http://teachertomsblog.blogspot.com/2025/08/a-sea-of-metaphor.html

Starlings are sometimes referred to as “the mynah birds of the north” for his or her capability to imitate not simply different chicken songs, however different animals, together with people. They’ve even been recognized to re-create the sounds of telephones, squeaky hinges, sirens, doorbells, and different widespread sounds they decide up from their atmosphere. Nobody actually is aware of why they’ve developed this penchant, though it has been speculated that it permits them to deceive potential predators. I can think about {that a} hawk, as an example, may need second ideas when its supposed lunch barks like a junkyard canine. 

Regardless of the case, starlings and different birds that have a tendency towards mimicry, are always including to their repertoire from their atmosphere in addition to studying from different starlings, passing down sure sounds from technology to technology, typically persevering with to breed sounds from bygone eras lengthy after that sound has disappeared from their habitat. Because of this a inhabitants of starlings that has existed in a single place for generations has change into a kind of information storage system for parts of sound, maybe even complete soundscapes, from earlier centuries.

I used to be interested by this as we sat down with mates for dinner final week. 

We have a tendency to consider human language as merely a way of communication, however simply as starlings can preserve the previous alive by their songs, we too, in a manner, do the identical, even after we are fully unaware of it. For example, almost each phrase we use, could be traced again to a metaphor. Somebody sat on the “head” of the desk. It wasn’t, after all, an precise head, however a metaphorical one which derives from a time when there was no different strategy to describe that seat of honor. It is “like” a head, we thought, and so it entered the language, subtly shaping generations of people as we collect collectively for a repast. Likewise, the chair I sat in had “arms” and “legs.” We gathered collectively to be “in contact” with each other. A few of us needed to “deal with” a troublesome relative or dialog. 

Nevertheless it’s not simply after we check with bodily objects that we reveal our linguistic DNA. Our verb “to be” comes from the traditional Sanskrit phrase blu, which implies “to develop” whereas the English types of “am” and “is” have developed from the identical root because the Sanskrit asme, which implies “to breathe.” Even our basic phrase to explain existence hearkens again to after we had no different phrase for it so we resorted to a metaphor that reminds us to develop and breathe.

Our language derives from our collective expertise as a species and has developed as greater than mere birdsong, functioning as a form of organ of notion, a creator of actuality, and a document of our evolution as aware animals.

As adults, most of us, nonetheless, use our language unconsciously and due to this, I feel, we frequently generally tend to re-create a well-recognized actuality, particularly at conventional gatherings like Thanksgiving. We do it with out considering. We do it as a result of that is the way in which it is all the time been executed. And even after we attempt to interrupt away from the outdated patterns the traditional metaphors steer us again to the acquainted.

Our kids, nonetheless, don’t but know the metaphors we all know. They’re nonetheless nearer to the artistic potential of language which is why, if we will bear in mind to close up and hear, we discover ourselves so delighted, typically profoundly so, by the issues they categorical as they search to wrap language round expertise and vice versa. 

In our present rush to make our youngsters literate, nonetheless, we educate them at youthful and youthful ages that language is a lifeless factor, mere communication confined by immutable guidelines of grammar, punctuation, and spelling. We rob them of one thing important after we compel them to, basically, shut up and hear. It is a theft that impoverishes all of us. Kids are there to make the acquainted as soon as extra unfamiliar, however the one manner this occurs is that if language precedes literacy. Literacy is a mere workman’s plow that bends our backs towards utilitarian ends, whereas language is a rising, respiratory factor, a stressed sea of metaphor, a cacophony of birdsong, that’s central to what it means to be human. 

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