loading . . . Transcript Episode 96: Welcome back aboard the metaphor train! This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode âWelcome back aboard the metaphor train!â. Itâs been lightly edited for readability. Listen to the episode here or wherever you get your podcasts. Links to studies mentioned and further reading can be found on the episode show notes page. [Music] Lauren: Welcome to Lingthusiasm, a podcast thatâs enthusiastic about linguistics! Iâm Lauren Gawne. Gretchen: Iâm Gretchen McCulloch. Today, weâre getting enthusiastic about metaphors. But first, this episode was originally posted as a bonus episode in August of 2019. Lauren: Ever since March 2017, weâve been doing bonus episodes alongside main episodes every month for people who support us at the Lingthusiast level and above on Patreon. Theyâre our way of thanking people who support us on Patreon. As a show that doesnât have sponsors or advertising, itâs your direct support that keeps the show going. Gretchen: The good news is that weâre not part of some network that can just decide weâre not allowed to make the show anymore. When we first started the bonus episodes, they were a bit shorter than the main episodes because we wanted to make sure that itâd be sustainable to keep up a regular production schedule. Lauren: Youâd think after doing this show for eight years we wouldâve made Lingthusiasm a lean and efficient production. And yet, it turns out, we still take a lot of time to put these episodes together because we just keep having higher standards. Gretchen: Yeah. We definitely do a lot more research now because some of the early topics we covered were stuff that we already had a whole bunch of background on, and so we didnât need to do quite as much digging into other sources and asking other people â our many linguist friends and colleagues â for their suggestions and input, which we do a lot more of now. Lauren: This is also true for the bonuses. They went from being these 10-to-20 minutes on things like the linguistics of swearing or what we mean by the word âsandwich,â and then they very quickly â like, within about 12 months â became very similar to main episodes both in length and in structure and the amount of research that we do. Gretchen: We do sometimes do a bonus episode that is a deep dive into a single research article, like the time we discussed Bill Labov sneaking a rabbit into a primary school. Lauren: Hm, yes, classic. Gretchen: Or the time we talked about the very classic salad-salad paper, which is about, you know when you have egg salad and potato salad and then âsalad-salad.â Lauren: We also have bonuses where weâve done things like attempt to create a computer-generated transcript of Lingthusiasm with Janelle Shane, or weâve done Q&A episodes. We have at least 90 bonus episodes available to you right now, which make a really fun catalogue of listening alongside the main episodes. Gretchen: They can be a bit of a blast from the past if you go back to some of the very early ones. If youâre someone whoâs always got a lot of podcast episodes on the back burner, and you donât really need more listening material, but youâd just like to help us keep existing long into the future, we also really appreciate your support for whatever reason you wanna give it to us. Lauren: Weâre really proud of our bonus episodes, and we wanted to give them a bit more attention. Weâve taken this older bonus to share with you today. Gretchen: Also, frankly, this gives us a bit of a break while still giving you something to listen to. Lauren: Yeah, itâs nice to have a bit of a breather. Weâve been putting up monthly episodes since December 2016 and bonuses since March 2017. Weâve never even been a day late on those. Gretchen: Iâm very impressed by us, Lauren. Lauren: Weâve definitely got into a good routine. We plan to continue sharing many more mains and bonuses with you. But itâs really fun to also get to revisit some of our older episodes. Gretchen: Occasionally, building in a break into our production schedule is something that also helps us keep the show sustainable. Lauren: This episode is all about how metaphors are something that is deeply embedded into the way we talk about everyday things. Whatâs one thing you noticed about re-listening to episode, Gretchen? Gretchen: This metaphor episode aired right around the time that my book, Because Internet, was coming out. You can hear how Iâm maybe a bit nervous about that. Lauren: In fact, the original intro had a call to pre-order the book, which â Gretchen: So, weâve cut that. Lauren: Weâve cut that because you can actually order it now. Gretchen: That shipâs