By Jason Pickett
Metaphors are something we use everyday, unfortunately most people do not realize it. To most people “life is a bowl of cherries” is a metaphor but “I’m going to hit the hay” is not. Of course both are, but to most people “I’m going to hit the hay ” is not, because it does not sound perhaps as profound or poetic. Metaphor is all around us constantly, and without it, life would be much more difficult for us as people, not only to understand each other , but perhaps to also express ourselves in any meaningful way to others at all. It is not only a literary device used by authors and poets to sound as sophisticated as possible, but rather they derive most metaphorical concepts they may have from long established and highly integrated metaphors already existent in society. It shall be the chief ambition of this text to demonstrate just how common metaphors truly are in our society, and also to show perhaps some of the concepts and social consequences metaphor carries.
Interestingly enough, a great deal of the things we speak about using our language we use metaphors on, almost all abstract concepts require metaphor for our understanding of it to be successful. It is interesting because the basic concepts of metaphor, and how it works, is always constructed in the same way, and there are many rules as to how metaphors can work specifically. Often times we do not even think that there is anyway a metaphor can present itself in a given set of language use, but it would perhaps surprise most people that it is indeed present in the very words and not always perhaps in just some cliché or expression. It presents itself in our history as well and in the history of the languages that give us our lexicon or vocabulary.
When one comes right to it, one finds that nearly any concept or idea that man has, is almost entirely expressed by metaphor in an attempt to make others understand what is being expressed by drawing a comparison of like experiences between the person presenting information and his audience. How all of these metaphors can appeal to common experiences shared by everyone is quite interesting to note. The very idea that all humans of a society share enough like experiences is astounding, not only that they do share the experiences with the source domain of the metaphor, but also that they share it in the same way.
In conclusion this text will offer an insight as to how metaphor works and what each concept is composed of. In addition to that this text will offer an insight into some of the most common groups of metaphor and explain some basic properties most metaphors share. Another ambition will be to demonstrate the prominence of metaphor as used by common people in common dialect and so forth. The history of words and how that pertains to metaphor will be observed, and commented on. When the reader finishes this, we hope he will have a strong sense and idea of how important metaphor is not only to his library, but also to his life and relations to others in general.