Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (26 page)

If you are taking your daughter to breakfast in a coffee shop where you know that the server has a tendency to sound gruff but in fact he has always been very nice to you, you may well tell her in advance, “Don’t take the server’s tone seriously — his bark is worse than his bite.” You might also say this about an old car that occasionally makes some strange loud noises when you drive it but that has run smoothly for years without ever giving you the slightest problem. Your spouse might also say this about you if you have occasional fits of pique in which you let steam off vociferously, but the moment it’s over you’re as good as new and as friendly as can be. And you can surely think of many other situations that belong to the
bark-worse-than-bite
category.

Expressions of this type (long phrases that superficially seem very narrowly focused but that in fact have a very broad coverage) pervade spoken and written language, and one gains mastery of them much as one masters individual words. One gradually extends the category boundaries in just the same way as one does for shorter linguistic expressions — by noticing analogies between a new situation and the existing category. The actual words constituting the category’s name — “a sword of Damocles” or “to jump on the bandwagon”, for instance — merely hint at the full richness of the associated category, often revealing little if anything about its nature.

Colorful expressions often denote categories that are quite different from what a literal reading would suggest. Indeed, a literal reading often has nothing at all to do with the expression’s meaning. Thus who can explain why the phrase “to spill the beans” involves the action of spilling and, in particular, the spilling of
beans
? Why should
beans
, of all things, symbolize hidden secrets? And why would the act of dumping them out onto some surface be synonymous with revelation? Why couldn’t the phrase have been “to tip over the broccoli”, “to pour out the peas”, “to flip the Brussels sprouts”, “to drop the apricots”, “to release the acorns”, “to liberate the peanuts”, “to free the fleas”, or even (really stretching things to the limits of plausibility) “to let the cat out of the bag”? Of course there is a good
etymological
reason behind the real phrase, but that doesn’t make it
psychologically
more convincing.

And yet every adult native speaker of English takes this phrase for granted. We all know that it means that
a small group of people were sharing some secret and one of them, perhaps deliberately, perhaps accidentally, couldn’t resist the temptation of revealing the secret to a non-member of the cabal (most probably by simply blurting it out without any forethought), and suddenly the secret was no longer a secret, to the regret of all its members.
When it is spelled out explicitly this way, one sees how complex and subtle the category really is, and yet there is no hint whatsoever of all this complexity and subtlety in the few words that constitute its concise name.

And then there is another phrase — a cousin phrase — that might at times be considered synonymous with “to spill the beans” — namely, “to let the cat out of the bag”. The two expressions both stand for situations in which once-secret information has, to the regret of certain parties, been revealed to a larger public. And yet the two phrases, for all their similarity of meaning, don’t apply to exactly the same set of situations. That is, they are names of slightly different categories (whose members have a considerable degree of overlap). Thus when a member of a criminal gang reveals (whether to the police or just to an outsider) the gang’s plans for wrongdoing, it’s a case of
spilling the beans
(and probably not of
letting the cat out of the bag
), whereas when a married couple tells a few of their close friends very early on that the wife is pregnant, despite having earlier resolved that they would wait a few more weeks before telling anyone, they are
letting the cat out of the bag
(and probably not
spilling the beans.
) These are close calls, and some native speakers might disagree (actually, in an informal poll of native speakers of English that we took, almost all fully agreed with our judgment), but what is undeniable is that most of the time, just one of these phrases will pop to mind while the other remains dormant, and the reason is that the evoking situation
fits
one of the two cases more than it fits the other. The subtle difference in flavor between the categories denoted by the two phrases is certainly not a standard piece of conscious knowledge on the part of native speakers (most of whom would be hard put to spell it out), but is simply something that is acquired over time as the phrase is encountered in a wide range of contexts. There is nothing in the phrases themselves that reveals these subtleties in even the slightest degree.

To convince oneself that idioms are often arbitrary, one need only take a look at a few foreign-language idioms, as they are frequently resistant to literal interpretation. Who would have guessed that “to let go of the piece” (“lâcher le morceau”) and “to sell the wick” (“vendre la mèche”) are the closest French expressions to “to spill the beans” and “to let the cat out of the bag”? And how do French people feel who
have the peach
(“qui ont la pêche”)? Well, they are
full of beans
(that is, energy and good health). And what is a French mother doing when she
passes a soap
to her child (“elle lui passe un savon”)? Why, she’s
giving him what-for
, of course! And French people who proclaim that they’ll
see the mason at the foot of the wall
(“c’est au pied du mur qu’on voit le maçon”), well, what they mean is that
the proof of the pudding will be in the eating.
All of this is
clear like some water of rock
(“clair comme de l’eau de roche”).

