Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (19 page)

More than once in this chapter we have stated that what holds for nouns, such as “desk”, “elephant”, “tree”, “car”, “part”, “idea”, and “depth”, holds just as much for other parts of speech. We already broached this topic in our discussion of some of the charming verb choices such as “nurse the truck” and “patch people’s teeth”, made by children whose categories
to nurse
and
to patch
didn’t coincide totally with those of adults. We’ll now go into this idea in greater detail.

It’s not so hard to move from nouns to verbs, firstly because many verbs are tightly associated with certain nouns, and vice versa. To start with an obvious example, anyone who can recognize
rain
falling on the ground can also recognize that
it is raining
. The same holds for the category associated with the noun “snow” and the category associated with the verb “to snow”; ditto for “hail” and “to hail”. We move effortlessly back and forth between noun and verb, because the words are identical. But even in cases where there is no phonetic resemblance between noun and verb, there are countless cases where the evocation of a particular verb goes hand in hand with the evocation of a particular noun. When you see a dog and hear it make a sudden loud noise, you are simultaneously perceiving a member of the category
dog
and a member of the category of situations where
something is barking.
In much the same manner, given that mouths eat, drink, and speak, we all perceive, many times per day, members of the categories of situations where
something is eating, something is drinking
, and
something is speaking.
In the same vein, the sun
rises
and
shines
, eyes
look
and see, birds
fly
and
chirp
, cyclists
ride
and
pedal
, leaves
tremble
and
fall
, and so forth.

Our insistence on the idea that verbs, no less than nouns, are the labels of categories might seem to be merely a fine point of philosophy without any consequence. However, we are insisting on it because the same perceptual mechanisms that allow us to recognize pumpkins, pastries, plows, and pigs also allow us to recognize situations where some marketing, menacing, meowing, or mutating is going on. Once one has had enough experience with situations where menacing is going on, one is able to recognize members of this category, to label them as such, to talk about them with one’s friends, to report them to the appropriate authorities, to describe them if called on as a witness in a court, and so forth. One even learns to recognize, from long observation of how people drive their cars, situations where someone is driving in a menacing fashion,
occasionally through hearing just a certain telltale squealing of tires. The fact that the verb “to menace” automatically bubbles up to our conscious mind in such situations is in no way different from the fact that a certain noun bubbles up when we look at a canary, a doorknob, or a pair of pants. These evocations of words are the result of categorization. In the case of verbs just as much as that of nouns, the effortless bubbling-up of a word occurs as a result of a vast number of prior experiences with members of the category in question.

If at first glance the collection of all the members of the category
to nurse
seems vaguer and less “real”, somehow, than the collection of all members of the category
bridge
, that’s simply a prejudice and an illusion. The bridges of the world are not given to us without effort and without blur. Even if all the existing bridges could oblige us by simultaneously lighting up in response to a button-push, there would still be all the bridges from ancient Roman times, ancient Chinese dynasties, and so forth, which have long since disappeared, not to mention all the bridges that are yet to be constructed during this century and all centuries yet to come. And of course, we haven’t even touched on the fictitious bridges seen in paintings and films and described in novels. And what about the miniature bridges built by children out of wooden blocks? Or tree trunks fallen over creeks? Or “jetways” (those tunnels on wheels that link an airplane with a gate)? And then there are bridges (or do they count as such? — that’s the question) built by ants, for ants, and made out of ants! And what about a toothpick casually placed between two plates, affording a shortcut for a wandering ant? What to say about bridges inside one’s mouth, bridges built between distant cultures, bridges between distant ideas? A moment’s thought shows that the category
bridge
is highly elusive. At this point, one might even wonder if situations that deserve the slightly abstract verbs “to nurse”, “to menace”, and “come on!” aren’t rather straightforward in comparison with situations that deserve the visual noun “bridge”.

Let’s move on now to such an everyday word so mundane that most people would never think of it as the name of a category or concept. Namely, we’ll focus on the word “much”. What is the nature of situations that cause this word to spring to one’s lips? What do they all have in common? In short, what is this
much
category? Let’s take a close look at some examples of this abstraction.

What is the shared essence of
much
situations? A
much
situation involves an opposition (usually unconscious) to an imaginary
some
or
somewhat
situation; in other words, a
much
situation involves a mental comparison in which a particular mental knob is “turned up” relative to a milder, more common situation. For example, “I wanted it so much” can only be understood by means of a fleeting comparison with a hypothetical scenario in which the speaker’s desire is less intense. In short, the word “much” is evoked in the mind of English speakers when they want to describe an unexpectedly large quantity or large degree of something, whether it’s concrete (“too much peanut butter”, “not very much air”) or not concrete (“much to my displeasure”, “much more prestige than it deserves”). As for listeners, when they hear the word used, they understand this intention on the part of the speaker, and consequently, in their heads they turn up a small mental knob in order to reflect the speaker’s apparent desire to intensify some part of speech, or even to intensify a phrase or clause.

A
much
situation is thus a situation that resides partly in the objective, outside world and partly in the subjective, inner world of one’s expectations about the nature of the outer world. In order to recognize a
much
situation as such, you have to be concentrating not only on something in the world “out there” (such as the amount of soup you’re being dished up by someone), or on some internal situation (like being hungry or sleepy), but also on your own expectations in such a situation, or on a typical person’s expectations. The exclamation “Hey, they sure didn’t give me much soup!” means that, in comparison with one’s expectations of the amount of soup typically served in restaurants, this serving is on the low end of the spectrum.

