1. Operations in which large numbers of men may lose their lives ought not to be described by code words which imply a boastful or overconfident sentiment… . They ought not to be names of a frivolous character… Names of living people–Ministers and Commanders–should be avoided… .

2. …the world is wide, and intelligent thought will readily supply an unlimited number of well-sounding names which do not suggest the character of the operation or disparage it in any way and do not enable some widow or mother to say that her son was killed in an operation called “Bunnyhug” or “Ballyhoo.”

3. Proper names are good in this field. The heroes of antiquity, figures from Greek and Roman mythology, the constellations and stars, famous racehorses, names of British and American war heroes, could be used, provided they fall within the rules above.

By BEN ZIMMER for The NY Times, July 29, 2011

We like to think that modern fiction, particularly American fiction, is free from the artificial stylistic pretensions of the past. Richard Bridgman expressed a common view in his 1966 book “The Colloquial Style in America.” “Whereas in the 19th century a very real distinction could be made between the vernacular and standard diction as they were used in prose,” Bridgman wrote, “in the 20th century the vernacular had virtually become standard.” Thanks to such pioneers as Mark Twain, Stephen Crane, Gertrude Stein and Ernest Hemingway, the story goes, ornate classicism was replaced by a straight-talking vox populi.

Now in the 21st century, with sophisticated text-crunching tools at our disposal, it is possible to put Bridgman’s theory to the test. Has a vernacular style become the standard for the typical fiction writer? Or is literary language still a distinct and peculiar beast?

Scholars in the growing field of digital humanities can tackle this question by analyzing enormous numbers of texts at once. When books and other written documents are gathered into an electronic corpus, one “subcorpus” can be compared with another: all the digitized fiction, for instance, can be stacked up against other genres of writing, like news reports, academic papers or blog posts.

One such research enterprise is the Corpus of Contemporary American English, or COCA, which brings together 425 million words of text from the past two decades, with equally large samples drawn from fiction, popular magazines, newspapers, academic texts and transcripts of spoken English. The fiction samples cover short stories and plays in literary magazines, along with the first chapters of hundreds of novels from major publishers. The compiler of COCA, Mark Davies at Brigham Young University, has designed a freely available online interface that can respond to queries about how contemporary language is used. Even grammatical questions are fair game, since every word in the corpus has been tagged with a part of speech.

Suppose we’re interested in looking at past-tense verbs. The most common examples in COCA are nondescript: “said,” “came,” “got,” “went,” “made,” “took” and so on. On the surface, the fiction offerings aren’t that different: “said” is still the big winner, while some others move up the list a few spots, like “looked,” “knew” and “thought.” But ask COCA which past-tense verbs show up more frequently in fiction compared with, say, academic prose, and things start to get interesting: the top five are “grimaced,” “scowled,” “grunted,” “wiggled” and “gritted.” Sour facial expressions, gruff noises and emphatic bodily movements (wiggling fingers and gritting teeth) would seem to rule the verbs peculiar to today’s published fiction.

Beyond the use of individual words, researchers can uncover even more striking patterns by looking at how words combine with their neighbors, forming “collocations.” Dictionary makers take a special interest in high-frequency collocations, since they can be the key to understanding how words work in the world. It’s a particular boon for making dictionaries that appeal to learners of English as a second language. When the lexicographer Orin Hargraves was studying collocations for a project at Oxford University Press (where I previously worked as editor for American dictionaries), he struck upon a trove of collocations that “would not be statistically significant were it not for their appearance in fiction.” And these weren’t just artifacts of genre fiction, like “warp speed” in sci-fi or “fiery passion” in bodice-ripping romance novels.

Using the Oxford English Corpus, encompassing about two billion words of 21st-century English, Hargraves found peculiar patterns in simple words like the verb “brush.” Everybody talks about brushing their teeth, but other possible companions, like “hair,” “strand,” “lock” and “lip,” appear up to 150 times more frequently in fiction than in any other genre. “Brush” appears near “lips” when two characters’ lips brush against each other or one’s lips brush against another’s cheek — as happens so often in novels. For the hair-related collocations, Hargraves concludes that “fictional characters cannot stop playing with their hair.”