The writer Jean-Loup Chiflet has played with English and French idioms in his books, taking English idioms and translating them “at the foot of the letter” (that is, literally) into French, and vice versa. The results are often very amusing, because as we’ve just seen, most idioms, if translated literally, make no sense. Thus “Our goose is cooked”, familiar to any native anglophone, if rendered as “Notre oie est cuite”, will bring a puzzled look to a French face. Likewise, “Il a vu des étoiles” (“He saw stars”) and “Personne n’osa faire allusion à l’éléphant dans la pièce” (“No one dared mention the elephant in the room”) will cause brows to be scratched. Conversely, literal translations into French of the English sentences “The carrots are cooked” and “He fell into the apples” will be colorful eye-openers (“seront des ouvre-œil colorés”).

If our idioms sound opaque to people from other cultures but clear to us, it’s because they have, over time, lost their evocative power for us and become
dead
metaphors — labels whose literal meanings are no longer heard by us but that jump out at foreign speakers. To them, such expressions appear at first to be live metaphors, and thus, quite understandably, they hope that a sufficiently dogged effort at making sense of the stream of words will, in the end, result in a flash of illumination.

Indeed, looking at the component words in an idiomatic expression might help someone who is unfamiliar with it, though it’s always a bit risky; however, that method is bypassed by native speakers, who retrieve the appropriate abstract category directly from their memory, without proceeding via a literal, piece-by-piece understanding. If it were necessary to figure out every idiom’s meaning from the words that make it up, then our understanding of speech, normally very rapid and seemingly effortless, would turn into a complex problem-solving session with no guaranteed results.

As we have seen, mental categories don’t limit themselves to what nouns denote; verbs, adjectives, adverbs, conjunctions, and interjections are every bit as much the names of categories as are nouns. So are longer phrases. And for that matter, full sentences (or sentence fragments) that do not seem at all like opaque idiomatic phrases can constitute the names of categories as well. For instance:

Each of these sentences (or fragments) names a familiar category — not because it is an idiomatic expression, but simply because it is so commonly used in certain contexts that it has acquired a rich set of implications. These useful little formulas, built from simple words and utterly bland-looking, are in fact the names of important categories, as they pithily encapsulate certain notions that crop up all the time in everyday exchanges. What appears to be a freshly manufactured sentence is in fact a stored phrase that can be called up as a whole by a situation that a speaker is in, and the phrase carries standard connotations that go well beyond the literal sense of the words making it up, in the same way as, for a dog, its master’s retrieval of the leash goes far beyond the mere prospect of having the leash imminently attached to its collar — it connotes going outside, taking a walk, smelling things everywhere, encountering other people and dogs, marking one’s territory, and eventually returning home.

For instance, the sentence-level categories
It’s your bedtime
and
So what’s new?
and
Are you out of your mind?
are as crisp, clear, and rich with layers of implicit meanings as, for a dog, is the retrieval of its leash, and as are categories designated by idiomatic phrases.

The category
It’s your bedtime
involves, to be sure, the idea that the child being addressed needs to go to bed very soon, but it also involves the idea that one has to sleep well to be alert in school tomorrow, the higher priority of school than of playing video games, the importance in life of good grades, the fact that in family life, parents are the bosses, and the fact that children need more sleep than adults do.

So what’s new?
conveys much more than just the desire to be informed about recent events. It says that one cares about the life of the other person, that one would like to have a chat, that one is concerned about how the other person is currently doing. When this category has been activated, the range of possible answers is fairly well defined: family, personal projects, professional activities. If someone answered “My shirt” when asked “So what’s new?”, it would be totally out of line with expectations, and would constitute a joke rather than an answer.

As for
Are you out of your mind?
, this rhetorical question reveals not just a sharp disagreement but a sense of surprise and shock, a fair degree of familiarity with the person addressed, and an aggravation, and it also implicitly asks for some kind of explanation or else a sudden turnaround on the part of the person addressed, and lastly, it warns that there is a potential fight brewing.

Just as a non-native speaker can gradually master the subtle art of choosing different flavors of greetings or thank-you’s in another language, so a native speaker slowly acquires the mental categories that are designated by short everyday sentences or fragments like those exhibited above, whose subtlety and complexity are masked by the bland appearance of their constituent words.

Sentences of the sort we’ve just considered fit into daily life in a very frequent fashion, because they involve extremely common categories of experience, some of which are encountered multiple times in a single day: asking others how they are doing,
saying how one is doing oneself, expressing disagreement, trying to figure out how much one disagrees with someone else, dealing cordially with people in a business role, suggesting that a conversation is approaching its end, and so forth. On the other hand, proverbs and sayings, although they are also frozen sentences, allude to situations that one may never have personally experienced but that nonetheless allow one to see events in one’s own life from a novel and useful slant.

Proverbs are ideal illustrations of our book’s thesis — that analogy-making and categorization are just two names of the same phenomenon. When, in a real-life situation, one finds oneself spontaneously coming out with “Once bitten, twice shy”, “You can’t judge a book by its cover”, “A rolling stone gathers no moss”, “An ounce of prevention is worth a pound of cure”, “The early bird catches the worm”, “Better late than never”, “The grass is always greener on the other side of the fence”, “When it rains, it pours”, “If it ain’t broke, don’t fix it!”, and so forth, the two sides of the coin of categorization through analogy-making are equally visible. Let’s take a look at a particular example.