sailed. You can just buy it. Itâs fine. Lauren: Itâs so funny to think that Because Internet has been out for five years. I mean, itâs also a complete testament to your work that it is so relevant after five years, which, is like, half-a-century in internet time. Gretchen: Yeah. Iâve still seen people recommending Because Internet to each other, even just this week. Thereâs actually an extended metaphor in the final chapter of Because Internet about how we should think of language like a massive, collective, participatory project, like the internet itself, rather than as a book, which is static and unchanging. I canât believe that past Gretchen didnât think to give myself a plug in the previous version of this episode. What did you notice listening to this episode, Lauren? Lauren: I was really confused how we got through a whole episode on metaphor, and we didnât talk about metaphoric gestures, which is a whole category, and one that Iâve been obsessed with for a really long time. Gretchen: Well, that may have been because we talked about gesture and metaphors two bonus episodes earlier in the interview with Alice Gaby. Lauren: Ah, yeah. We talked about time and space metaphors, how time â which is not a thing you can easily pin down. We often use space to talk about it. In English, we talk about and we gesture about the past being âbehindâ us. Gretchen: And we talk about looking âaheadâ to the future. This pops up in a lot of Western cultures in speech, in gesture, and even in the way that signed languages in Western cultures construct how they do tense. ASL â American Sign Language â has the past behind us and the future ahead of us. So does LSF â French Sign Language. I havenât checked all of the other signed languages in the LSF family because itâs a huge family, but this seems to be something that carries over from a similar cultural context. Lauren: Yeah, itâs the same for Auslan and other signed languages related to BSL, which are not related to American Sign Language, but they share this cultural metaphor of the past behind you as an influence on the tense system. I mean, thatâs not the case for all languages. Thereâs Aymara, which is spoken in the north of Chile and in bordering countries. In Aymara, thereâs a metaphor about the past being in front of you. Gretchen: Which, when you think about it, actually makes sense because you can see whatâs already happened, and you canât see whatâs going to happen, so it makes sense to put that behind your head where you canât see it, but thatâs just not what we do in English and a lot of other Western cultures. I remember in that episode, we talked to Alice about her work with Kuuk Thayorre in Northern Queensland here in Australia, where their metaphor for time is that time moves from east to west, just like the sun. Gretchen: Oh, that makes sense. Lauren: But they donât use it in their speech. They just use it in their gestures. Gretchen: Oh, yeah, like how English speakers will gesture from left to right for a sequence of events, whereas speakers of languages that are written from right to left would gesture in the other direction. Lauren: Yeah. Thereâs also evidence of Chinese speakers gesturing from top to bottom for time, especially discussing different generations in a family, which is part of the writing system influence on gesture. Gretchen: Itâs so interesting how metaphors get picked up and shared between cultures and how there are so many different levels of embedded metaphor in how humans do language. It was really fun to record this original episode, and absolutely a delight to revisit it. Lauren: Just a quick note that this bonus is before we went through our second major round of updating our microphone situation for this show. Again, a nice way to look at how far weâve come, look back to times before. Gretchen: But at least itâs after the first time that weâve updated our mic situation, which we would not subject you to. Both of those were thanks to patron support. Lauren: If you want to get access to over 90 other bonus episodes like this one and many, many other topics, thereâs a new bonus every month at patreon.com/lingthusiasm. [Music] Gretchen: âLauren, look how far weâre come.â Lauren: âHm. I feel like weâre at a crossroads.â Gretchen: âAre you saying weâll just have to go our separate ways?â Lauren: âI just feel like we canât turn back now.â Gretchen: âI donât know if this relationship is going anywhere.â Lauren: âThis year has been a long and bumpy road.â Gretchen: âItâs really a dead-end street.