Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (55 page)

The creation of a general category through the pluralization of a proper noun, such as a famous person’s name, is based on the idea that there is an essence to each very well-known person or thing, be it the Moon, the Mona Lisa, Mecca, or Mozart. This essence can be pinpointed and then distilled from the entity itself; such an act of distillation gives rise to a new abstract category, much as we saw happening in the passage from
hard-desk
to
soft-desk.
It’s not difficult to see that the same mechanisms of essence-identification and essence-distillation underlie a different family of expressions, based on the names of famous cultural landmarks, such as the following few: “the Rolls-Royce of dishwashers”, “the Concorde of trains”, “the Rolex of cameras”, “the Leica of sound reproduction”, “the Mona Lisa of the British Museum”, and “the Taj Mahal of chicken coops”, not to mention “the Stradivarius of fly-fishing fishing reels”.

One might think great fame is needed for a person or thing to be “canonized” as an abstract public category and thus to be realizable in multiple instances. However, this impression is deceptive: anyone and everyone can be so canonized, albeit at a more local level. One needs merely to be “locally famous” — intimately known to one’s
family and friends — and that is something that we all are, fortunately, and hence we can all be canonized and pluralized by our kith and kin, and indeed we often are, for we are among their “personal celebrities”, so to speak, and they are among ours.

Now and then in conversation, people toss off phrases like “Ellen is the Jeff of her family”, “I’m the Sam of my circle of friends”, “Bill is her David”, “She’s their George and Priscilla”, and so on. The first of these might be used to express the idea that one’s friend Ellen has a habit of cracking riotously funny deadpan jokes, especially in the setting of her family, and that this trait of hers is reminiscent of another friend Jeff, who belongs to an unrelated family. In making this kind of analogy, one hopes to cast a fresh perspective on Ellen and perhaps also on Jeff, since taking a fresh point of view via a spontaneous analogy often brings novel insights. As this anecdote suggests, we are all influenced by categories centered on familiar people — our “personal celebrities”.

To be sure, Jeff possesses many attributes besides his sense of humor, but the conversation is focused on Ellen and her style of humor, and in that context, only a narrow facet of Jeff is likely to be elicited in the listener. The fact that Ellen is the teen-aged daughter in her family, while Jeff is the middle-aged husband in his, is irrelevant in this context, and is easily ignored. In other words, a context-dependent “essence of Jeff” will be implicitly distilled by the listener with no trouble. This kind of streamlined usage is a highly effective mode of communication, provided the participants in the conversation have the needed background knowledge.

The phrase “the Jeff of her family” amounts to a pluralization of Jeff, suggesting that there could be various Jeffs in various families (or in other groups of people). In other words, it converts
Jeff the unique individual
into
Jeff the founding member
of a category. Of course, since the phrase was just a throwaway remark, this category may not last long in anyone’s mind, but it might conceivably plant the seed for a long-lasting and extensible category, so that in later conversations someone might refer to “the Jeff of our family”, “the Jeff of that club”, “the Jeff of my salsa class”, and so forth. But since Jeff has many facets, there could also be other conversations in which another of his facets — say, his perennial pessimism or his frequent griping about his work — would be the “essence of Jeff” that would be implicitly pinpointed and effortlessly understood.

We have no trouble using Jeff as the nucleus of a category. We effortlessly understand remarks like “Sally’s no Jeff!”, just as we effortlessly understand a remark like “Clint ain’t no Mozart!” Or even more explicitly pluralizing him, one could say, “Too bad there aren’t a lot more Jeffs in this world!” We pluralize old Jeff just as glibly as we pluralize Mozart, Mother Teresa, Madonna, Steve Jobs, or Joan of Arc.

This type of linguistic playfulness is only one way in which we pluralize our canonized friends. There are other ways we do so, however, which reveal that we see our friends as multi-member categories not just when we consciously decide to do so but also subconsciously, without any prior intention to pluralize. The next section will deal with these kinds of events.

