SHORT ARTICLES

Year 8; Issue 5; September 06

Short Article 1
Metaphorically Speaking
Steve Darn and Ian White
Steve Darn and Ian White have been teaching and training in Turkey for 22 and 18
years respectively and are now both based at the Teacher Development Unit, School of
Foreign Languages, Izmir University of Economics, Turkey. They are also involved in
British Council teacher development courses, training for Cambridge ESOL, and a
variety of writing projects.
There is one single reason why metaphor is important to the English language and
language teaching. It is impossible to communicate naturally and effectively without
employing this device. Metaphors are an essential part of our everyday language, used
to give physical qualities to the non-physical. Whilst we have clear and precise
language to describe events, we run into difficulties when we try to describe ideas and
concepts. Because we cannot see, feel, smell, taste, or touch an idea, in order to
overcome this intangibility we resort to metaphors to represent ideas and
understandings from our everyday experiences in a meaningful way. Very often,
metaphor is the solution to the imbalance between what we are capable of
comprehending and the language we are actually able to produce - the answer to the
question what do you mean? While teachers might argue that metaphor is peripheral
to language, linguists and philosophers would deem it as being central to our thoughts,
actions and conceptual systems.
To the language teacher and learner, it is this elementary level of significance which is
important, notwithstanding some of the recent work on right hemisphere processing of
language or recent cognitive studies. Such studies add to the rapidly expanding body of
knowledge in the area of neurology and language learning. There are its spin-offs into
ELT via multiple intelligences and neurolinguistic programming, but research tends to
indicate that there is little difference in the way that literal and figurative language are
processed. Metaphor, then, can be taught and learned in the same way as grammar
and lexis, but also has a role as a tool in teaching other facets of the language.
Despite the apparent richness of English in many areas, the language remains deficient
in others, particularly those of an abstract or ill-defined nature, where we are tempted or
forced to use metaphor, simile and analogy to clarify meaning. In this context, metaphor
is, quite literally, non-literal, being used not only to emphasise the qualitative similarities
between two words or phrases but also to make definition or explanation more exact. To

this end, we are attempting to objectify the subjective. We are also fond of drawing
comparisons for descriptive purposes through the use of simile and analogy, the former
being used more often at the personal or micro level, the latter to describe situations
and processes. In all cases, what we are trying to do is to conjure up an image, often
colourful, in the minds of the listeners which will allow them to comprehend complex or
abstract meaning and to make meaning concrete and therefore permanent. There is a
difference, then, between using a metaphor (I saw the headmistress sailing down the
corridor), a simile (he eats like a pig) or an analogy (politics is like football), and
speaking metaphorically, which seems to encompass all the aforementioned as well as
lexis as diverse as hyperbolae and Cockney rhyming slang.
Much of what we find difficult to describe and define is a product of the society that we
live in, a facet of society itself, or an aspect of change in society. The Germans are more
adept at labelling such sociological phenomena, and quick in their sociolinguistic
responses. Hence the term Zeitgeist, meaning the general intellectual, moral, and
cultural climate of an era, which has crept its way into English dictionaries and been
adopted as part of the intellectual genre rather than the nearest we can get to it (spirit of
the age). Of similar origins are loan words such as angst and weltanschauung (world
view), calques, or loan translations, such as Superman and Saturday and semicalques such as chopsticks, while other words such as apartheid and glasnost are
from cultures where societal necessity was the mother of linguistic invention. Events
and states in one culture may not exist in another, giving rise to a high incidence of
linguistic theft.
We, the British, and the Americans, are not so exact in describing the world we live in,
but good at providing labels for scientific and technological inventions and discoveries
that signify advancement. We are also keen on both inventing (phishing,
googlewhacking), and borrowing (ubersexual, sudoku) words for current fashion and
lifestyle (the Cosmopolitan genre), as if we are only too pleased to describe a world
that we would like to live in rather than the stark reality of the world that most of us
actually inhabit. Perhaps we feel safer in describing our society using metaphor as an
anaesthetic.
The nature and use of metaphor varies widely from culture to culture. Metaphor may be
the product of a cultural incident, an observation by the culture on its own
characteristics, or a feeling generated by the culture. Metaphor, then, may be useful in
exploring and understanding culture, though one must be aware of the context when
attempting to translate or find equivalents. The following metaphors and sayings tell us
something about the culture they come from:
Woe to him who gives a preference to one neighbor over another. (Ireland)
Gentle words open iron gates. (Bulgaria)
Convert great quarrels into small ones, and small ones into nothing. (China)
Fair speech turns elephants away from the garden path. (Swahili)
If a man steals gold, he is put in prison. If he steals land, he is made king. (Japan)
Unless you fill up the crack, you will have to build a new wall. (West Africa)
Metaphor can be valuable not only at the society level, but also at the individual level.
We, as mere patients, are not, for example, linguistically equipped to describe medical
complaints. There are probably as many kinds of headache as there are types of snow,
but Inuktitut (Inuit) and Finnish have the words for snow in their everyday vocabularies
whereas those of us who are not medically trained refer to knives stabbing and full of
cotton-wool to describe our head ailments. Psychiatrists and psychoanalysts fight a
constant battle to infer meaning through a barrage of metaphor with a good measure of
nuance and innuendo thrown in.