â [Laughter] Okay. So⊠Lauren: How long do you think we can keep that up for? Gretchen: Weâre not breaking up the podcast. Weâre not breaking up the band. Please donât worry about this. We are merely exploring how you can use an extended metaphor to talk about a relationship as a physical journey. Lauren: A metaphor is when you take features of one thing, and you apply them to something else â is the most basic way. Here, weâre talking about a podcasting friendship, but weâre using all of these features of a physical journey to talk about that. Gretchen: Things like, âgoing anywhere,â âlong, bumpy road,â âdead-end street,â âcrossroads,â âturning backâ â some of these are so engrained in the way we talk about relationships with people that you donât even necessarily think of them as metaphors anymore. Something like âLook how far weâve comeâ or âWeâll have to go our separate waysâ is technically a metaphor. Going different ways is a physical thing you can do. But itâs so engrained in the way we talk about emotional relationships, or friendships, or these kinds of things that we donât even necessarily think about them as a metaphor. Lauren: Yeah. I mean, Iâm still gonna be here in Melbourne. Youâre still gonna be in Montreal. If we were to quote-unquote âgo our separate ways,â we would not change anything about our physical location. Gretchen: In fact, if we were to go in different directions, we would, statistically, probably end up closer together on this physical Earth-orb. Lauren: Closer together, yeah. Gretchen: Just saying. Lauren: Weâre so used to thinking in metaphors. I think this idea of extended metaphors â I think when I learnt about metaphors in high school, it was like you do one clever thing in one sentence with some words. But, actually, the thing I love about metaphors is that they are kinda pervasive in the way that we think. Gretchen: Yeah. I remember learning âMy love is a red, red roseâ or something like this and thinking, âOkay. Well, thatâs fine. I guess this poetâs gonna do this.â But the kind that are really fascinating are the ones that we use every day without even thinking about them as much. Do we wanna do a bit of etymology? Lauren: Yeah. I think so. Gretchen: âMetaphorâ comes via French via Latin from the Greek âmetapherein,â meaning âtransferâ â from âmeta-,â which means âover,â and â-pherein,â which means âto bear or to carry.â The âmeta-â also shows up in other prefix like âmetaphysics,â which is like âover physics.â Or sometimes you talk about something being very âmeta.â Itâs beyond the literal sense. â-Phereinâ meaning âcarryâ shows up in â Lauren: Oh, like âtransfer.â Gretchen: Well, thatâs the Latinate equivalent. â-Phereinâ shows up in other words like âparaphernalia,â which are the extra things you carry around with you. Or âsemaphore.â Lauren: âSemaphoreâ like the flags? Gretchen: Yeah. Like the flags, which I guess are probably signs that you carry. Lauren: Hmm. Gretchen: Itâs less-directly related to F-E-R in Latin, as in âtransferâ itself. A metaphor carries something over â carries an idea over â from one domain to another and often from a concrete domain to a more abstract domain. Lauren: This goes back to one of our favourite themes on the show, which is the idea that humans are just giant meat puppets and language is always kind of tied to the very physical-ness of our human bodies. Gretchen: Even when weâre talking about really abstract ideas, itâs easier to do so if we evoke very physical things in the world. Lauren: You find that a lot of the metaphors have a consistent â especially, even if you look cross-culturally, thereâs some variation. Weâll talk about that. But overall, thereâs these common features where, if something is good, itâs upwards, and bad is downwards. Happy is upwards and sad is downwards. Thereâs this kind of correlation between this, and it has to do with the fact that we are bipedal and vertical beings. Gretchen: We have to struggle against gravity. If you managed to succeed against gravity and stand up, thatâs probably good. If youâre lying flat on the ground, maybe youâre dead or something. Another one that I really like is phrases like âto graspâ a concept or âto gatherâ what youâve understood. That uses a physical action of picking up or holding something as a metaphor for understanding something. Lauren: Again, ideas are very vague and abstract. And so we turn ideas into physical concepts, like little physical blocks. I can âgiveâ you this idea. Or we could âputâ all our ideas together. Gretchen: Or sometimes we use sight to talk about ideas â I âseeâ what you mean or that sounds âclearâ to me. Those are using a different metaphor to talk about a similar domain because ideas are very abstract. I had a really fun experience a few months ago when I learned that the German word âwichtig,â which Iâd always had trouble remembering, means âimportant.