Language Without Metaphors

You’re listening to A Way with Words, the show about language and how we use it.

I’m Grant Barrett.

And I’m Martha Barnette, and it’s time for another round of Linguistic Would You Rather?

Oh, boy.

You know, the party game where you answer questions like, would you rather have the ability to be invisible or time travel and why?

Oh, wow. Is that you? You’re asking me that or is that just an example?

Well, that’s an example, but now that I mention it, I’m curious.

Time travel. Time travel.

Really?

Unquestionably, yes.

Okay. Why?

Because I want to see things that are unseeable. I want to go places that are ungoable.

Okay, you don’t want to be unseeable. You want to go to the places.

I want to learn.

Being invisible is more a tool for mischief for me.

Yeah, I agree with you.

Although the invisible was tempting for a little bit. But the more I thought about it, I mean, wouldn’t it be great to hang out with Cleopatra?

And technically, you could use time travel as a form of being invisible.

Technically, I suppose you could.

Kind of, right?

You could just time travel yourself to 10 seconds in the future into the other room, right? Time travel yourself into a house.

Well, that’s true.

Okay, all right.

Maybe that wasn’t a good question, but I have a language.

But what’s the linguistic one?

All right, give it to me.

I have a language question.

Would you rather write in a language that’s limited to no punctuation whatsoever in your writing or a language that uses no metaphors and no similes?

Wow.

There’s amazing stuff here.

Yeah.

So there’s a character in the Guardians of the Galaxy movie and in the comic books named Drax. He doesn’t have metaphors, and it’s really funny in the movie.

Oh, yeah?

Somebody says, oh, that went right over his head. He said, it did not go over my head. I just wasn’t tall enough. I couldn’t reach it.

So it’s funny to observe, but I wouldn’t want to live in that kind of colorless linguistic realm.

The other one, because tons of people have already shown us in texting and messaging, the punctuation isn’t 100% required.

Yes.

It’s not.

I would agree.

You can do things with spaces or line breaks that aren’t technically punctuation but do the same job.

Yeah, just forget the punctuation.

And similes, too.

I cling fast to my similes.

I was camping recently and I told somebody, it looked like somebody had splashed a bucket of stars across the sky.

Oh, nice.

There’s no way that I could describe that otherwise.

There are many stars in the sky.

Look, I think there are almost two billion.

Well, I think we’re on the same page once again, Grant.

Yeah, but fortunately we don’t have to make that decision.

That’s true.

I can still do my text messages with punctuation.

That’s true.

Yay.

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