We have all had the experience of confusing one person with another — and here we are speaking not of their names, which may be very dissimilar, but of their identities. More specifically, we mean the experience of slipping, to one’s surprise, from a person to a “similar” person. Errors of this sort reveal unintentional recategorizations: occasions in which person A is momentarily confused with person B, who is very familiar, and the lexical label for person B — that is, B’s first name — comes to mind rather than A’s first name. This kind of error takes place frequently because categories for people such as our friends can be centered on a single individual and yet blur outwards so as to let in, on occasion, other less central members. Here are some concrete examples:

This phenomenon of conflating two people’s identities (
i.e.
, seeing one person as an “instance” of another person — that is, as a member of the mental category centered on another individual) can also occur outside of language. When one meets someone new, it sometimes happens that one is reminded, more or less consciously, of someone else, and this déjà-vu sensation can be so strong that we feel we had already met the new person before, and we can anticipate their reactions to what we say, guess accurately their attitudes toward many things, intuit their interests and their sense of humor. (This is what happened when John and Rebecca met Thor, at the end of
Chapter 3
.) We treat the new person the way we would treat our old friend, and a much greater degree of intimacy is rapidly achieved thanks to this coincidence than would be imaginable with a “genuine stranger”.

We are not referring to social stereotypes that are triggered in our mind when we see someone wearing certain articles of clothing, or hear certain words or phrases uttered, or have similar superficial reactions. We’re talking about situations where one has the strong feeling of really
knowing
the new person (although one may later discover that this impression was unwarranted), and this intuition is the direct result of a categorization. Once the new acquaintance has been categorized as
a Nancy
, or as any other of our “personal celebrities”, then our expectations regarding the new person’s inner nature come from this categorization, just as our expectations that a certain animal will bark come from our categorization of it as
a dog
, or that an object will break if it falls come from our categorization of it as
a teacup
, or that an object is edible because of our categorization of it as
an apple.
We might thus expect of
a Nancy
we’ve just met that she will be gentle, compassionate, and maternal; that when she laughs she will turn her head in a certain way; that she will often lean forward when she walks; that she has a certain style of humor, and so on. On the other hand, we certainly don’t expect her name will be “Nancy” — that would just be amusing icing on the cake.

Sometimes unusual circumstances can result in a deep confusion of the identities of two people one knows well, profoundly shaking some of one’s cherished categories.

A bit of introspection reveals that the act of pluralizing any of our friends establishes certain expectations, both in terms of looks and personality, based on that person’s first name. Thus, if we’ve “met” somebody solely on the phone or through email, it’s nearly impossible not to have formed a kind of advance image of them, no matter how irrational we might know this is. Certain cues — the first name of course being one — exert power over us in creating a subconscious set of expectations concerning this person.

One time J. had an email exchange with the director of an advanced technology research lab, who was named Agnes. It struck him as somewhat odd that an elderly lady would be so highly placed in such a modern, fast-moving laboratory. When one day J. found out by chance that Agnes was considerably younger than himself, he was caught totally off guard, and he realized that, solely on the basis of her first name, he had unconsciously formed an image of his correspondent as being well on in years.

Like Seth, disconcerted by the girl he met who “didn’t look
at all
like an Emma”, we’ve all met people whose faces and personalities don’t seem to match their name. We find ourselves making frequent errors in naming them; thus we may find ourselves sometimes calling someone “Allen”, or at least having that name jump to our mind and nearly get uttered, even though their name is really “Will”, simply because the person
looks
to us like “an Allen”. How many times have we heard statements like, “The name ‘Alex’ really didn’t fit him. He was dark-haired, slim, tall, distinguished-looking, spoke confidently, and was always well-dressed — the total opposite of my cousin Alex, who’s short, blond, brash, plays rugby, and always hangs out in bars.”

We all have also had the more common experience of feeling that a friend’s name or a new acquaintance’s name perfectly matches the person. Thus it strikes us as inconceivable that the people closest to us — parents, children, siblings, close friends — could have had any other names; it seems that their first name fits them like a glove, and that any other one would have been a cosmic miscalculation. And if we take a different first name and imagine sticking it on them, we recoil with shock, finding it absurd, since their true name is such a perfect fit. No other name would have harmonized with their face or their personality. If one discovers that some old friend goes by a name other than the name they were given at birth, one might be tempted to think that the parents really missed the mark in giving their child a name that doesn’t fit, but that luckily a different name was found later that fits perfectly.