â Thatâs fine. They clearly didnât borrow it from Latin and French like English did. But I always was like, âOkay, âwichtig.â That sounds like it should have some sort of word thatâs related to it in English,â but that word that I think of it being related to in English is definitely not anything sounding like âimportant.â Then I learned that it could also be translated as âheavy,â which is also âgewichtig,â which thereby makes it cognate with âweighty.â Lauren: Ooo, a âweightyâ idea. Gretchen: Yeah. A âweightyâ idea is an important idea, right? Lauren: That sits really well with me. Gretchen: Exactly. And even if I wouldnât necessarily talk about a weighty idea myself, I can use that as a memory peg for âOh, âwichtig.â Somethingâs a weighty idea â itâs important.â Or a person is âwichtigâ â theyâre weighty. Theyâre important. Theyâve got dignitas and gravitas theyâre bringing to the room. Lauren: We are absolutely by no means the first people to observe these features of metaphors as being very grounded in our experience and kind of extended across lots of little examples mapping onto this one big idea. This is something thatâs come out of a field called âcognitive semantics.â George Lakoff is one of the key practitioners. You may have heard of him. He likes to do public commentary on big cultural metaphors a lot. But lots of people have been working on this over the years â documenting or looking at these pervasive metaphors, looking at how they vary across cultures. One of my absolutely favourite things about this area is a study by Gentner & Gentner from 1982 that shows how not only do these metaphors exist in our brain, but they can affect the way we think about and process information in the world. They had a study where they were teaching people how electric circuits work. They had two different metaphors. The first is moving people through a series of passages. Gretchen: So, tunnels like you might send people down to the subway in our something like that? Lauren: Yeah. That was your wires â your courses or passages. And then your â Gretchen: Electrons? Lauren: Electrons are little people. And then the current is how many people can go through the passage. Voltage is how many people are pushing. You map those things. They taught a whole bunch of people that metaphor for how an electric circuit works. Then, they taught a different group of people a metaphor for electric circuits on a hydraulic water-pumping system. Gretchen: So, now your pipes are your wires, and the water is your electrons or something. Lauren: Yep. Then, the flow rate of the water is the current â as opposed to the flow rate of people. Once they taught them these metaphors â you kind of figured them out as soon as I said them. They have obvious mappings between the original domain and these areas that they were using as metaphors. Once they taught people the metaphors, they got them to think about electrical systems using the metaphors â things like serial versus parallel battery configurations, which is definitely a thing I remember learning about in high school physics. Donât really remember the science behind â Gretchen: I donât think I did. If I did, I donât remember it. But I donât even know if I ever learned it. Lauren: They found that â because the way batteries are cabled up, if you have them all lined up together or you have them all coming off different cables and coming back, it affects how things like voltage and resistance work. If people learnt the flowing water metaphor, they could figure out the better outcome of how that works. Having the water pumped through different pumps was a better analogy for batteries. But if youâre looking at serial versus parallel resistor configurations â and who amongst us has not? â Gretchen: Me, actually. Lauren: â the crowed passages of people actually gave you a better metaphor for correctly predicting what would happen in that circumstance. Gretchen: Oh, thatâs interesting. Different metaphors can help you reason about different domains. Lauren: Yeah. But a metaphor can only take you so far, right? Even though both of them are pretty good metaphors, and you could figure them out even without knowing a whole lot about how electrical systems worked â Gretchen: And definitely not know anything about resistors or batteries. Lauren: â the metaphor can only go so far. Gretchen: Yeah. Right. That makes sense. I mean, we do this sometimes when weâre coming up with episode topics. Weâll say, âOkay. Weâre gonna need a metaphor to talk about verbs. What are some physical objects that have similar properties to the things that we wanna talk about with respect to verbs?â or with respect to sounds or various other types of pieces in language, which can be fairly abstract, to say, âLetâs give people a very concrete object that they can touch, or they can visualise, and have some sense of how it works.â Lauren: We spent ages with the coat rack one, which was explaining how verbs help structure sentences. We kept stress-testing the metaphor. Gretchen: I remember that one because we recorded that episode when I was visiting you in Australia. I remember we went for a walk the day before we recorded it saying, âWe need a metaphor. Letâs talk through a bunch of different possibilities. What are some things that have multiple relationships with each other?â I ended up being very pleased with the coat rack metaphor in that episode, but it took us walking through a bunch of different metaphors. I know we rejected the verb is like the skeleton and the other parts of the sentence are like body parts that can hang onto that because one of the big problems â Lauren: You can rearrange coat racks much easier than you can rearrange human skeletons. Gretchen: We really didnât want to go super gruesome, even though sometimes a skeleton is used as a metaphor like, âThis is the backbone of the industry,â or âThe skeleton key can open different thingsâ â something like that. A skeleton is sometimes used as a metaphor in a non-gruesome sense, but in this particular context, we really wanted to talk about things going on and off. It was just gonna end up really bloody. Lauren: The thing I found fascinating is we recorded that whole episode, and we actually had different physical coat racks in our minds. Gretchen: Because you had the coat rack in your mind thatâs the kind that you hang against the wall? Lauren: No, I had the freestanding coat rack. Gretchen: You had the freestanding one. Maybe I had the one hanging against the wall. I kind of had both maybe. Lauren: Turns out Gretchenâs idea of a coat rack is much more fast-and-loose than mine. I had a very specific physical model in my head when I was building the metaphor. Gretchen: Well, because I think I call a âcoat rackâ â it has to be hanging against the wall. Versus the other kind I call a âhall treeâ or a âcoat tree.â Lauren: Thatâs a cute metaphor. Gretchen: Yeah! Itâs also a metaphor. Look at that! But it doesnât really matter because, in the end, the thing that was relevant of âHow many hooks do you have?â and these kinds of things was sufficiently parallel for the particular thing that we were talking about. There are actually people whose professional job it is to design metaphors. Lauren: Thatâs a pretty fun job. Gretchen: It always seems like a very cool job to me. One of them is Michael Erard, who works for The Frameworks Institute as a professional metaphor designer. I think that was an institution that Lakoff founded, right? Lauren: Yeah. Heâs definitely involved in some way. I think he founded it. Gretchen: One of the examples of a metaphor that they designed at Frameworks was looking at childrenâs executive function â how your brain is organised and how much you control how you do things â as if itâs air traffic control for your brain. Air traffic controllers are obviously those people who are telling the airplanes when they can come down. The insight that they had from this was, yes, itâs important to be organised â and training and runway space is also important â but, ultimately, there can also only be so many planes in the air or you just overload your brainâs air traffic controllers. If youâre wondering why children are frustrated and unable to do all the things they want to do, maybe they could just only keep so many planes in the air. You can support that to a certain extent by improving their organisational skills, but you canât expect people to keep more planes in the air than theyâre capable of doing. Lauren: Yeah. In order to sell this metaphor, they had to do what we do for the episodes. They kind of test them and make sure that all the implications of the metaphor arenât potentially problematic. Gretchen: There was another metaphor that I remember reading Michael Erard criticising, which was there was some sort of metaphor about dandelion children versus orchid children. Lauren: Oh, dear. Gretchen: The problem with this metaphor is, is that, okay, these are two different flowers. People know what these flowers are. Lauren: Iâm trying really hard to sit here and be like âDandelion children are⊠yellow?