Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (28 page)

This idea, having to do with the aftermath of a traumatic event, is not self-evident. The idea that an emotional shock can have lasting negative consequences — that there can be “wounds to the soul” — became acceptable only in the last hundred and some years as a psychological notion. Trauma, originally thought of solely as
physical
damage to a living being, was extended to the realm of
psychic
damage when it became part of the received wisdom that deep emotional shock can cause long-lasting repercussions, which suck the victim into a vortex of changes at many levels, sometimes reversible, sometimes not.

Several languages, including Turkish, Italian, Spanish, German, and French, have proverbs about the irrepressibility of seeing certain analogies. Thus in French one says, “Il ne faut pas parler de corde dans la maison d’un pendu”, and it has a very rare English counterpart, “One mustn’t speak of rope in a hanged man’s house”, and, even more obscure, “One mustn’t say ‘Hang up your fish’ in a hanged man’s house”. The idea expressed by such proverbs is of course that people cannot help making analogical associations at the drop of a hat, and that everyone should be sensitive to this fact. Thus, even if one innocently wishes to allude to a piece of rope that was used to tie a package, or to say that some fish should be hung out to dry, it would be boorish to do so in the presence of the family of someone who had been hanged. The hanging would be vividly present in the uttered words, no matter how the thought was phrased. And so in certain circumstances, certain things cannot be said or even hinted at.

This proverb tips its hat to the fluidity of human cognition, but of course it doesn’t tell the whole story. Indeed, the spontaneous retrieval of proverbs, triggered by situations one encounters (as described in the book
Dynamic Memory
by cognitive scientist Roger Schank), shows that our everyday perception goes far beyond just seeing the hanging of a loved one in a mention of rope. When a proverb comes to mind in but a fraction of a second, a link has been discovered between two situations that would seem, on first glance, to have nothing whatsoever in common. For example, in the story where Jim, as he widely skirts Lucy’s rebuilt wooden-block fence, suddenly blurts out, “Once bitten, twice shy”, the connections exist only at a deeply semantic level. There was no dog, no bite, and no physical pain; instead there was an accidental kick, a falling block, and some psychic pain witnessed (in other words, not Jim’s own psychic pain, but vicariously-experienced anguish). Rather than fearing a deliberate external attack bringing about his own physical pain, Jim was concerned about accidentally causing someone else mental anguish. And yet the analogy seemed obvious, even trivial, to him — a throwaway remark, a mere bagatelle, nothing to write home about — hardly a mental feat to be proud of. And for all the other
Once bitten, twice shy
situations given in our list above, one could make similar comments. There is no dog, but there is an “abstract dog”; there is no bite, but an “abstract bite”; there is often no physical pain,
but just something that maps onto it. At the core of each event, however, there is a person who overreacts, sometimes wildly so, to an unpleasant situation. That is the crucial shared core.

The worldwide category
Once bitten, twice shy
pops up in many different verbal incarnations in various cultures around the globe, all of them superficially different, but tied to one another by their shared conceptual skeleton. It is interesting to notice how simple and down-to-earth each culture’s quintessential situation is, a fact that makes the proverb’s message seem very plausible, no matter what language it is in. Thus, for instance, in Romania people say, “Someone who gets burned while eating will blow even on yogurt.” In Afghanistan, “Someone bitten by a snake fears even a rope.” In China, “Bitten by a snake, frightened of tiny lizards.” And of course in English-speaking countries, “Once bitten, twice shy.” And thus this same category, whatever its surface-level linguistic guise may be, has a good chance of being evoked whenever (1) an event gave rise to negative consequences, and (2) a superficially similar event was subsequently avoided, no matter how unlikely it was to have negative consequences.

In France, the image is of boiling water scalding a cat, followed by the cat’s shunning of all water, even cold. The fact that cold water cannot scald shows that the desire to avoid it is irrational, and thus that the caution is overdone. Likewise, while a snakebite is painful and harmful, neither a rope (superficially resembling a snake) nor a tiny lizard (a distant biological cousin) presents the slightest risk of harm.

Novel “proverbs” along the same lines can be created at will, which serve to label exactly the same category, or very close categories. The reader may find it amusing to play this game, giving birth to alternative versions of “Once bitten, twice shy”. Here are a few sample pseudo-proverbs, just to set the ball rolling:

All the pithy phrases we’ve considered, whether taken from real cultures or invented by us, bring to mind and apply to situations centered on a traumatic event. In contrast to so many idioms that are impenetrable on the basis of just their component words, such as “to see red”, “to sing the blues”, “to be yellow”, “to be in the pink”, “to be in the black”, “to spill the beans”, “to shoot one’s wad”, “to fly off the handle”, “to go on a wild goose chase”, “to go Dutch”, “to be in Dutch”, “to say uncle”, or “to be a Dutch uncle”, a proverb has the twofold virtue of naming a category transparently and
doing so in a catchy fashion. Indeed, unlike the preceding idioms, which, even if an etymologist could explain their origins, will still strike foreigners as being just as opaque and arbitrary as compound words such as “cocktail”, “understand”, and “handsome”, proverbs readily conjure up easily visualizable scenarios — “All that glitters is not gold”, “A leopard cannot change its spots”, “A rolling stone gathers no moss” — and this tightens and strengthens the link between the category and its linguistic label.

How broadly does a proverb apply? How wide is the scope of situations that a given proverb can be said to cover, without one feeling that one is stretching things uncomfortably? As we have seen in the foregoing, the mental categories associated with proverbs have members that on the surface are extremely different. This means that such categories are very broad, and that they bring together situations whose common gist is located only at a high level of abstraction.

