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Notes -
What is the cognitive difference between someone who uses a living experienced figure of speech, versus a dead metaphor only understood through conversation? Examples: run a tight ship, get on board.
When sailing was commonplace in English culture, these phrases would convey salient and significant experiences: the idea of strict rank inherent to seafaring, the idea of one singular authority deciding life and death with no one else around for hundreds of miles, civilized cooperative order versus chaos (ship versus rough seas), the prospect of status enhancement from obedient conduct; and the “board” of the ship meant near-claustrophobic proximity, rank-and-file, before tasks were dispersed. None of this meaning is transmitted in the expression today, only the connotation of when the phrase was previously heard by you. So, if you heard “run a tight ship” today, you would probably just imagine a manager who likes to be hands-on… and that’s it.
Some questions:
Am I just wrong here? I don’t think so. Consider the new zoomer expression “delete your account”. This expression conveys meaning which would be lost on someone living in 1860. It implies an immediate, swift, final action which totally eliminates a type of socializing (a type alien to the 19th century). We can easily imagine “delete your account” becoming an offline expression in the future, but then it would only connote basic shaming.
Are metaphors, in some sense, vastly more important for cognition than we think? How do we understand a word without metaphor? A word like “sufficient” seems to connote less than a phrase, just a small intellectual feeling without image, emotion, sound, texture — a hunch.
Should we kill off dead metaphors, and somehow replace them with living metaphors?
Should we give children a breadth of metaphorical experiences in the Montessori sense for cognitive gain?
I think it's simply a fact that any given person's idiolect contains a mixture of metaphors they understand from experience and archaic ones that they have absorbed from the broader culture without fully comprehending. Learning how language was used in the past is one way to help sharpen your own thinking and ability to artfully express yourself, but communication is a two way street, so however much I like using e.g. metaphors from chemical kinetics to describe social and political processes, I have to adjust my vocabulary based on context.
To answer your last two questions, linguistic evolution is a natural process that you or I have little power to influence, but I certainly think it adds something to a child's understanding of the world to know that for instance the word "broadcast" is a term borrowed from farming, at least insofar as it drives home the point that early 1900's America was an agrarian society where everyone would understand such terminology. Learning a foreign language is helpful in a similar way, particularly one that uses a completely alien set of metaphors and historical references.
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I don't have answers to any of your questions but, anecdotally, it drives my 17 year old nuts when I use old figures of speech that somehow he has never heard before. "What does that even mean!?" Great conversation starters!
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