â No, because you get yellow orchids. Do you get yellow orchids? Gretchen: Dandelion children supposedly, according to this metaphor, can kind of bloom wherever theyâre planted, whereas orchid children require more delicate care and feeding â or delicate emotional attention. Lauren: Oh, I was thinking of irises. Gretchen: In theory, this is a useful distinction. But the problem is, is that people have very different values associated with dandelions versus orchids. So, everyoneâs like, âOh, great. I want my kid to be an orchid kid.â And that was actually what they were trying to call attention to as like, âItâs dangerous for your kid to be an orchid kid. How can we create more dandelions?â because dandelions thrive everywhere. Lauren: In my brain itâs like âweed childrenâ versus âugly children.â Gretchen: Yeah. I mean, some people like orchids, Lauren. The problem was most people, on average, like orchids more than they like dandelions. Even though the metaphor kind of works from a characteristic property sense, I guess, it also comes with a value judgement that ultimately made it not a very good metaphor for trying to help people improve their parenting practices. Lauren: Was also ignoring a lot of other characteristics. Gretchen: Yeah. Like, âMake your child more like a dandelion and less like an orchidâ is a really hard sell to parents. Lauren: Every time I think of orchids, I think of people using little spray bottles. Now, Iâm thinking of people spray-bottling their children. Gretchen: Theyâre very finicky. They grow in these greenhouses and stuff like that, whereas dandelions will just grow in the cracks in the sidewalk. You can see why maybe you want your kid to be able to bloom wherever theyâre planted. That sounds like a good idea. And yet, orchids are just so rare and valuable that this also seems like a really good idea. One better metaphor that I actually heard Michael Erard talk about at the polyglot conference in New York City a number of years ago was that he came up with a new metaphor for language learning. He said that itâs developing a complex skill like weaving a rope. In this metaphor, a good rope has many strands, which have to be woven together tightly in order for the rope to be strong. The strands and the techniques of weaving the rope are like the skills that you begin with, and that you learn, and you develop as youâre doing it. But the rope wonât weave itself. Itâs not just you learn the language and itâs done. Itâs that youâre building up all of these different stands and putting them together and that you have a lot of time and effort going into putting it together. Once itâs complete, the rope is a useable thing â a tool. You can do something with language when youâve learned it. But some people think of learning a language as like filling a bucket or something. You poured in the language and there it is. You never have to do anything else. This idea emphasising the process and all of the different steps of learning a language could be useful to people thinking about their own language learning more productively. Lauren: Nice. I like that metaphor. Gretchen: Itâs quite nice. Because I think, as linguists, we often face the âHow many languages do you know?â question. And the âknowâ implies that thereâs an endpoint. If you talk about weaving a rope, itâs very clear that there isnât one logical size of rope that then you have the rope â that a rope can be infinitely long, in theory. Lauren: Yeah. I now just have a few strings of Polish. Gretchen: Exactly. You can conceive of having different amounts of â or like, I have some raggedy old whatever language that Iâve forgotten, or Iâve just acquired the shiny new string of another language. Lauren: Weâve talked a lot so far about metaphors being shared in a particular group of people. When you have the cultural references, âdandelion childrenâ versus âorchid childrenâ make sense. But even as someone who is ostensibly from the culture that that metaphor was designed for, I failed. When you look across cultures, you do get culturally grounded knowledge thatâs required to understand metaphors. I teach this with a metaphor from the Songhai language in Mali. I want you to see what you can make of this metaphor, Gretchen. Gretchen: Okay. Lauren: âThe words of the elders are like the droppings of the hyena.