At the situational level, metaphor offers a convenient mode of describing work and the
workplace. As language teachers, we often find ourselves referring to our work load as
being up to my neck in it or snowed under, our institution as the factory, our facilities
as Victorian our superior as The Chief, co-operation as pulling together, our elder
colleagues as dinosaurs and our work as the grindstone. In this situation, metaphor
performs the same function of adding colour, though perhaps for different purposes,
those of relieving tedium, describing common ground, or making light of the onerous.
Metaphor at individual and situational levels has two major functions; to conjure up a
meaningful image, but also to allow the listener to make the transfer between the
language of the layperson or the person outside their social sphere and their own
specialised professional, technical or cultural terminology. Metaphor is as much a
product of idiolect as of extrinsic social forces. As our individual linguistic worlds
become increasingly infested with intra-professional jargon (witness our own ELT world)
and as society becomes increasingly fragmented, this function of metaphor assumes
enormous communicative value and importance on the inter-personal, inter-professional
and inter- (sub) cultural levels.
If metaphor is so important, then why dont we teach it? The nearest one finds in most
course material is the ubiquitous unit on describing items in a shop, when one might
come across the occasional simile (its like/looks like) amongst a welter of language
including a thing with, made of and a variety of relative clauses. Metaphors may also
be found in the unit on poetry at advanced level, the units which have songs in them,
and, of course, in authentic reading passages chosen for reasons other than their clarity
and uncoloured language. There have been occasional attempts to adapt conventional
exercises to teach and practise metaphors using common concept-image relationships
such as anger and heat (a blazing row) and quantity and water (showered with
compliments), which are probably better presented as lexical chunks. Similarly, there
are thematic focuses such as metaphors to do with the body or the weather, but such
classifications tend to be simplistic, decontextualised and deal with common fixed
expressions. Classifications of metaphors also present a problem akin to that of the
traditional listing of phrasal verbs according to the main verb or the preposition, with
metaphors presenting a more complex problem in that they can be classified according
to part of speech (noun, verb or adjective), the derivation of the metaphor (colour, the
weather, the body), or to what it describes (people, health, event/state):
A red-letter day (adjective, colour, event)
A rough diamond (adjective + noun, object, person)
The foot of the mountain (noun, body, place)
To be in the pink (adjective, colour, health)
To be snowed under (verb, weather, state)
The problem for the teacher and the learner is that metaphor is often unpredictable and
personalized. One mans poison may be another mans nectar of the gods. It may be
that some metaphors are unnecessary, different or meaningless in the learners own
language. Metaphor requires interpretation rather than interpreting. Even in our own
grammar instruction, we are taught the definitions of metaphors and similes and how to
distinguish between them, but not how to make or use them.
There is strong case for teaching metaphor (as with phrasal verbs) as lexis, for drawing
attention to it in any noticing stage of a lesson, and for storing it meaningfully. Certainly,
learners need to see or hear a lot of metaphor, perhaps through stories and anecdotes,
before they can produce their own. In a monolingual environment, where exposure is
lacking, comparisons may be drawn with metaphors in the mother tongue in order to