The French proverb “Qui vole un œuf vole un bœuf” has a relatively little-known counterpart in English: “He who will steal an egg will steal an ox.” There is also a proverb in Arabic that says “He who will steal an egg will steal a camel.” Someone might argue that these two proverbs express very different ideas, a camel and an ox being rather different beasts. Of course this takes things at a ridiculously literal level. In hearing either proverb, we are meant to understand something far more general than the notion that a male human being who has stolen an egg will one day also steal either an ox or a camel. We are supposed to infer, through our natural tendency to generalize outwards, that any person, male or female, who steals something smallish stands a good chance of going on and committing more serious acts of thievery later on. A schoolchild who swipes a candy bar may well steal Picassos as a grownup, or perhaps “Paper-clip filcher at five, hardened bank robber at twenty-five.” But the intended lesson hidden behind the proverb’s surface is probably considerably broader than that, since thievery is not really the point here — the targeted idea is bad deeds of any sort, including cheating on tests, engaging in fights, and so forth. The crux of the proverb is that bad deeds on a small scale can be but the initial step on a slippery slope leading towards subsequent bad deeds that resemble them but on a much larger scale.

Aside from the idea of scaling up the initial bad deed, it is also possible that as the bad deed grows in size over time, it also changes in nature, moving from an insult to an assault, from an assault to an assassination. The kid who steals a pencil from another kid’s locker in school and then as an adult becomes a hired killer would thus be covered by “He who will steal an egg will steal an ox.”

But we are not done yet, for who says that our proverb covers only crimes? Why not let the category flex a bit more, allowing it to cover all kinds of negative behavior, criminal or not? For example, being fresh to one’s parents as a kid could lead to habitual aggressive language when one is grown up, or telling little white lies as a kid could lead to telling whoppers to one’s spouse, or saying “Darn!” as a kid could be a prelude to swearing like a sailor when one is big. All of these cases would then be
covered by “He who will steal an egg will steal an ox.” Or would they? Where are the implicit, unspelled-out boundaries of this proverb’s category?

Suppose we allow the scope to become more encompassing yet. We could, for instance, drop the idea that the behavior in question has to be negative. In that case, the proverb’s meaning becomes roughly, “Small acts are a prelude to larger acts.” This might mean, for instance, that a child who drops a penny in a beggar’s cap stands a good chance of going on to head up a charitable organization when grown up, or that someone who starts a musical instrument when young will turn into a concert artist.

On the other hand, we suspect that most people would say that we’ve gone way overboard here — that expanding the scope of the proverb so that it applies to positive as well as negative actions, and not even caring about any similarity existing between the earlier and later acts that it is centered on, is not faithful to what it genuinely means. It’s like taking the word “chair” to stand not only for all the standard chairs that people have deliberately designed over the millennia, but also for countless other physical objects, since a person can sit on just about anything. At that point, the word “chair” has lost most of its useful meaning. All this suggests that there is an optimal level of generalization of the proverb that does not dilute its meaning to the point of absurdity.

It is certainly too narrow to hear it as applying solely to acts of thievery, because the key idea seems to be some kind of slippery slope leading from small “sins” to larger sins of roughly the same type. To hear only an allusion to thievery in the proverb would be very limiting. Presumably, the proverb’s purpose is to put people on guard concerning all sorts of negative actions early in life, so that they might try to prevent those actions from growing out of control as time goes by. “Nip bad acts in the bud!” would be the crux of the advice being given.

If, however, the scope is extended to actions without negative import, then the idea of being on guard against them no longer makes any sense. We don’t need to be on guard against good deeds, don’t need to nip them in the bud. To be sure, we can easily imagine a slippery slope leading from small good deeds to large ones — but that misses the proverb’s point. In so doing, we will be sacrificing much of the “bite” of the proverb. Such a sacrifice might be seen as a standard consequence of the nature of abstraction, since by definition, “to abstract” means to abandon the less important aspects of what one is dealing with, but if a series of acts of abstraction is carried out without any attention being paid to intent, sooner or later the gist will simply be lost. Indeed, a small sin of abstraction may lead to a large sin of abstraction.

In the case of our proverb “He who will steal an egg will steal an ox”, we could take things one level further in abstraction, not just ignoring the idea of magnification (from egg to ox), but also ignoring the sameness of the verbs in the two clauses and even any semantic relation between them; this would lead us to conclude that the proverb means that
one thing leads to another.
This extreme level of abstraction includes all situations in which there are causes and effects, but what good does such an extreme leap upwards do anyone? The richness of the original proverb is lost, and in fact, when carried to this stratospheric level of abstraction, “He who will steal an egg will steal an ox” winds up being no different from “Once bitten, twice shy.”

Although jumping up the ladder of abstraction rung by rung may in some cases be a sign of intelligence and fluid thinking, if it is taken too far, it becomes a vacuous and frivolous game, and playing such a game with a proverb reveals an impoverished and superficial understanding of it. Indeed, in the end, an excess of abstraction winds up being similar to an excess of literality, because seeing any two things as analogous is no more insightful than not being able to see any analogies at all.

It would thus seem that there is an optimal level of abstraction, and that if we stop before reaching that level, we will exclude a host of situations that fit the proverb like a glove, such as the pint-sized swearer in nursery school who many years later turns into a volcanic spouse, and contrariwise, if we go beyond the optimal level of abstraction, we will let in a flood of irrelevant situations, such as the kid who at age six made three dollars selling lemonade at the corner and went on to become a billionaire in the soft-drink business at age sixty.