It enables an orator to supply a more striking word in the place of an expected one (‘the moon winked from behind its cloud’), and it can enable us to provide a word for something for which no word presently exists. For Quintilian metaphor fulfils two main functions. In Institutio Oratoria, the fullest rhetorical handbook from the ancient world, Quintilian regarded metaphor as first among what were termed the ‘tropes’, or the figures of speech that change a word or phrase ‘from its proper meaning to another’. Something that twitches when angered could consequently have a word appropriate to a cat transferred to it, as a kind of cross-categorical switch which is analogous to the kinds of analogy that generate the class ‘cat’. A ginger cat resembles a tabby cat in respects apart from its colour (likes fish, swishes tail when angered, pounces on mice), so both are cats. The act of making up a metaphor does seem in some respects analogous to the processes of abstraction that enable us to think and to use language. Aristotle’s use of the verb theōrein in that typically gnomic sentence is thought-provoking: theōrein can just mean ‘to see things’, but it’s also the root of our word ‘theory’ and can imply something like ‘to stand back and analyse’. Aristotle said in the Poetics that the ability to create metaphors was ‘a sign of natural gifts, since to use metaphor well is to discern similarities’. The most obvious answer to that question is ‘because it always has been’. How did metaphor become king of the rhetorical figures? Metaphor would come high on a GCSE examiner’s list of things a teenager should be able to spot in a poem, and probably most people would put it pretty high on any list of the characteristics of poetic language. It’s the only figure of speech which not only everyone uses but which more or less everyone can name, even if they can’t instantly rattle off the OED’s definition of it as ‘a figure of speech in which a name or descriptive word or phrase is transferred to an object or action different from, but analogous to, that to which it is literally applicable’.
‘Put a lid on it,’ ‘get stuck in,’ ‘shut your trap’: they’re a routine feature of vernacular usage, even when the metaphors are (as we metaphorically say) ‘dead’ or ‘buried’. M etaphors. The little devils just wriggle in everywhere.
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