Dead metaphors
Horses and sailing
All languages are composed of dead metaphors as the soil of corpses, but English is perhaps uniquely full of metaphors of this sort, which are not dead but sleeping, and, while making a direct statement, colour it with an implied comparison.
William Empson
To start off, apologies for the tardiness of this post, I’ve been snowed under with work, a piece of phrasing which neatly (if more than a tad contrivedly) introduces the concept of dead metaphors – I’m not buried under an avalanche and the metaphor has weakened to such a degree that snowed under means little more than ‘busy’. Similarly, while I’ve massively overshot my (self-imposed) deadline to finish this blog, deadline no longer refers to the boundary line around the perimeter of a prison beyond which prisoners couldn’t go unless they wanted to be shot by the guards – I’m just a bit late. The whole point of a metaphor is to refer to the qualities of one thing in order to compare it with another unrelated thing in a novel, surprising way. Once a metaphor loses its bite, it loses its impact and becomes overly familiar and semantically empty – a dead metaphor. Languages are full of dead metaphors, because people pick up on figures of speech that were once thought-provoking and interesting and repeat them ad nauseum to the point that they are conventionalised and become common and garden turns of phrase, or worse still, meaningless clichés.
Some semantic fields seem to have more than their fair share of dead metaphors. A surprising number stem from horse riding, a reminder that this was the prime means of transport prior to the invention of the horseless carriage – the car. Pulling on the reins of a team of horses would make them stop, so if you hold your horses, you are pausing, even though they (or you) may be champing (or chomping) at the bit, the bit being part of the horse’s bridle which a restless horse would grind its teeth against when being restrained. A curb goes under the horse’s lower jaw and works in conjunction with the bit to control the horse. This is the origin of the curb of curb your spending, that is, ‘limit your spending, keep it in check’. Going hell for leather is another horsey metaphor, referring to the effect of riding as fast as possible on the leather of the saddle. Horses were highly-prized animals, so if you were lucky enough to be given one, it was bad form to check whether it was long in the tooth (the traditional way of gauging its age), as you shouldn’t look a gift-horse in the mouth. If something comes straight from the horse’s mouth, though, it is not an indicator of age, but information based on first-hand knowledge. This dead metaphor comes from horse racing and the murky world of betting. In a milieu frequented by inveterate gamblers, unscrupulous con artists and assorted other mountebanks, jockeys and spectators might be seen as unreliable tipsters and the horse itself could be deemed the most reliable source for racing tips. And anyone who scorns such a view can get off their high horse!
Nautical dead metaphors are also commonplace. We frequently hear that it’s advisable to batten down the hatches when preparing for a potentially dangerous situation without giving a second thought to what batten actually means in this analogy. A batten < Old French battent ‘beating’ is a long flat piece of timber that was used to secure a ship’s tarpaulin over the hatches in a ship’s deck during a storm. A storm at sea would often require sailors to use a rope to adjust the jib sails to the windward side of the ship to position it sideways on to the storm so it wasn’t blown off course. Each sail that was fastened in this way was ‘sheeted to the wind’, and violent storms might require three jib sails to be set in this way, three sheets to the wind. This would keep the ship hove-to, i.e., perpendicular to the force of the storm, but rolling back and forth at the mercy of the waves and out of control – hence, the analogy with people so drunk that they don’t know which way is up. Jib sails used to be shaped in such specific ways that their origin was easily identifiable, so if you liked the cut of the jib of an approaching ship, it was friend rather than foe. This phrase was subsequently applied to the countenance or appearance of strangers – the nose on your face roughly corresponds to the position and triangular shape of a jib sail on a boat – if your nose is aesthetically pleasing or can function as a part-time sundial, I’m going to like the cut of your jib. While many dead metaphors reference rough weather at sea – if the wind drove your sails flat against the mast, the sails were so startled that they were taken aback – many more refer to periods when the ship was unable to harness the power of the wind and was in the doldrums – in windless equatorial waters – and basically immobile. At this point, there was nothing for it but to tide over – float with the tide until there was enough wind to fill the sails. Another nautical dead metaphor is change tack, which originally pertained to moving the position of the sails to alter the direction of the ship but is now more often used for ‘try a different approach’. The distance that a sailing ship does without changing tack is the leg of a journey, another phrase for the dead metaphor police.
As we have seen, the fate for what may once have been wildly inventive metaphors coined by master orators and wordsmiths is not good. Evocative and creative language tends to be copied endlessly and les mots justes become words rattled off by all and sundry until they become stale and hackneyed everyday utterances, often remote from their original context. Unfortunately, some of my favourite expressions are heading for the ignominy of dead metaphor status. One of my acquaintances can justly be described as not the sharpest tool in the box – he’s eager to try his hand at anything but his endeavours will often go belly up – a pair of idioms which have lost their power: no longer conjuring up the image of a blunt saw or an animal flailing helplessly on its back. Anyway, I’m now going to put a sock in it – put a balled-up sock down the trumpet of a gramophone to reduce the volume – and leave you to scrolling X and perusing Substack. I hope you liked the post. If not, to be frank, and returning to the nautical theme, you can pipe down – follow the signal from the boatswain’s pipe to go below decks and sleep. While you’re at it, please toe the line ‘stand at attention for inspection with your feet in line with the seams of the planks on a ship’s deck’ and subscribe!