ROGER:
> perhaps all we ever do is think and speak in metaphors.
ELEPHANT:
This is something I seem to change my ideas about from time to time, largely
because no-one can tell me definitively just exactly what metaphor *is*.
Ideas?
I'm particulaly interested because it seems to me that you can't call most
human language *literal* exactly, given that it's the words as begets the
objects, not the other way around. On the other hand, that doesn't
automatically make such words metaphorical - I mean "metaphorical" might not
be a direct opposite of "literal", there might be some langauge which is
neither a report of a thing in terms of itself, nor a depiction of a thing
in terms of another. Most language in fact. And if it's this third
category of languge (neither metaphoric nor literal) which is really
fundamental (what gets the objects off the ground, so to speak, so that we
can later come along and be 'literal' about them), maybe we want to say that
metaphor *can't* be all pervasive. But then again we don't really know what
metaphor is.... if you say with one camp that it's depicting one thing
through another, then it looks like metaphor cannot go right down to the
root of language - because the root is where you have no thing to describe
anything in terms of. But maybe the initial act of naming, of numbering -
maybe this too is seeing one thing in terms of another - imposing *formal*
being on the *dynamic*..... Or is this something else again from what we
normally call "metaphor" - what say you?
I'm not sure at all, not at all at all. It's damm hard to speak for what
other people "normally" mean when they use words. "Metaphor" particularly.
yours puzzled,
Puzzled Elephant
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