising’ that is not inborn, but instead fostered through a ‘depth of attention’ that, in turn, breeds imagination.”
Imagination and creativity: the forever most neglected skills of them all. Either because they have always been the fifth wheel of the educational system, or because they don’t foster productivity among employees, or because they are not perceived as ‘practical’ or again because they are supposedly the prerogative of a minority that “was born with it”. But is it really like that? How do we get back to imagination? And, most importantly: do we really need to?
Let me take a step back on the educational issue. Education in the era of the attention market is a huge brainer. How do you keep a teen interested in a three-centuries old text when they can’t even pay attention to their own spatial awareness? Plus, maths is considered useless because you have a calculator on your phone, same for learning texts by heart because we can find everything everywhere all at once. Learning how to use machines would be nice, but teachers are too busy proving people that humanities are still relevant to the world to engage in the necessary, dedicated training. But in a world where we can’t even agree on what should be taught or not, is there any space at all for creativity?
The black cloud hanging over
Creativity: the misty, colourful, arcane concept that means the ability of generating the new. Or, as Ludwig puts it:
Creativity has never been a priority for public educational institutions. STEM has, because it dwells in productivity, optimisation, technological progress. Creativity, on the other hand, isn’t (apparently!), so it is not worth the time spent to develop it. Yes, develop, because you weren’t just “born with it”. Like intelligence, like hard and soft skills.
According to Kyung Hee Kim’s essay for the Creativity research Journal, a long research started in 1966 and concluded 2008 evidenced a head-spinning decline in creative skills in Americans, and it never stopped dropping. Not just that: another study by a research team of Harvard University led by Emily Weinstein proved a sensible lack of creativity skills and metaphoric thinking among highschoolers and linked this shifting in capabilities to the ever-more growing use of “ literalism, abbreviation, and emojis”.
We all march our own drummers
Metaphoric thinking, the mental process that creates implicit comparisons between entities which are usually considered in separate classifications, is therefore not just an arid rhetorical device, is a vehicle of culture: just think how different cultures—and their languages— have different metaphors for the same concept!
For example, the idea of ‘very expensive’ is ‘It costs an arm and leg’ in English, because probably they find their limbs the most important part of their body, contrary to the French who say that “it costs an eye”, or the Bulgarians that instead call forth mother and father for the sake of this same metaphor (cute!). A decline in the use of metaphors means that soon enough we will get a much straightforward talking, more standardised imagery, possibly—Harvard says— more emojis.
It could be that a more standardised way of speaking would lead to a more democratic and inclusive communication, since there would be no metaphor or figure of speech to code, but the thing is that also emojis have to be coded and very often exclude the vast majority of social media users. For instance, is definitely more likely that you’d understand “I gave my two cents” rather than the meaning of 🐐 (here you will find the solution).
Cover your bases
Therefore, it could be possible that instead of a simplification or an act of inclusivity we are just looking at an impoverishment of language due to the exponential growth of necessity to talk fast, to say all with less, to communicate as quickly as we can. Would you buy that for a couple of metaphors? I’d rather not.
Metaphors sometimes can be astonishingly deep or deadly funny. If you can’t understand one, just try to type it to Ludwig and learn it! Let’s all work together to save our precious metaphors.
What’s your favourite one? Whose culture is it from? Let us know in the comments of our Instagram page.