Talking Points in Linguistic Creativity

Creative linguistic devices like metaphor, simile and analogy serve two important roles in language. The first of these is to make the unfamiliar and the strange seem more familiar and understandable (Indurkhya, 1992). For instance, one might describe a burqa (a full body covering for Muslim women) as a suit of armor, as a shield against prying eyes or, depending on one’s communication goal, as a wearable cage. The other role of these linguistic devices is most often associated with the poetic and fanciful use of language, but is no less important: to make the familiar and mundane seem strange and unfamiliar. In this latter guise, metaphors, analogies and similes allow us to view a commonplace idea from a new and revealing category perspective (Camac and Glucksberg, 1984). For instance, one might describe make-up as “the Western burqa”, to communicate not just the idea that each involves a covering of the female form, but that each reflects a society-imposed expectation on the public presentation of women. Each of these roles is a manifestation of the same underlying mechanism for combining concepts, for understanding how they interact (Black, 1962) and for determining how they are connected (Fauconnier and Turner, 1998), even if those connections are tenuous, hidden or not always obvious (Collins and Loftus, 1975). For example, Figure 1 shows the reframing that is needed to appreciate the above metaphors: