Ann Coady (@anncoady.bsky.social)

Transcript Episode 96: Welcome back aboard the metaphor train! This is a transcript for Lingthusiasm episode ‘Welcome back aboard the metaphor train!’. It’s 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 that’s enthusiastic about linguistics! I’m Lauren Gawne. Gretchen: I’m Gretchen McCulloch. Today, we’re getting enthusiastic about metaphors. But first, this episode was originally posted as a bonus episode in August of 2019. Lauren: Ever since March 2017, we’ve been doing bonus episodes alongside main episodes every month for people who support us at the Lingthusiast level and above on Patreon. They’re our way of thanking people who support us on Patreon. As a show that doesn’t have sponsors or advertising, it’s your direct support that keeps the show going. Gretchen: The good news is that we’re not part of some network that can just decide we’re 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 it’d be sustainable to keep up a regular production schedule. Lauren: You’d think after doing this show for eight years we would’ve 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 didn’t need to do quite as much digging into other sources and asking other people – our many linguist friends and colleagues – 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 “sandwich,” and then they very quickly – like, within about 12 months – 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 “salad-salad.” Lauren: We also have bonuses where we’ve done things like attempt to create a computer-generated transcript of Lingthusiasm with Janelle Shane, or we’ve 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 you’re someone who’s always got a lot of podcast episodes on the back burner, and you don’t really need more listening material, but you’d 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: We’re really proud of our bonus episodes, and we wanted to give them a bit more attention. We’ve 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, it’s nice to have a bit of a breather. We’ve been putting up monthly episodes since December 2016 and bonuses since March 2017. We’ve never even been a day late on those. Gretchen: I’m very impressed by us, Lauren. Lauren: We’ve definitely got into a good routine. We plan to continue sharing many more mains and bonuses with you. But it’s 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. What’s 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 I’m maybe a bit nervous about that. Lauren: In fact, the original intro had a call to pre-order the book, which – Gretchen: So, we’ve cut that. Lauren: We’ve cut that because you can actually order it now. Gretchen: That ship’s sailed. You can just buy it. It’s fine. Lauren: It’s so funny to think that Because Internet has been out for five years. I mean, it’s 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. I’ve still seen people recommending Because Internet to each other, even just this week. There’s 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 can’t believe that past Gretchen didn’t 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 didn’t talk about metaphoric gestures, which is a whole category, and one that I’ve 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 – 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 “behind” us. Gretchen: And we talk about looking “ahead” 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 – American Sign Language – has the past behind us and the future ahead of us. So does LSF – French Sign Language. I haven’t checked all of the other signed languages in the LSF family because it’s a huge family, but this seems to be something that carries over from a similar cultural context. Lauren: Yeah, it’s 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, that’s not the case for all languages. There’s Aymara, which is spoken in the north of Chile and in bordering countries. In Aymara, there’s a metaphor about the past being in front of you. Gretchen: Which, when you think about it, actually makes sense because you can see what’s already happened, and you can’t see what’s going to happen, so it makes sense to put that behind your head where you can’t see it, but that’s 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 don’t 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. There’s 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: It’s 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 we’ve come, look back to times before. Gretchen: But at least it’s after the first time that we’ve 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, there’s a new bonus every month at patreon.com/lingthusiasm. [Music] Gretchen: “Lauren, look how far we’re come.” Lauren: “Hm. I feel like we’re at a crossroads.” Gretchen: “Are you saying we’ll just have to go our separate ways?” Lauren: “I just feel like we can’t turn back now.” Gretchen: “I don’t know if this relationship is going anywhere.” Lauren: “This year has been a long and bumpy road.” Gretchen: “It’s really a dead-end street.” [Laughter] Okay. So… Lauren: How long do you think we can keep that up for? Gretchen: We’re not breaking up the podcast. We’re not breaking up the band. Please don’t 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 – is the most basic way. Here, we’re talking about a podcasting friendship, but we’re using all of these features of a physical journey to talk about that. Gretchen: Things like, “going anywhere,” “long, bumpy road,” “dead-end street,” “crossroads,” “turning back” – some of these are so engrained in the way we talk about relationships with people that you don’t even necessarily think of them as metaphors anymore. Something like “Look how far we’ve come” or “We’ll have to go our separate ways” is technically a metaphor. Going different ways is a physical thing you can do. But it’s so engrained in the way we talk about emotional relationships, or friendships, or these kinds of things that we don’t even necessarily think about them as a metaphor. Lauren: Yeah. I mean, I’m still gonna be here in Melbourne. You’re still gonna be in Montreal. If we were to quote-unquote “go our separate ways,” 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: We’re so used to thinking in metaphors. I think this idea of extended metaphors – 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 “My love is a red, red rose” or something like this and thinking, “Okay. Well, that’s fine. I guess this poet’s gonna do this.” 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: “Metaphor” comes via French via Latin from the Greek “metapherein,” meaning “transfer” – from “meta-,” which means “over,” and “-pherein,” which means “to bear or to carry.” The “meta-” also shows up in other prefix like “metaphysics,” which is like “over physics.” Or sometimes you talk about something being very “meta.” It’s beyond the literal sense. “-Pherein” meaning “carry” shows up in – Lauren: Oh, like “transfer.” Gretchen: Well, that’s the Latinate equivalent. “-Pherein” shows up in other words like “paraphernalia,” which are the extra things you carry around with you. Or “semaphore.” Lauren: “Semaphore” like the flags? Gretchen: Yeah. Like the flags, which I guess are probably signs that you carry. Lauren: Hmm. Gretchen: It’s less-directly related to F-E-R in Latin, as in “transfer” itself. A metaphor carries something over – carries an idea over – 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 we’re talking about really abstract ideas, it’s 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 – especially, even if you look cross-culturally, there’s some variation. We’ll talk about that. But overall, there’s these common features where, if something is good, it’s upwards, and bad is downwards. Happy is upwards and sad is downwards. There’s 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, that’s probably good. If you’re lying flat on the ground, maybe you’re dead or something. Another one that I really like is phrases like “to grasp” a concept or “to gather” what you’ve 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 “give” you this idea. Or we could “put” all our ideas together. Gretchen: Or sometimes we use sight to talk about ideas – I “see” what you mean or that sounds “clear” 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 “wichtig,” which I’d always had trouble remembering, means “important.” That’s fine. They clearly didn’t borrow it from Latin and French like English did. But I always was like, “Okay, ‘wichtig.’ That sounds like it should have some sort of word that’s related to it in English,” but that word that I think of it being related to in English is definitely not anything sounding like “important.” Then I learned that it could also be translated as “heavy,” which is also “gewichtig,” which thereby makes it cognate with “weighty.” Lauren: Ooo, a “weighty” idea. Gretchen: Yeah. A “weighty” idea is an important idea, right? Lauren: That sits really well with me. Gretchen: Exactly. And even if I wouldn’t necessarily talk about a weighty idea myself, I can use that as a memory peg for “Oh, ‘wichtig.’ Something’s a weighty idea – it’s important.” Or a person is “wichtig” – they’re weighty. They’re important. They’ve got dignitas and gravitas they’re 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 that’s come out of a field called “cognitive semantics.” 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 – 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 – your courses or passages. And then your – 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 – as opposed to the flow rate of people. Once they taught them these metaphors – 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 – things like serial versus parallel battery configurations, which is definitely a thing I remember learning about in high school physics. Don’t really remember the science behind – Gretchen: I don’t think I did. If I did, I don’t remember it. But I don’t even know if I ever learned it. Lauren: They found that – 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 you’re looking at serial versus parallel resistor configurations – and who amongst us has not? – Gretchen: Me, actually. Lauren: – the crowed passages of people actually gave you a better metaphor for correctly predicting what would happen in that circumstance. Gretchen: Oh, that’s 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 – Gretchen: And definitely not know anything about resistors or batteries. Lauren: – the metaphor can only go so far. Gretchen: Yeah. Right. That makes sense. I mean, we do this sometimes when we’re coming up with episode topics. We’ll say, “Okay. We’re 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?” or with respect to sounds or various other types of pieces in language, which can be fairly abstract, to say, “Let’s give people a very concrete object that they can touch, or they can visualise, and have some sense of how it works.” 