Sue Curry Jansen and I, writing for Psyche, have a new essay out on the neglected philosopher Susanne Langer and metaphor:
Metaphor, for Langer, is language’s law of growth. When there is no word available to express a new thought, we reach for analogy – for familiar language that denotes something similar – and apply it to the new thought. We may send it out on its own or alter it in some way by, for example, adding a prefix or suffix. Our listeners grasp that the word isn’t meant literally – that it serves here as proxy for a new idea or object. The literal meaning is a symbol for the figurative meaning, the ‘thing that has no name of its own’. As the metaphor gets taken up – if it’s used enough – the word will fade to the literal, as ‘horsepower’ has for most of us. Its metaphorical quality dissipates, thereby expanding the language’s denotative stock – so the word can be lent out again to express another novel thought
It was a fun piece to write.