What is a metaphor?
A figure of speech that describes an object by comparing it to another object with similar characteristics.
It can clarify big ideas - it can give the audience a greater understanding of complex ideas in a digestible manner. It can effectively convey an idea than a literal description.
or evoke profound emotions.
I feel what it does is it reduces the cognitive load for the new idea being conveyed.
We can think of it as transferring qualities of one object to another.
Metaphor is made up of two parts.
- Tenor - Subject
- Vehicle -Object - lends its qualities to the tenor. What the two parts have in common is called the ground.
When a metaphor or simile is followed by an explanation it becomes an analogy Ex: My mom always said Life was like a box of chocolates. You never know what you are going to get.
The greatest thing by far is to be a master of metaphor; it is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others; and it is also a sign of genius, since a good metaphor implies an intuitive perception of the similarity in the dissimilar.
—Aristotle.
Aristotle defined it as giving some “thing” a name that belongs to something else. The “thing” is called the metaphor’s “target” and the “something else” from which it takes a name is its “source.” Like the etymology of the word, meta (over, across, and beyond) + phero (to carry), a metaphor carries across a name from the source to the target. When it does, amazing things begin to happen.
I think that the impulse to find the likeness between unlike things is very basic to us, and it is out of that, of course, which the simile or metaphor springs
- Paul Muldoon
Metaphors hold the potential for seeing things from an uncommon perspective. Engage in activities that provoke an analogy or metaphor for your company’s products or services.
Metaphors and analogies are extremely powerful connectors, because they lead you to very different ways of looking at problems.
You can use a range of different metaphors to unlock a wider array of solutions for this problem.
In a recent study, Lera Boroditsky and Paul Thibodeau demonstrated that we get quite different sets of solutions depending on which metaphors we use to describe urban crime. If urban crime is described as a virus, then the solutions are predominantly shaped around social reforms, such as changing laws. However, if crime is described as a monster in our community, then the solutions focus on dealing with the individuals involved.
Use provocative metaphors
The more abstract something is, the more we need metaphors to make sense of what we are experiencing.
By mixing the foreign with the familiar, the marvellous with the mundane, metaphor makes the world sting and tingle
- James Geary, I is an Other
Metaphor Exercise:
Pick an object or concept and brainstorm a list of metaphors that could be used to describe it. Ex: Tree - a giant umbrella, natural skyscraper
We apply metaphorical thinking to transform what we have at hand into what we have in mind.
- Object metaphors are powerful
- Use metaphorical thinking to help explain complex ideas, create impact in your presentations, and think outside the box
- AI Metaphors - https://www.draftwithai.com/metaphor-generator
- Metaphorical thinking travels one way - concrete to abstraction
- Metaphor allow the mind to use a few basic ideas to understand abstract domains and Combinatorics allows a finite set of simple ideas to infinite set of complex ones
- Unknown can only be made known through metaphor and analogy