Often, I struggle to find the right word to describe exactly what I’m feeling. Despite an arsenal of synonyms and a browser full of Wordhippo tabs, I sit staring at the half-finished sentence in front of me and watch the cursor blink, inert from my confusion. This is not just a burden when it comes to creativity, or an annoyance which slows down the writing process (though it does this too). Our inability to express the particulars of our mental states does have an adverse impact on our social lives; feeling misunderstood is often not a one-way street. When we feel like someone’s just not getting it, perhaps we would do better to ask first if we have fully and without confusion expressed what we meant to say, leaving no room for misinterpretation. Though often this is difficult to do, because exactly what we’re feeling can’t be summed up in words. There are words that are close, that best describe what it is we mean to say, but they just miss something of the whole picture. Sometimes we just don’t know the right words for it.
Searle claims that metaphor transports meaning in a particular way, which is not transitive – some of the meaning is lost between the metaphor and its literal translation. Though ‘Sally kicked the bucket’ just is to say that ‘Sally is dead’, something is not exactly equivalent between these statements. A tone which gives away a particular implication, an avoidance of a certain intensity of the literal statement; either way, some small part of the meaning of the utterance is wrapped up in the fact that it is a metaphor itself. Perhaps it is the very fact that the metaphor stands in for another utterance without in fact saying that thing that gives it its own essentiality – the very insincerity or indistinctness of the metaphor is what imbues it with meaning.
Or, perhaps it is that metaphors express those annoying inbetweens, the uncommunicable fissures in our vocabularies of the self. We feel better understood by whatever it is about that particular metaphor which separates it from the literal utterance. My guess is that, more often than not, we employ those metaphors to explain something unexplainable about ourselves, not the external world around us. Our language is perfectly competent when it comes to describing the external world, but it leaves us wanting when we attempt to articulate the complexities of our emotions.
But why is language so centred around the peripheral, while providing little for more internal affairs? Perhaps it has to do with the origins of language itself – why have we evolved to speak, not just grunt and caw like other animals? How is the specificity of our language an evolutionary advantage?
The particularity of our language aids our survival greatly. That we can say, ‘a hundred metres downstream, there’s an angry swarm of locusts coming
towards us’ and not only ‘urrrgghhh’ is a survival cheat code for a species which is otherwise not notably strong, fast, or durable. We have thought and spoken our way out from (and perhaps more recently, into) crisis to crisis, and the ability of our language to describe our world in such detail is a driving force behind our continued safety.
But for this to develop, as is the case for any evolutionary advantage, there must be a selection pressure. Something has to necessitate the change, and for the external specificity of our language, this ‘something’ is obvious. The lion, or the bear, or the rival outgroup, or the meteor (though perhaps language is unhelpful in this case) – some threat precipitates, quite immediately, our need to be able to describe the threat. While this has worked wonders for our ability to describe the natural world – Scotland has now 421 distinct words for ‘snow’
– it has not carried over to our abilities to describe how we feel, because we have never had the same selection pressure. In purely survivalistic terms, it doesn’t really matter whether what we feel is best described by ‘rage’ or ‘exhaustion’ or ‘frustration’.
So we bundled them all together into ‘anger’, and now when you’re angry it comes out at the whole world, even the stranger behind the counter making your drink who asks how your day’s been, and would you like any extra shots of caramel in that, because we never learned to categorise the emotions that we feel beyond their most basic forms. And if we can’t talk about them, if we can’t realise our feelings by giving them a name, then to begin to deal with them is a hopeless task.
This is why so much literary writing uses synesthesia and metaphor – it’s perhaps easier to evoke a particular emotion in the reader’s mind by using a common object, something that audience and author alike can guess what it would be like to be, or feel, or have. In ‘Looking for Alaska’, John Green writes;
I wanted so badly to lie down next to her on the couch, to wrap my arms around her and sleep. Not even have sex. Just sleep together in the most innocent sense of the phrase. But I lacked the courage and she had a boyfriend and I was gawky and she was gorgeous and I was hopelessly boring and she was endlessly fascinating. So I walked back to my room and collapsed on the bottom bunk, thinking that if people were rain, I was drizzle and she was hurricane.
To borrow from Searle, clearly a great deal is lost between ‘I was drizzle and she was hurricane’ and ‘I was somebody without particular vivaciousness and commanding social presence, and she was somebody of much greater enthusiasm and animation of which I could not match.’
Though it may well be an aesthetic choice to employ metaphor (and a good one at that), my complaint is that it is also necessary. Because we simply don’t
have the words, in lots of cases, to articulate the exact cocktail of emotions that we mean, and we have to resort, pretty as they are, to these fantastical metaphors that hybridise the senses.
It’s important to expand your vocabulary. Not so that you might show off ‘meretricious’ at the dinner table (though this will make you really cool also), but in order to better understand your own thoughts. When you can differentiate between exhaustion and frustration, you’ll know if you need to lie down or go work out. ‘‘Language has often been called a weapon, and people should be mindful about where to aim it and when to fire, ’ Steven Pinker said.
Perhaps we’d do better to turn the gun on ourselves a little more often, and fire, in the hopes of discovering what it is we truly feel.
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