Metaphors: Food For Thought And Action

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We believe metaphors bring to mind concepts that stimulate thought and action.

Often taught as a pedagogical concept in most high school English classes, a metaphor "is the direct verbal equation of something unknown with something known, so that the unknown may be explained and made clear". Metaphors are typically linked to the "poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish" (Lakoff & Johnson, 1980, p. 3), and many people— due to the literary and poetic nature of metaphors— perceive these figures of speech as beyond their means for interpretation and understanding.

Indeed, it may be difficult to grasp the subtleties of metaphorical language when it is used as a ...
... literary device. For example, when Maya Angelou calls her autobiography / Know Why the Caged Bird Sings, she is not talking about confined birds, but rather, about how she was able to escape illiteracy, oppression, poverty, and her self-imposed muteness to liberate her voice and understand her life.

Within the natural contexts of everyday language, ordinary people use metaphors for everyday purposes. Perhaps that is why the media, to quickly capture the attention of readers, so often use metaphors. For instance, a recent article lamenting the demise of the U.S. auto industry, illustrated by the front end of a Hummer, bore the headline "How Detroit Drove into a Ditch" (Ingrassia, 2008).

Here, the reader is aided in understanding what could be a complex economic crisis by making inferences with the assistance of both a visual and linguistic metaphor.

Moreover, metaphorical, linguistic expressions such as "I've got you covered," "she is traveling down the road to destruction," "education is the key to a good life," "the father and daughter were joined at the hip," "put the grading on the back burner," and "the fog was thick enough to cut with a knife" are metaphors we might hear from a neighbor, friend, colleague or family member. Dr.

Martin Luther King, Jr., a renowned and eloquent orator who spoke to many ordinary and poor people, noted that he had "been to the mountaintop." With a melodic cadence, and signaling his vision for democracy and equity for all people, Dr. King graced his audiences with a metaphor that was powerful and chilling.

Metaphors have the potential to be mediators of understanding because they use more concrete or familiar references to help us understand abstract concepts that we cannot easily know. Metaphors can make apparent connections to experiential knowledge, and thereby, make abstractions more useful in thought even though they are difficult to understand. Kovecses (2002) commented on the intuitive sense of this idea: "Our experiences with the physical world serve as a natural and logical foundation for the comprehension of more abstract domains" (p. 60).

That is why a visual metaphor, like the picture of a Hummer, is helpful, and when linked with a linguistic expression such as "driving into a ditch," it prompts people to have not only an intellectual but also a visceral response. "Entailment" is the name that Lakoff and Johnson (1980) gave to the concrete references inherent in metaphors, the parts that "highlight and make coherent certain aspects of our experience" (p. 156).

Thus, if we talk about love being a red rose, the entailments might be the aspects of the rose such as a deep red color and a lush fragrance that allow us to make meaningful inferences about the love being compared with that rose.

Censorship is about restriction and control of intellectual development, and the danger when educators fail to investigate what censorship truly means—for example, by attaching it to metaphors with abundant entailments—is that people will merely "shrug off" the removal of books from libraries and classrooms and fail to see challenges of books as a violation of First Amendment rights.

When we strive to explain censorship through metaphor and collect as many entailments as we can to create powerful metaphors, then we can equip educators to truly know the danger of censorship. With this abstract knowledge, educators will be able to move forward with information that may elicit thoughtful responses to challenges that limit teachers' professional decision making and students' paths to a truly democratic society. In the following sections, we offer three metaphors to clarify the dangerous nature of censorship and book challenges.