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, “We need a metaphor. Let’s talk through a bunch of different possibilities. What are some things that have multiple relationships with each other?” 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 – Lauren: You can rearrange coat racks much easier than you can rearrange human skeletons. Gretchen: We really didn’t want to go super gruesome, even though sometimes a skeleton is used as a metaphor like, “This is the backbone of the industry,” or “The skeleton key can open different things” – 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 that’s 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 Gretchen’s 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 “coat rack” – it has to be hanging against the wall. Versus the other kind I call a “hall tree” or a “coat tree.” Lauren: That’s a cute metaphor. Gretchen: Yeah! It’s also a metaphor. Look at that! But it doesn’t really matter because, in the end, the thing that was relevant of “How many hooks do you have?” 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: That’s 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. He’s 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 children’s executive function – how your brain is organised and how much you control how you do things – as if it’s 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, it’s important to be organised – and training and runway space is also important – but, ultimately, there can also only be so many planes in the air or you just overload your brain’s air traffic controllers. If you’re 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 can’t expect people to keep more planes in the air than they’re 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 aren’t 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: I’m trying really hard to sit here and be like “Dandelion children are… yellow?” No, because you get yellow orchids. Do you get yellow orchids? Gretchen: Dandelion children supposedly, according to this metaphor, can kind of bloom wherever they’re planted, whereas orchid children require more delicate care and feeding – 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, everyone’s like, “Oh, great. I want my kid to be an orchid kid.” And that was actually what they were trying to call attention to as like, “It’s dangerous for your kid to be an orchid kid. How can we create more dandelions?” because dandelions thrive everywhere. Lauren: In my brain it’s like “weed children” versus “ugly children.” 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, “Make your child more like a dandelion and less like an orchid” is a really hard sell to parents. Lauren: Every time I think of orchids, I think of people using little spray bottles. Now, I’m thinking of people spray-bottling their children. Gretchen: They’re 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 they’re 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 it’s 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 you’re doing it. But the rope won’t weave itself. It’s not just you learn the language and it’s done. It’s that you’re 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 it’s complete, the rope is a useable thing – a tool. You can do something with language when you’ve 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: It’s quite nice. Because I think, as linguists, we often face the “How many languages do you know?” question. And the “know” implies that there’s an endpoint. If you talk about weaving a rope, it’s very clear that there isn’t one logical size of rope that then you have the rope – 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 – or like, I have some raggedy old whatever language that I’ve forgotten, or I’ve just acquired the shiny new string of another language. Lauren: We’ve talked a lot so far about metaphors being shared in a particular group of people. When you have the cultural references, “dandelion children” versus “orchid children” 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 that’s 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: “The words of the elders are like the droppings of the hyena.” Gretchen: Okay. I’ve definitely never seen hyena droppings. But “words of the elders” are probably good, right? So, that must mean that there’s cultural things the droppings of the hyena are also good, which means that I’m 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: You’re back-logic-ing. Gretchen: Yeah. If I’m thinking of the droppings of a bear or a deer or something, which is an animal that I’m more familiar with, you could use those to tell where they’re going and maybe be better at hunting them. It gives you information and clues and stuff. So, maybe that’s 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 they’re not like, “Oh, those elders. They’re talking such bull” – you know. Lauren: Bull poo. Gretchen: BS. Lauren: The culturally relevant knowledge that you need here – or the locally relevant knowledge that you don’t have – is that hyena droppings are opaque and cloudy when they’re first done, and then they kind of become see-through and transparent. I don’t 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 – or their wisdom becomes clearer – over time. Gretchen: Oh! That’s really good. That’s really elegant. Lauren: Yeah. It is a really elegant metaphor but only if you know how hyena droppings work. Gretchen: Which clearly, I