highlight non-literal meaning and clarify ambiguity; One swallow doesnt make a
summer. Probably the best vehicle for exploring metaphor, however, is the reading
passage, since listening texts demand instant attention and metaphors within them may
be insignificant in terms of general meaning, confused, or be missed completely. In an
authentic reading passage, however, metaphor can easily be concept and image
checked:
Smart little restaurants boasting cuisine to die for have sprung up all over Dublin
Can restaurants boast? No
What springs up? Flowers, plants
Would you die for this food? No
There is also logic to metaphor which lends itself to systematic lexical teaching. Since
metaphorical expressions in our language are tied to metaphorical concepts, language
often develops with the concept in a systematic way. An example would be the concept
Time is money, which is based on the scarcity and value of time in our society. The
root metaphor gives rise to common phrases such as:
Youre wasting my time.
How do you spend your time these days?
I've invested a lot of time in that project.
I don't have enough time to spare for that.
Take the motorway; itll save you an hour.
He's living on I borrowed time.
You should use our time more profitably.
Similarly, common collocations reflect the same basic metaphorical relationship. We talk
about hourly rates, yearly rentals, annual interest and paying our debt to society by
serving or doing time. Similar base metaphors include Life is a river and Argument is
war. The scope for exploring lexical sets and collocation in this framework is enormous.
Metaphor is also closely linked to functional language. Lakoff and Johnson identify the
orientational metaphor commonly found in our everyday language to describe the
spatial organization of our lives. Orientational metaphors are either locational (going up
to town, hes down the pub, thus substituting for complex locational descriptions, or
based on the metaphor that health, life, happiness, virtue, consciousness and common
sense (good) are up, while illness, death, sadness, depravity, unconsciousness and
irrationality (bad) are down. Other orientational metaphors referring to control, power,
status and quantity have to do with in-out, front-back, on-off, deep-shallow, centralperipheral, all of which give a concept a spatial orientation which has a real physical
basis. Hence:
Things are looking up
Put your feelings aside
That would be beneath me
Down in the dumps
Hes climbing the ladder
He sank into a coma

Im in deep water
Hes at the peak of his
career
Im out of work
Productivity is going up
Im coming down with the
flu
Im feeling low these days

Hes in the upper echelon

He dropped dead
At the peak of fitness
Hes in top shape
I usually rise early
His spirits sank/rose

Songs are also a rich source of metaphor, and because learners are often interested, a
good context within which to categorise and explain basic use. Certain metaphors are
common to particular genres of music, such as the use of the railroad in country and
western:
I wish I was a headlight on a northbound train
In popular and rock music, metaphor may be overt:

'Oh honey you turn me on, I'm a radio

Tangential:
Old trees just grow stronger, old rivers grow wilder every day, old people just grow
lonesome
Related to sub-culture and street language:
If ya'll can quit poppin' off at your jaws well then I canwe all fall down like toy soldiers
And can again be easily identified:
A nation turns its lonely eyes to you
Can a nation have eyes?
Can it be lonely?
It is the imagery of metaphor and its value in description and explanation, which makes
it such a powerful teaching tool which course materials and syllabuses barely pay lip
service to. Metaphor is difficult to test, while teachers may feel unable to cope with its
complexities. In two recent articles in Humanising Language Teaching, Simon Mumford
clearly demonstrates how metaphor can be used in teaching grammar by making
connections based on shape, structure, sound, object and process, between familiar
objects and unfamiliar language. Metaphors help to avoid lengthy explanation and are
often memorable, as are proverbs and sayings (often metaphorical in themselves).
Using them as teaching tools helps learners to understand and use them for
communicative purposes. One only has to be a little wary in that the over-use of
metaphor may detract from central meaning. Over-use of metaphor can also be
unnatural, inappropriate, jarring on the ear of the listener or symptomatic of showing
off, and judicious use is recommended. Inappropriate use of metaphors is often
characterised by the mixed metaphor and malapropism (Once you open a can of
worms, they always come home to roost). The analogy here is with statistics where
anything may be connected with anything, but the connection is only of value if there is
an underlying rationale.
Much has been made of the value of metaphor in teacher training, particularly in terms
of attaching images to the common tools of the teacher, and thus a direct springboard
for discussions on methodological issues:
A course book is like a crutch/spare tyre/lifebelt/straightjacket
My classroom is a battlefield/the womb
Alternatively, the metaphor is used to draw parallels with aspects of a chosen situation:
If teachers are like parts of the body, which part do you feel you are in terms of the role
you perform in your institution?
This use of metaphor has filtered down from a wider use in education whereby
metaphor is seen as either cognitive:
Schools are prisons, gardens, factories, societies, families
Teachers are parents, guides, directors, actors, animal trainers
Students are bottles, plants, circus animals
Or generative:
School should be a market-place/a co-operative/a nursery garden/one big family
Learning should be growth, filling up, acquiring goods, building a structure
In the educational context, the distinction between cognitive and generative is at the
very least more relevant and productive than other philosophical and linguistic
classifications such as objective/subjective and ontological/structural metaphors. The
generative metaphor sits comfortably alongside humanistic teaching and training in that
it aims to produce change and is experiential by nature.
In teaching and training, the cognitive metaphor is of immediate use, while the
generative metaphor is designed to encourage and influence actions such as reform,

