Using metaphor is a very good way to communicate.
For example, in how to give a 3 minute presentation we learn that winning speakers made use of metaphor and other verbal illustrations to simplify a complex idea.
If we accept that we are by nature multilingual, then it's good to have an understanding of how metaphor works and that it is central to how in fact language works.
We live by metaphors, as in clichés, pragmatics and how we use language to connect us beyond the actual words used:
Metaphors We Live By - Wikipedia [metaphor is a tool that enables people to use what they know about their direct physical and social experiences to understand more abstract things like work, time, mental activity and feelings.] and Metaphors We Live By: George Lakoff and Mark Johnson - YouTube [Lakoff and Johnson argue that metaphors aren’t just poetry, but a fundamental part of our brain conceptual system. That is, they’re central to the way we perceive ourselves, others, and the world.]
It goes pretty deep, whether it's the language of money... the language of religion... the language of love...:
The Bible is peppered with the language of debt. Sin, forgiveness, reckoning, redemption - all of these words actually derive from the language of ancient finance. What's more, this seems to be true in all the great religious traditions - not just Judaism and Christianity, but Hinduism, Buddhism, Taoism, and Islam - all of their texts are filled with financial metaphors, many of which relate to issues surrounding debt... We tend to think of these religions as teaching us that we must repay our debts. But the truth is that the financial metaphors in religious texts are oddly ambivalent. The original translation of the Lord's Prayer from 1381 reads "Give us this day our daily bread, and forgive us our debts, as we also have forgiven our debtors". But do we forgive our debtors? Actually, most of us don't.
[There is in The Merchant of Venice] the ironic weight the actors gave to all the financial metaphors that Shakespeare deploys in the love plot. Bassanio’s pursuit of Portia is first announced as his scheme “to get clear of all the debts I owe”, because Portia is rich. He refers to Portia’s famed “worth”, and calls her a “rich” “gem”. He marvels: “Look on beauty, / And you shall see ’tis purchas’d by the weight.” And while Shylock demands the fulfilment of the “bond” that Antonio signed, the pledged lovers twitter happily about “love’s bonds”, and Graziano speaks of the “bargain” of their faith. At the end, Portia tells Antonio that he is going to be Bassanio’s “surety”, to guarantee his faithfulness.
Or, to look at a BBC piece on the words that help us understand the world:
And here's a fascinating piece on The Ubiquity of Metaphor from the perspective of a behavioural scientists.
So, it's more than just a bit of 'fancy' or 'flowery' language: language is metaphor.
Let's look at some philosophy and whether someone can explain structuralism to me like I'm 5;
1: Levi-Strauss reckoned that the way we think about things has been set in place already by cultural factors (mainly language) - so the individual is almost a base through which ‘society’ does its work. Think about it like this - language existed before we were, and will continue after we will be gone, but we think through it and it constrains our understanding. The language allows understanding by contrasting together concepts, like dark:light. Would you understand dark if you didn't understand light? Then language goes one step further, and uses metaphor (or, if you like, myth) to allow even deeper understanding of something. So dark is to light as order is to chaos as Man is to Woman. You understand the first concept much more richly by linking it to your understanding of the other contrasts.
2: We actually understand things only through metaphors. Every word was once a metaphor - 'muscle' for example, came through the German word for 'mouse', because muscles looked like little animals moving under the skin. This extends up how we act out concepts. When we speak of 'knowledge', for instance, we understand it to be a 'space'. We 'shed light on that' or 'find common ground', or 'another perspective'. We therefore exchange knowledge freely, because everyone can stand in that space. Other cultures, for instance the Maori of New Zealand, understand knowledge to be a treasure. They therefore DON'T share knowledge except with (male) descendants, and don't particularly care if it's actually right or not, because it was a gift from their ancestors. See how this metaphor language stuff shapes society and understanding?
And let's look at the magazine Philosophy Now and A Gentle Introduction to Structuralism, Postmodernism And All That:
Structuralism arose on the continent, in particular in France, in the early 60s. The first ‘big name’ was Claude Lévi-Strauss, an anthropologist, who took on Jean-Paul Sartre, the leading French intellectual and philosopher of the time, and didn’t so much win, as went unanswered (which from Sartre’s point of view was worse). Here was France’s main philosopher, Sartre, who usually had something to say about everything, being attacked in Lévi-Strauss’ The Savage Mind, and yet not replying! The implication was that he couldn’t reply, and the intellectual mood began to move towards Lévi-Strauss’ intellectual position, which he called structuralism.
A simple explanation of structuralism is that it understands phenomena using the metaphor of language. That is, we can understand language as a system, or structure, which defines itself in terms of itself. There is no language ‘behind’ language with which we understand it, no metalanguage to explain what language means. Instead it is a self-referential system. Words explain words explain words (as in a dictionary), and meaning is present as a set of structures.
Helpful?!
To finish, here's something a bit strange(r)...
Going further, malaphors are when we get our metaphors mixed up [as in "it's not rocket surgery" instead of "it's not rocket science"!]
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