Metonymy and metaphor are the most powerful force at work in language – 04/10/2024 – Sérgio Rodrigues

In the last column I spoke about literalists and their condemnation – useless, but sowing confusion in the minds of the unwary – of the established use of “através” with the meaning of “through”. This is just one of the mistakes made by lyricists, and they are all caused by hatred of figurative language.

Perhaps because of old school textbooks full of mold, many people think that using metaphor and metonymy is calling things by inappropriate, “poetic” names, changing words just for the sake of beauty.

In the case of metonymy, we say that so-and-so made “forty springs”, for example. In the metaphor, we can call the desert the ocean, the ocean the sheet and the sheet the garden of delights. But who talks like that in real life, right?

If it were just that, the power of metaphors and metonymies would not be small, but I would better understand the struggle of literalists and their style manuals for a direct, sober language, purged of what exact minds see as “freshness”.

It turns out that’s not all. We are talking about the most powerful force at work in language, from end to end, from beginning to end, so prolific and omnipresent that in most cases it is not even visible.

Take the unsuspected word “rule”, with very exact credentials. Much appreciated by literalists in their crusade against figurative language, it is figurative in itself. It is one of the descendants of the Latin “regula”, which originally meant “ruler”, a slat used to draw straight lines.

But what does a stick have to do with a rule? Literally, nothing. A metonymy began the process of expanding meaning. In this case, as we know, we call one thing by the name of another, but there is a concrete link between them, a functional neighborhood. For example, a line of conduct can be drawn from a ruler.

But the unfolding of the senses is rarely content with little. When the semantic load of rule increases to the point of making the word mean law, norm, precept, the wooden strip is already so buried in history that we believe we are sticking to the letter.

It is worth noting that the very letter that podolators cling to is figurative to the core. Lyrics are metonyms for words and have a metaphorical footing. Semantic expansions like this are brush in the history of languages. Fighting against them is nothing more than an attempt to trap wind in a net – did you notice the metaphors?

Maybe the hole (yet again!) is even lower. In the classic “Metaphors of Everyday Life” (Educ), from 1980, linguists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson defend the thesis that metaphor overflows from language to shape our thoughts and social conduct.

“Based primarily on linguistic evidence,” they write, “we have discovered that most of our conceptual system is metaphorical in nature.” Perhaps they wouldn’t even need to add that this system, this way of understanding the world, determines our actions.

The first example that Lakoff and Johnson provide of a metaphorically based concept has special relevance in our social media times: “Debate is war.” This would be evident in phrases such as “He attacked the weak points of my argument” and “What you say is indefensible”, among others that are equally warlike.

Believing that debate is war, when we enter into it we behave like warriors. The metaphor usually wins. In general, the best we can do is to become aware of this and negotiate a dignified peace with it.

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