â Gretchen: Okay. Iâve definitely never seen hyena droppings. But âwords of the eldersâ are probably good, right? So, that must mean that thereâs cultural things the droppings of the hyena are also good, which means that Iâm reasoning from the abstract to the concrete domain rather than the other way around, which is presumably what this metaphor actually wants me to be doing. Lauren: Youâre back-logic-ing. Gretchen: Yeah. If Iâm thinking of the droppings of a bear or a deer or something, which is an animal that Iâm more familiar with, you could use those to tell where theyâre going and maybe be better at hunting them. It gives you information and clues and stuff. So, maybe thatâs also what they think about the hyena droppings? Lauren: I mean, I guess the first thing is that equating anything with poo is generally seen as negative in our culture. Gretchen: Right. I was trying to be positive because presumably theyâre not like, âOh, those elders. Theyâre talking such bullâ â you know. Lauren: Bull poo. Gretchen: BS. Lauren: The culturally relevant knowledge that you need here â or the locally relevant knowledge that you donât have â is that hyena droppings are opaque and cloudy when theyâre first done, and then they kind of become see-through and transparent. I donât know how this works. But this is apparently a fact. Gretchen: This is not a chemistry podcast. Lauren: And so the words of the elders are initially unclear and opaque, but like a good prophesy, they become clearer â or their wisdom becomes clearer â over time. Gretchen: Oh! Thatâs really good. Thatâs really elegant. Lauren: Yeah. It is a really elegant metaphor but only if you know how hyena droppings work. Gretchen: Which clearly, I didnât know. I was just trying to base that on other droppings of other animals, which donât have this very specific, translucifying property. Lauren: I think metaphors are always one of those â there are sentences when Iâve learnt languages where itâs like, âI understand each one of these words. I donât really know what this sentence means,â because metaphors are definitely some of those more elaborate rope-weaving parts of the language learning process â to borrow Michael Erardâs metaphor. Gretchen: Understanding the literal words doesnât necessarily mean you have the cultural context. Sometimes, itâs a cultural reference like if youâre making some sort of âOh, this is from a game show 30 years ago that everyone used to watch and we still make this reference,â but actually if you havenât seen this gameshow, you donât know that thatâs where itâs coming from or something like that. Lauren: I think also weâve talked a lot about â that metaphors are kind of persistent and they have these big, extended uses. But just because we have a cognitive image of how things map from one domain to the other doesnât mean that we donât mess them up. Gretchen: And people do mess them up. This is known sometimes as a âmalaphor,â which is like a metaphor but gone bad â specifically named often the Dickensian character Mrs. Malaprop, who used to get words mixed up. But also just âmal-â in general is bad. You get things like, âI wouldnât trust him with a tent-foot pole.â Lauren: Oh, no! Thatâs combining âI wouldnât trust him as far as I could throw him.â Gretchen: Yeah. Lauren: And âI wouldnât touch him with a ten-foot pole.â Gretchen: Yes. Then you end up with âI wouldnât trust him with a ten-foot pole,â which you could say, but itâs not an existing metaphor in our culture. Lauren: But itâs actually quite satisfying because it combines both of them. Gretchen: Exactly. Iâve got a list of some of these malaphors. If you, Lauren, would like to try to identify what the original metaphors are. Or we can go back and forth if you want because maybe â Lauren: Yeah. Letâs do that. If youâre playing along at home, you can get your phone or your computer out and hit the pause button and argue away with people that youâre listening with. Gretchen: Yeah. See if you can guess before us. Okay. Do you wanna go first then? Lauren: Sure. âDonât judge a book before itâs hatched.â Gretchen: Ah! This is definitely true about my book. Okay. I think thatâs combining âDonât judge a book by its coverâ and âDonât count your chickens before theyâre hatched.â What about âEvery cloud has a silver spoon in its mouthâ? Lauren: Oh, this is riffing on âsilverâ for both of them, I think, because itâs âEvery cloud has a silver lining,â which means that even bad things can have good bits to them. And if someoneâs born with a silver spoon in their mouth â which I used to imagine literally. The problem with metaphors. But it just means that they are super fancy. Gretchen: You mean your baby was not born with a silver spoon in its mouth? Lauren: Thankfully. Gretchen: Yes. I think thatâs what those are. Lauren: âItâs not rocket surgery.â Gretchen: I think thatâs pretty easy, right? âItâs not rocket scienceâ and âItâs not brain surgery.â I guess you could also have âItâs not brain science.â Thatâs not quite as catchy. Lauren: Doesnât quite capture it, does it? Gretchen: âYou canât teach a leopard new spots.