didn’t know. I was just trying to base that on other droppings of other animals, which don’t have this very specific, translucifying property. Lauren: I think metaphors are always one of those – there are sentences when I’ve learnt languages where it’s like, “I understand each one of these words. I don’t really know what this sentence means,” because metaphors are definitely some of those more elaborate rope-weaving parts of the language learning process – to borrow Michael Erard’s metaphor. Gretchen: Understanding the literal words doesn’t necessarily mean you have the cultural context. Sometimes, it’s a cultural reference like if you’re making some sort of “Oh, this is from a game show 30 years ago that everyone used to watch and we still make this reference,” but actually if you haven’t seen this gameshow, you don’t know that that’s where it’s coming from or something like that. Lauren: I think also we’ve talked a lot about – 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 doesn’t mean that we don’t mess them up. Gretchen: And people do mess them up. This is known sometimes as a “malaphor,” which is like a metaphor but gone bad – specifically named often the Dickensian character Mrs. Malaprop, who used to get words mixed up. But also just “mal-” in general is bad. You get things like, “I wouldn’t trust him with a tent-foot pole.” Lauren: Oh, no! That’s combining “I wouldn’t trust him as far as I could throw him.” Gretchen: Yeah. Lauren: And “I wouldn’t touch him with a ten-foot pole.” Gretchen: Yes. Then you end up with “I wouldn’t trust him with a ten-foot pole,” which you could say, but it’s not an existing metaphor in our culture. Lauren: But it’s actually quite satisfying because it combines both of them. Gretchen: Exactly. I’ve 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 – Lauren: Yeah. Let’s do that. If you’re playing along at home, you can get your phone or your computer out and hit the pause button and argue away with people that you’re listening with. Gretchen: Yeah. See if you can guess before us. Okay. Do you wanna go first then? Lauren: Sure. “Don’t judge a book before it’s hatched.” Gretchen: Ah! This is definitely true about my book. Okay. I think that’s combining “Don’t judge a book by its cover” and “Don’t count your chickens before they’re hatched.” What about “Every cloud has a silver spoon in its mouth”? Lauren: Oh, this is riffing on “silver” for both of them, I think, because it’s “Every cloud has a silver lining,” which means that even bad things can have good bits to them. And if someone’s born with a silver spoon in their mouth – 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 that’s what those are. Lauren: “It’s not rocket surgery.” Gretchen: I think that’s pretty easy, right? “It’s not rocket science” and “It’s not brain surgery.” I guess you could also have “It’s not brain science.” That’s not quite as catchy. Lauren: Doesn’t quite capture it, does it? Gretchen: “You can’t teach a leopard new spots.” Lauren: Ah. “You can’t teach an old dog new tricks,” but “You can’t change a leopard’s spots.” Gretchen: Yeah. Lauren: That one’s a really elaborate mashup. Gretchen: That one’s pretty elaborate. Lauren: “The train has left the frying pan.” Gretchen: “The train has left the station.” And I guess “Out of the frying pan into the fire” or something? Lauren: Yeah. So, the train is on its way to the fire, I guess, is the visual image we’ve got going here. Gretchen: Yeah. “Until the cows come home to roost.” Lauren: “Until the cows come home.” Is that a thing? Gretchen: Yeah. Lauren: And your “Chickens come home to roost.” Gretchen: Yeah. I think “Until the cows come home” is like, “We’ll be talking about this until the cows come home” – like forever. And then the “Chickens come home to roost” 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 they’re all grouped in together like this. Gretchen: And because they’re so fun to look at. Lauren: And because they’re so fun, we’re just gonna share a few more. “Until the pigs freeze over.” Gretchen: Oh, this is good. This is “Until pigs fly” with “Until hell freezes over.” I guess you could also do “Until hell flies,” but I don’t know if that works as well. “It’ll be a walk in the cake.” Lauren: See, this combines “It’ll be a walk in the park” with “It’ll be a cake walk.” And a “cake walk” 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 weren’t especially easy. I don’t 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 – musical chairs – with a thing I love – 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 – 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 “If we can hit that bullseye, then the rest of the dominos will fall like a house of cards. Checkmate!” You’ve 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, that’s 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: “Metaforce be with you!” [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 – Lauren: You mean “roonerspisms.” Gretchen: – Mondegreens and eggcorns, as well as an episode on comparatives and superlatives – Lauren: The best. Gretchen: – and an episode on “do support.” Lauren: “I don’t mind if I do.” Gretchen: Can’t afford to pledge? That’s okay, too. We also really appreciate it if you can recommend Lingthusiasm to anyone in your life who’s 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 “Ancient City” by The Triangles. Gretchen: Stay lingthusiastic! 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