reflection and ongoing development. Generative metaphors and actions tend to coexist
Students are like limitless containers, for example, implies an ongoing and endless
learning process. Cognitive metaphors are relatively safe ground, generally open only to
personal misinterpretation. Problems occur, however, when cognitive metaphor is
mistaken for generative metaphor and when generative metaphor is misunderstood,
thus producing an error in reasoning and possibly in decisions over process or strategy.
In Britain, the policy of turning social institutions, including schools and universities, into
businesses may well be founded on the unquestioning acceptance of a view of Britain
as a nation of shopkeepers, originally and famously coined by Napoleon. The message
here is that while metaphor and process/state coexist, processes are dynamic and
states may alter. Metaphors may thus become redundant and turn into fossilized lexical
items, or into clichs and dead metaphors (time is running out) which have lost their
impact through over-use. Perhaps this is how proverbs, saying and adages emerge;
they may be the black dwarfs of metaphor.
The real value of metaphor in education lies in its utility as a vehicle for turning fantasy
and concept into reality and practice, both in terms of language for the learner and
methodology for the teacher. Metaphor may provide the only way of perceiving and
experiencing much of the world. We should remember, however, that since neither
language nor methodology is static, we should not obscure newly developed ideas with
metaphors from bygone ages.
In the world of metaphors,
there are no boundaries, ownership, or conflict.
(Vivian Chu)
Song lyrics from: The Grateful Dead, Joni Mitchell, John Prine, Eminem and Paul
Simon.
References and Recommended Reading
Chu, Vivian. Teaching Global Unity Through Proverbs, Metaphors and Storytelling.
Developing Teachers
http://www.developingteachers.com/articles_tchtraining/global1_vivian.htm
Clandfield, Lindsay. Explaining the metaphor vocabulary lessons. Onestop English,
http://www.onestopenglish.com/grammar/vocabulary/metaphor1.htm
Cortazzi, Martin, and Lixian, Jin. Bridges To Learning: Metaphors Of Teaching, Learning
And Language. In Researching And Applying Metaphor, ed. Cameron, L. CUP 1999
Goatly, Andrew. The Language Of Metaphors. Routledge 1997
Kvecses, Zoltn. Metaphor: A Practical Introduction. OUP 2002
Krantz, Caroline. Exploring Metaphor. Macmillan English Dictionary E-lesson Archive
http://www.macmillandictionary.com/medelessonsarchive.htm
Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. Metaphors We Live By. Univ. of Chicago Press
1980
Lakoff, George, Espenson, Jane, and Schwartz, Alan. Master Metaphor List (Second
Edition). Cognitive Linguistics Group, University of California at Berkeley, October 1991
Lazar, Gillian. Exploring Metaphors In The Classroom, British Council/BBC Teaching
English. http://www.teachingenglish.org.uk/think/methodology/metaphor.shtml
Lazar, Gillian. Meanings and Metaphors Cambridge University Press 2003
Mumford, Simon. Explaining Grammar Through Metaphor, Humanising Language
Teaching, Year 7, Issue 3, May 2005
Mumford, Simon. Explaining Grammar Through Metaphor Part 2, Humanising
Language Teaching, Year 7, Issue 6, November 2005
Ormell, Christopher. Eight Metaphors Of Education. Educational Research 38 1996

Ponterotto, Dianne. Metaphors We Can Learn By. English Teaching Forum 32 1994
Sommer, Elyse, and Weiss, Dorrie. Metaphors Dictionary. Visible Ink Press 1996
EDITORIAL
In Metaphorically Speaking by Steve Darn and Ian White deal with other issues related
to our classroom practice. These last two contributions also point towards the next,
November issue of HLT which will mainly consist of articles contributed by teachers from
Turkey or based in Turkey.