â Lauren: Ah. âYou canât teach an old dog new tricks,â but âYou canât change a leopardâs spots.â Gretchen: Yeah. Lauren: That oneâs a really elaborate mashup. Gretchen: That oneâs pretty elaborate. Lauren: âThe train has left the frying pan.â Gretchen: âThe train has left the station.â And I guess âOut of the frying pan into the fireâ or something? Lauren: Yeah. So, the train is on its way to the fire, I guess, is the visual image weâve got going here. Gretchen: Yeah. âUntil the cows come home to roost.â Lauren: âUntil the cows come home.â Is that a thing? Gretchen: Yeah. Lauren: And your âChickens come home to roost.â Gretchen: Yeah. I think âUntil the cows come homeâ is like, âWeâll be talking about this until the cows come homeâ â like forever. And then the âChickens come home to roostâ is another farm metaphor. Lauren: I guess we should say that malaphors also just encompass general aphorisms and sayings which may not actually be metaphors in the way we always think about them. But theyâre all grouped in together like this. Gretchen: And because theyâre so fun to look at. Lauren: And because theyâre so fun, weâre just gonna share a few more. âUntil the pigs freeze over.â Gretchen: Oh, this is good. This is âUntil pigs flyâ with âUntil hell freezes over.â I guess you could also do âUntil hell flies,â but I donât know if that works as well. âItâll be a walk in the cake.â Lauren: See, this combines âItâll be a walk in the parkâ with âItâll be a cake walk.â And a âcake walkâ is a thing I do not know what it is, but I know that it means that it will be easy. Gretchen: When I was in school, they used to do cake walks sometimes as charity fund raisers. Lauren: What was that? Gretchen: They werenât especially easy. I donât know if this is the only kind of cake walk there is. But they were kind of like musical chairs, but the last person left would win a cake, basically. Lauren: Oh. Combines a thing I hate â musical chairs â with a thing I love â winning cakes. It also shows how idioms and metaphors can contain fossilised knowledge that we now no longer have. Gretchen: Yeah. Exactly. Lauren: A cake walk is now more common in a saying than an actual event â in my life. Although not in yours, apparently. Gretchen: We also get, in addition to the very tightly mixed up malaphors, you get longer mixed metaphors, which is when you end up with two metaphors referring to the same thing. Ideas can be both things you grasp and also things you see but mixing them in a way that seems sort of weird. Something like âIf we can hit that bullseye, then the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!â Youâve got a whole bunch of different game metaphors all stacked up on top of each other that each of them would work individually, but together they end up with a really confusing set of imagery. Lauren: Should say that was Futurama character Zapp Brannigan, known for being a bit of a dolt. That was a very deliberately constructed mixed metaphor. Gretchen: Yes, thatâs true. I mean, this tends to happen with maybe only two examples in a more realistic sense. Lauren: I guess it shows how the brain can kind of operate with different metaphors happening at the same time. Gretchen: Can we end this episode with my very favourite metaphor pun? Lauren: Yes, please! Gretchen: âMetaforce be with you!â [Music] Lauren: For more Lingthusiasm and links to all the things mentioned in this episode, go to lingthusiasm.com. You can listen to us on all the podcast platforms or lingthusiasm.com. You can get transcripts of every episode on lingthusiasm.com/transcripts. 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Patrons can also get access to our Discord chatroom to talk with other linguistics fans and be the first to find out about new merch and other announcements. Recent bonus topics include playful mishearing like spoonerisms â Lauren: You mean âroonerspisms.â Gretchen: â Mondegreens and eggcorns, as well as an episode on comparatives and superlatives â Lauren: The best. Gretchen: â and an episode on âdo support.â Lauren: âI donât mind if I do.â Gretchen: Canât afford to pledge? Thatâs okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life whoâs curious about language. Lauren: Lingthusiasm is created and produced by Gretchen McCulloch and Lauren Gawne. Our Senior Producer is Claire Gawne, our Editorial Producer is Sarah Dopierala, our Production Assistant is Martha Tsutsui-Billins, and our Editorial Assistant is Jon Kruk. Our music is âAncient Cityâ by The Triangles. Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic! 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