Better the devil we know
Imagery and idiom
In Our Time is an amazing resource, with academic seminars on every topic imaginable1. I listened to one on karma last summer — bear in mind I have a Hindu godfather and a longstanding friend who’s Theravada Buddhist and has been trying to teach me for years, so the subject and its nuances across Hindu, Buddhist and Jain traditions interests me. An analogy one of the guests quoted was about actions in this life being knots in your cosmic fishing net, which you then cast when you die and net yourself a life to come. It struck me that that’s an analogy you would either use if you were from a fishing area or perhaps were used to talking to fishermen and had a knack for adapting your analogies. Which got me thinking about metaphor and simile, the imagery we commonly use and understand.
When I was a child my mother often described people as being ‘as thick as two short planks’. I remember puzzling over it for a while and then deciding that she must mean setting the planks end to end, essentially getting one long plank, which — if that were the thickness of something — would be pretty thick indeed. I doubt she ever thought about the imagery at all, it was just a habitual phrase, but whether because I was a strange child (I know, so hard to imagine) or because the phrase was new to me, I had to make sense of it from first principles, which involved working out what images it was intended to conjure in my mind.
There’s a George Orwell essay from 1946 called Politics and the English Language2 which, among other things, goes on about stale imagery and imprecision of language.
there is a huge dump of worn-out metaphors which have lost all evocative power and are merely used because they save people the trouble of inventing phrases for themselves
George Orwell, Politics and the English Language
‘A newly invented metaphor’ says Orwell, ‘assists thought by evoking a visual image’. When a phrase refers to something outside of the experience of the reader (or listener) then it not only fails to conjure the right image but is apt to confuse. He gives ‘toe the line’ being incorrectly spelt as ‘tow the line’ as one example — if you don’t know whether you’re putting your foot on something or pulling it along, then what’s the use of the phrase?
Stock phrases rely on a shared cultural understanding and they’re heavily influenced by history. In Sally Coulthard’s A Short History of the World According to Sheep she points out how many of our phrases relate to the long history of sheep farming and its associated industries, like being on tenterhooks, being the black sheep of a family, or spoiling a sheep for a ha’porth of tar (yes, you read that right — sheep not ship, though either works. Tar being a shepherd’s remedy for all sorts of ailments, in pre-veterinary times).
If you don’t know about cloth being stretched on a tenter, or that black wool is not much use for dyeing to get colourful yarn, or that tar can be useful in either sheep medicine or the caulking of planks, then none of the aforementioned phrases help you understand what’s meant. Ideally we’d either learn the origin of these popular phrases, keeping them useful and finding out fun facts while we’re at it, or we’d come up with new ones.
PG Wodehouse is one of my favourite comedic3 authors, creator of Jeeves and Wooster, characters many of you will have run across even if you don’t recognise his name. One of the things he’s known for is original similes. So for instance instead of saying that a chap with a hangover in Pigs Have Wings looked like ‘something the cat dragged in’, a familiar phrase that washes over the reader, he said “He looked like the things you find in dust-bins, which are passed over with a disdainful jerk of the head by the discriminating alley cat” which is fresh and conjures an image. Although, these days how many of us are familiar with alley cats scrounging in bins, except in old cartoons?
I’ve had great fun trying to invent new imaginative phrases in my Wodehouse-esque novel set in Northumberland in the late 1920s. The trick is to come up with one that isn’t actually one of Wodehouse’s own that’s been lodged at the back of my mind for 30 years. I wouldn’t outright swear to originality on ‘He gaped at Ghastly Prendergast in the manner of a particularly slow-witted fish’ but I feel slightly happier about ‘mouth aflap like a goldfish whose raffle ticket has just won him a tandem bicycle.’
I should also mention Raymond Chandler, who Lev Parikian recently pointed out was educated at the same school as PG Wodehouse (I think Chandler arrived the year Wodehouse left, but they will no doubt have been taught by some of the same chaps). If you follow that link you will find that Lev has supplied a nice list of Chandler descriptions, such as ‘High enough to have snow on him’, though his most famous is undoubtedly ‘A blonde to make a bishop kick a hole in a stained glass window’. Of course these days there are plenty of bishops who may well be unmoved by the woman in question, but diversity in the church wasn’t something Chandler or his contemporary readers had to consider.
Changing times is one thing, but for stories set in other worlds it’s amazing how rare it is for the author to have adapted their stock phrases. Maybe they didn't need to, either there’s enough of an overlap with our own world or their characters don’t use familiar phrases, proverbs and the like. Sometimes, though, I run across a phrase in a fantasy or sci-fi novel and wonder how come they would say that in the world of this book. Leeds-based author RJ Barker showed how it could be done in his excellent Bone Ships trilogy, with slight twists on the familiar that made everything fit with the world he’d created.
So, writers — invent some new image-rich phrases that fit with your world (this one, the fantasy one you invented, the historical one you’re currently writing in). You’ll surprise and delight your readers and it’ll help you figure out exactly what it was you were trying to say. Likewise non-writers, try some new metaphor in an email or conversation. It’ll wake the other person up and it can be great fun.
If you’d like some inspiration, or to learn fascinating things about other cultures, Adam Sharp has a book called The Wheel is Spinning but the Hamster is Dead, about idioms, proverbs and slang from around the world. He used to entertain us on Twitter with lists of sayings for similar ideas in different countries, but I think he’s now shifted to Bluesky.
For those of you who aren’t familiar with it, In Our Time is a weekly BBC radio discussion programme with three academics who are experts on some aspect of the topic in hand, and host Melvyn Bragg ensuring they cover the pertinent questions and explain any jargon. Over 1000 episodes are available as podcasts.
It is deliciously grumpy in places, guaranteed to make any non-fiction writer laugh at all the flaws they recognise in others, then wince when they spot one of their own. I’ve got it in a book called Inside the Whale and Other Essays, but it appears to be available online at https://www.orwellfoundation.com/the-orwell-foundation/orwell/essays-and-other-works/politics-and-the-english-language/
I’ve adopted ‘comedic’ recently so that it’s clear when I mean (comic) writers of funny stuff as opposed to (comic) writers of graphic novels and the like. Now that I’ve got that Orwell essay in mind I feel slightly pretentious using it.