“Bolting upright” and “drawing one’s breath” are two more fiction-specific turns of phrase revealed by the corpus. Creative writers are clearly drawn to descriptive idioms that allow their characters to register emotional responses through telling bits of physical action — “business,” as they say in theater. The conventions of modern storytelling dictate that fictional characters react to their worlds in certain stock ways and that the storytellers use stock expressions to describe those reactions. Readers might not think of such idioms as literary clichés, unless they are particularly egregious. Individual authors will of course have their own idiosyncratic linguistic tics. Dan Brown, of “Da Vinci Code” fame, is partial to eyebrows. In his techno-thriller “Digital Fortress,” characters arch or raise their eyebrows no fewer than 14 times.

Brown’s eyebrow obsession may simply signal a lack of imagination, but corpus research can also illuminate a writer’s stylistic creativity. Masahiro Hori, a professor of English linguistics at Kumamoto Gakuen University in Japan, has studied how Charles Dickens breathed new life into literary collocations. In “The Pickwick Papers,” for instance, Dickens played off the idiom “to look daggers at someone” (meaning to shoot a wrathful glare, itself descended from Shakespeare’s “to speak daggers”) by innovatively replacing “daggers” with “carving-knives”: an old lady “looked carving-knives at the hardheaded delinquent.” To be sure, a careful reader might have discerned the originality of the phrase on his own, but corpus analysis allowed Hori to confirm and extend his insights into Dickens’s ­originality.

For David Bamman, a senior researcher in computational linguistics with Tufts University’s Perseus Project, analyzing collocations can help unwrap the way a writer “indexes” a literary style by lifting phrases from the past. Often this can consist of conscious allusions — Bamman and his colleagues used computational methods to zero in on the places in “Paradise Lost” where John Milton is alluding to the Latin of Virgil’s “Aeneid.” Though traditional literary scholarship has long sought to track these echoes, the work can now be done automatically, transcending any single analyst’s selective attention. The same methods can also ferret out how intertextuality can work on a more unconscious level, silently directing a writer to select particular word combinations to match the expectations of the appropriate genre.

When we see a character in contemporary fiction “bolt upright” or “draw a breath,” we join in this silent game, picking up the subtle cues that telegraph a literary style. The game works best when the writer’s idiomatic English does not scream “This is a novel!” but instead provides a kind of comfortable linguistic furniture to settle into as we read a novel or short story. While Twain, Hemingway and the rest of the vernacularizers may have introduced more “natural” or “authentic” styles of writing, literature did not suddenly become unliterary simply because the prose was no longer so high-flying. Rather, the textual hints of literariness continue to wash over us unannounced, even as a new kind of brainpower, the computational kind, can help identify exactly what those hints are and how they function.

By Carlin Romano

Writing about metaphor is dancing with your conceptual clothes off, the innards of your language exposed by equipment more powerful than anything operated by the TSA. Still, one would be a rabbit not to do it in a world where metaphor is now top dog, at least among revived rhetorical devices with philosophical appeal.

“To be a master of metaphor,” Aristotle wrote in his Poetics, ”is the greatest thing by far. It is the one thing that cannot be learnt from others, and it is also a sign of genius.” He described it most simply as “giving the thing a name that belongs to something else.” More recent thinkers explain its analytic structure with greater precision. One locus classicus is the philosopher Max Black’s 1955 article, ”Metaphor,” in which he set forth three traditional views of the device that still guide debate about it.

The ”substitution” theory argues that a metaphor of the form ”A is B” (Shakespeare’s ”Juliet is the sun”) presents some intended literal meaning of the form ”A is C” (”Juliet is the center of my solar system”). The ”comparison” theory, probably the most widely held, interprets the ”A is B” metaphor as an elliptical simile that really asserts ”A is like B in the following respects. … ” Here, the reader or listener must ferret out the relevant respects. ”Juliet is the sun” may call attention to Juliet’s gravitational influence on Romeo, the heat she radiates, the light she emits, or all these characteristics and more. Last, the ”interaction” theory suggests that the ”system of associated commonplaces” of A and B somehow merge to create a distinct metaphorical meaning that no literal statement captures.

Aristotle meant, by his kudos, mastery in using metaphors.Euripides struck him as a master, and Shakespeare remains one to us four centuries later. Mastery of the subject of metaphor, however, is an entirely different matter. Nobody back in ancient Greece, except Aristotle himself, talked much about the concept.

But in the late 20th century, metaphor studies took off across disciplines, with philosophers, linguists, psychologists, cognitive scientists, and others—George Lakoff, Mark Johnson, and Samuel Guttenplan are some names that come to mind—elbowing one another aside in the rush to anoint “metaphor” as the concept at the crux of all thought, and maybe all human understanding. That academic work on metaphor has largely investigated its logical intricacies, tissuing out the implications of experimental and neurological data, or detailing its specialized epistemological relations to truth and meaning. Yet no one has tried to explain the big picture, and particularly metaphor’s everyday impact, to a general, educated audience.