If a speaker didn’t feel that some milder contrasting scenario needed to be hinted at (at least subliminally), the word “much” wouldn’t pop to mind. “Too much peanut butter”, when spoken in a given situation, is aimed at evoking in listeners a hypothetical contrasting situation where the
right
amount of peanut butter was used. It’s in this contrast that the phrase’s meaning resides. Likewise, “Thank you very much!” is aimed at evoking in a listener, in a subtle fashion, the idea that the speaker
could
have voiced a less ebullient sentiment; it is therefore heard as a desire to convey gratitude more intensely than some other people might do in the same situation, or more intensely than the same speaker might do in a different situation or in a different mood.

We have seen that
much
situations concern the disparity between the external world and an ideal inner world filled to the brim with expectations and norms. Just as one can hope (though always vainly) to pin down what the essence of the category
bird
is, so here we’ve tried, with the aid of extremely blurry words, at least to hint at what the essence of the category
much
is.

As the above list of examples shows, when one is talking, there are certain readymade syntactic slots into which the word “much” fits very neatly and there fulfills its function. In fact, these syntactic slots themselves constitute another facet of the nature of the word “much”. As we grow up and go to school, we encounter the word “much”
many thousands of times, and if certain spots where that word sits among other words strike us, on first hearing, as a bit surprising, after a while they become more familiar, then turn into a habit, and in the end they wind up being a reflex that is completely unconsciously integrated into us. Ways of placing the word “much” that at the outset seemed odd and unnatural gradually become so familiar that in the end one no longer sees what could at first have seemed puzzling or confusing about them.

Why do we say “I much appreciate all you’ve done for me” but not “I appreciate much all you’ve done for me?” Why do we say “I don’t go out much” and sometimes “I don’t much go out” but never “I much don’t go out”? Why “I’m much in agreement with her” but not “I’m much out of contact with her”? Why “much the same” but not “much the different” or “much the other”? Why “I’m much obliged” but not “I’m much grateful”? Why “much though I’d like to join you” but not “very much though I’d like to join you” or “much although I’d like to join you”? Why is “Many thanks” as common as daisies while “Much thanks” is as rare as orchids? Or is it? A quick Google search revealed a ratio of 200 to 1 in favor of “Many thanks to my friends” as compared to “Much thanks to my friends” — but the fact that the latter exists at all suggests that things might be changing. Here we find ourselves face to face with the blurry and moving contours of the category
appropriate syntactic slots for the word “much”.
Who knows what the just-mentioned ratio will be in five years, ten years, or fifty? Native speakers seldom ask themselves these kinds of questions about word usages, because the patterns are deep parts of their very fiber.

What all this means is that the category
much
— that is, roughly speaking, the full range of situations that evoke the word “much” and a feeling of “muchness” — is a category that possesses not only a
cognitive/emotional
side (while speaking, we feel a need or a desire to emphasize something, to draw a contrast between how things are in fact and how they might have been or may become), but also a
syntactic
side (we sense, as we are building a sentence even while uttering it, various telltale slots where the word could jump right into the sentence with no problem).

A reader might react to this observation by claiming that all we’ve said is that the word “much” has two facets, one being the concept behind it, and the other being the grammatical roles that the word can play in English, and thus that our claim is merely that “much” has both a semantic and a syntactic side (much as does any word), and that semantics and syntax are independent human mental faculties. Such a stance implies that the mental processes that underlie people’s choice of
what
to say and their choice of
how
to say it are autonomous and have nothing in common. But making such a distinction is highly debatable. Could it not be that the mechanisms with which we perceive
grammatical
situations in the world of discourse are cut from the same cloth as those with which we perceive
physical
situations in the world around us?

As a child, one learns to “navigate” (quote unquote!) in the abstract world of grammar just as one learns to navigate in the world of concrete objects and actions. A child starts to use the word “much” in the simplest syntactic contexts at first, such as “too much”, “not much”, “much more”, and so on. These initial cases constitute the core of the category; as such, they are analogous to little Tim’s Mommy as the core of
his category
mommy
, and to the Moon as the core of Galileo’s category
moon.
The child might possibly explore risky avenues such as “a lot much”, “many much”, “much red”, “much here”, “much now”, “much night”, and so forth, but such trial balloons will be popped, sooner or later, by society’s cool reaction, and will be given up.

As the years go by, our child will hear, read, understand, and integrate increasingly sophisticated usages, such as “much traffic”, “I much prefer the other one”, “much to my surprise”. These could be likened to the other children’s mothers in the mind of little Tim, and to the moons of Jupiter in the mind of Galileo. Each time a new usage is heard (such as “much to my surprise”), that specific case will contribute to a blurry mental cloud of potential usages that are
analogous
to it (“much to her horror”, “much to his shame”, “much to our disappointment”, “much to my parents’ delight”, etc.) Thus the child will be led to taking further risks by making little explorations at the fringes of these expanding categories — risks such as “much to my knowledge”, “much to her happiness”, “much to his unfamiliarity”, “much to their comfort” — and to the extent that these tentative forays resonate or fall flat with other speakers, they will be reinforced or discouraged.