Unmasking the Metaphor

Larry Tritten San Francisco

Research conducted last year at the Institute of Metaphoric Analysis, Guesswork, and Exploration (IMAGE) in Sandra Linda, California, has shed new light on a matter that has concerned scholars of language and the prolix ever since man first began to laugh at things he said. Dr. William “Bill” Gomeral, a professor of Silly Languages, working on a grant provided by NAT (National Association of Talkers), tracked the fabled metaphor to its phenomenological lair, thereby revealing its conceptive source.

Research in this area has been sparse. In 1919 two Oxford dons (Donald Hunter and Donald Fisher) spent several weeks intensively investigating the metaphor, but without reaching any conclusion that could be expressed in precise literal thought or writing. There is also a record of a Wilkes Nettleton, a Philadelphia lexicographer, publishing a small tract in 1854 in which he claimed credit for original insight into the psychological nomenclature of the metaphor; unfortunately, this was written in the form of a rebus and since Nettleton was such a poor artist (a friend wrote that “his stork was scarcely distinguishable from a gate-leg table”) nobody could figure it out.

As common as the metaphor has been to human speech and writing, we have known very little about what makes it tick. The simile, on the other hand, as Dr. Holland Dill demonstrated in his polygraph, Service With a Simile (Boarding House, 1951), and its less coherent sequel, A Myth of an Inch Is As Good As Simile (Onan & Sons, 1953), is clearly the product of a unique blend of slapstick impulse and sublimated lunacy. The nature of the metaphor has been more elusive.