More the pity, then, that James Geary’s playful, accessible I Is an Other: The Secret Life of Metaphor and How It Shapes the Way We See the World (Harper), comes burdened with such an atrocious title. The line is a literal translation of one of the French poet Arthur Rimbaud’s most famous lines, better translated by Lydia Davis as “I am someone else.” No matter. Ignore the title. Think of Geary, even at his glibbest, as the bridge between the burgeoning field of metaphor studies and the man and woman in the street.

Geary announces his high regard for metaphor at his book’s outset:

“Metaphorical thinking—our instinct not just for describing but for comprehending one thing in terms of another—shapes our view of the world, and is essential to how we communicate, learn, discover and invent. … Our understanding of metaphor is in the midst of a metamorphosis. For centuries, metaphor has been seen as a kind of cognitive frill, a pleasant but essentially useless embellishment to ‘normal’ thought. Now, the frill is gone. New research in the social and cognitive sciences makes it increasingly plain that metaphorical thinking influences our attitudes, beliefs, and actions in surprising, hidden, and often oddball ways.”

Geary further unpacks metaphor’s influence in his foreword:

“Metaphor conditions our interpretations of the stock market and, through advertising, it surreptitiously infiltrates our purchasing decisions. In the mouths of politicians, metaphor subtly nudges public opinion; in the minds of businesspeople, it spurs creativity and innovation. In science, metaphor is the preferred nomenclature for new theories and new discoveries; in psychology, it is the natural language of human relationships and emotions.”

All true, though Geary occasionally makes it sound as if the importance of metaphor to human language, knowledge, and comprehension is a recent discovery. (At other times, he gives deserved credit to early champions of metaphor such as the Italian philosopher Giambattista Vico, who was born in the late 17th century.) In fact, many modern thinkers and scholars have agreed that all language is at root metaphorical. Rousseau argued that man’s ”first expressions were tropes”; modern analysts such as Nelson Goodman recognized that metaphor still ”permeates all discourse”; and continental theorists like Derrida concurred (”Abstract notions always hide a sensory figure”). Fontanier, the great French theorist of tropes, pointed out that even so abstract an idea as ”idea” grew from the Greek eido, ”to see.”

 Further undermining those who seek an Archimedean spot from which to analyze metaphor is that even the words ”metaphor” and ”figure” are metaphors. Derrida, in White Mythology, mocks Aristotle’s famous full definition: ”Metaphor consists in giving the thing a name that belongs to something else; the transference being either from genus to species, or from species to genus, or from species to species, or on grounds of analogy.” Derrida writes that, in the original, every word of the definition is a metaphor. Paul Ricoeur describes the situation in his study, The Rule of Metaphor: ”There is no nonmetaphorical standpoint from which one could look upon metaphor.”

Of all philosophical writers on metaphor, Nietzsche probably draws the strongest conclusions from this situation. ”Tropes,” he writes, ”are not something that can be added or abstracted from language at will—they are its truest nature.” He argues that there is ”no real knowing apart from metaphor,” by which he means that we experience reality through metaphors, and our notion of literal meaning simply reflects the ossification of language, as figures of speech lose their vitality. He emphasizes in The Genealogy of Morals how metaphor tends to extend its sway, to bring wider ranges of experience under its wing. He goes so far as to say that ”the drive toward the formation of metaphor is the fundamental human drive.” For him, literal and figurative meaning are not stable categories, but historical ones determined by their social context.

The Nietzschean ”big picture” of metaphor’s role in language and culture lends support to Derrida’s point in White Mythology that the evolution of abstractions is always a case of going from the physical and sensible to the abstract. Derrida is critical, like Nietzsche, of the automatic distinction of the sensory and nonsensory in Western thought, believing that it shows a lack of self-consciousness in thinkers about the roots of their language. He thinks a key question in looking at a supposed ”abstraction” is whether the memory of its sensory origin remains in its usage.

That’s the rough and unarticulated philosophical backdrop from which Geary’s confidence arises, allowing him to note and dismiss the countertradition, particularly in philosophy, that saw metaphor as a temptation away from firm, supposedly literal truth: Hobbes’s description of metaphors as “abuses of speech,” or Berkeley’s admonition that “a philosopher should abstain from metaphor.”

The upshot of the boom in metaphor studies, Geary makes clear, is the overturning of that presumption toward literalism: Nowadays, it’s believers in a literalism that goes all the way down (so to speak) who are on the defensive in intellectual life, and explorers of metaphor who are on the ascendant. As a result, Geary hardly feels a need to address literalism, devoting most of his book to how metaphor connects to etymology, money, mind, politics, pleasure, science, children, the brain, the body, and such literary forms as the proverb and aphorism.

In those highly empirical arenas, Geary takes off.

Listen to him explain the metaphorical universe: the “teeth” on combs, the “spines” in books, and how active, dormant, and supposedly extinct metaphors each deserve separate categories. Take in his observations on business metaphors, such as the Wall Street term “dead cat bounce.” Follow his links from metaphor to Asperger’s syndrome and his discussion of the “affect heuristic” in advertising (You think “You’re in good hands with Allstate”?). Examine with him the neurological underpinnings of synesthesia, metaphorical gestures such as the “OK” sign, telling political phrases such as “climate cancer,” the imagistic competence of children, the need for metaphor in science, and scores of other telling, concrete examples of how metaphor runs our lives.

Writing with or about metaphors is not dancing with the stars, but dancing with asterisks—pointers to the figurative understructure of our supposedly literal language. The more we stay sensitive to that, the better we dance. As the Chinese say, “It’s hard to dismount from a tiger,” and every metaphor starts out as a wild beast, waiting to be tamed by usage.

Forty-five years ago, the author David Bourland published an essay proposing a radical overhaul of English based on eliminating all forms of the verb “to be”. In a world where we all spoke E-Prime, as Bourland called this new language, you couldn’t say “Sandra Bullock’s latest film is shockingly mediocre”; you’d have to say it “seems mediocre to me”. Shakespeare productions would need retooling (“To live or not to live, I ask this question”), as would the Bible (“The Lord functions as my shepherd”). The world, in short, would feel very different – though in E-Prime you couldn’t actually say it “was” very different. Unsurprisingly, it proved even less popular than Esperanto, and in fairness Bourland never meant it as a serious replace ment for English. But in this anniversary year, his eccentric vision deserves celebrating. Because in theory at least, E-Prime aimed at nothing less than using language to make our insane lives a little more sane.

Bourland studied under Alfred Korzybski, a Polish aristocrat émigré who founded the philosophy of General Semantics, made famous by his slogan, “The map is not the territory.” To think about and function in the world, Korzybski said, we rely on systems of abstract concepts, most obviously language. But those concepts don’t reflect the world in a straightforward way; instead, they contain hidden traps that distort reality, causing confusion and angst. And the verb “to be”, he argued, contains the most traps of all.

Take the phrase, “My brother is lazy.” It seems clear, but Korzybski and Bourland would say it deceives: it implies certainty and objectivity, when in reality it expresses an opinion. Even, “The sky is blue” papers over the details: I really mean, “The sky appears blue to me.” “Our judgments can only be proba bi listic,” wrote Allen Walker Read, a Korzybski follower. “Therefore we would do well to avoid finalistic, absolutistic terms. Can we ever find ‘perfection’ or ‘certainty’ or ‘truth’? No! Then let us stop using such words in our formulations.” E-Prime provided an easy way to do this: simply stop using “to be”.

All this might seem maniacally pointless pedantry. But as cognitive therapists note, thoughts trigger emotions, and “finalistic, absolutistic” thoughts trigger stressful emotions. “I am a failure” feels permanent, all-encompassing, hopeless. Restating it in E-Prime – “I feel like a failure” or “I have failed at this task” – makes it limited, temporary, addressable.

“I have found repeatedly,” wrote the novelist Robert Anton Wilson, an E-Prime advocate, “that when baffled by a problem in science, in philosophy, or in daily life, I gain immediate insight by writing down what I know about the enigma in strict E-Prime.” Political debates might benefit, too, since E-Prime renders unyielding dogmatism – “All immigrants are scroungers!”, “Taxation is theft!” etcetera – essentially impossible. As George Santayana put it, “The little word ‘is’ has its tragedies.”

E-Prime never really caught on; General Semantics fell out of fashion. (It can’t have helped that Korzybski’s fans included that high-priest of poppycock, L Ron Hubbard.) Even so, trying to express one’s thoughts without using “to be” can have a curiously salutary, bracing effect. In this column, with the obvious exception of the quoted examples, I have attempted to do this.