In
fact, the word metaphor comes from Greek, and is itself a metaphor,
meaning ‘to carry across or beyond’ (combining ‘meta’ (beyond) and
‘phero’ (to carry). Metaphors carry meaning across from one thing to
another.

Metaphors transfer all kinds of connotations, associations and
connections – more than exchanging words, they exchange concepts and
ideas. Many scientists, including Albert Einstein, have used metaphor to
explain theories. “The only way we have of learning something new is by
comparing it to something we already know,” says author James Geary in
the BBC Radio 4 programme Word of Mouth.
But it’s not just “an unveiling of a resemblance”, or a revelation of
something pre-existing, says Professor Stacy Pies from New York
University; it’s also “an imaginative leap that stretches how we think”
and enlarges our frame of reference.

We often rely on metaphor to talk about emotions or ideas, such as
the archetypal metaphor, ‘my heart is broken’. Geary says that metaphors
are found, like a fossil, in “any of the words we use to convey
meaning, complexity and substance… either on the surface or if you dig
into the etymology… we tend to think of metaphor as a way with words,
but it’s actually a way of thought.”  A metaphor is an invitation to
understand something – and when that happens, there’s “a moment of
intimacy between minds that’s really satisfying and pleasurable and
meaningful”, says Pies.

The
unusual but very fitting images used in Sylvia Plath’s poem Metaphors
will, for example, chime with many mothers recalling the experience of
being pregnant: “…An elephant, a ponderous house, / A melon strolling on
two tendrils. / O red fruit, ivory, fine timbers! / This loaf’s big
with its yeasty rising. / Money’s new-minted in this fat purse. / I’m a
means, a stage, a cow in calf…”

“There is a two-way thing that has to happen – you’re reaching out,
you’re holding your hand out to the person you’re talking to and saying
‘please understand me’,” says Pies. For the person who created the
metaphor, when someone gets it, there is a sense of recognition, “a
feeling of being understood, of having the invitation accepted, the hand
grasped,” she says.

Pies compares metaphors to “3D chess”. You’re thinking three things
at once: what it says, what it means and what it doesn’t mean. So what
makes a good – or effective – metaphor? For Pies, it’s when the “zing”
happens. Certainly it’s those that are vivid, striking and original. But
it’s also about what the person making the metaphor is seeking to
achieve in their audience. When they succeed in evoking their desired
outcome, says Pies, there’s “a wonderful connection… like a spark”.

Hidden resemblance

“When you see something represented that you know in life, there’s a
pleasure of recognition,” says Pies. Conversely, when you see something
in art you don’t know in life, then it’s a way of experiencing
that. “The act of imagination and feeling expands your emotional
knowledge,” she explains.

The simile is the close relation of the metaphor, and shares many of
its qualities. But unlike a metaphor, a simile uses the word ‘like’. So
‘life is like a box of chocolates’ is a simile. In his poem 90 North,
Randall Jarrell paints a vivid picture with an unlikely simile: “like a
bear to its floe, / I clambered to bed”.  Both similes and metaphors
often make the unfamiliar familiar, but when a surprising comparison
makes you reconsider a familiar experience (such as going to bed being
like a polar bear flopping on to an ice floe) it can be the opposite:
making the familiar unfamiliar. “The poetry of metaphor is finding that
connection, finding that hidden resemblance,” says Geary.

Through
defamiliarisation, metaphor helps stop us being desensitised to the
everyday and awakens our senses. It makes us pay attention and reveals
the uniqueness and wonder of the quotidian that we’ve become inured to.
Take the analogy of a Cézanne painting of an apple. We look much more
intensely at this than we would at a normal apple, but after studying
the painting, we see an ordinary apple anew. Effective metaphor has the
same eye-opening power.

But
a successful metaphor also depends on what the person using it hopes to
achieve. Dr Kathryn Allan from University College London explains that
in political speeches, metaphors are chosen “purposefully and really
consciously to try to make people perceive a situation in a certain kind
of way”. For example, a war metaphor immediately presupposes a ‘good’
side and a ‘bad’ side. In a key speech about coronavirus in May 2020, UK
Prime Minister Boris Johnson talked about “shining the light of science
on this invisible killer”, and referred to “coming down the mountain”
often being more dangerous. These metaphors were undoubtedly not
accidental.

And what constitutes a bad metaphor or simile? One that’s dull or
uninspiring, perhaps. We might say a cliché – like ‘two peas in a pod’ –
is an unimaginative phrase. But it may just seem tired and unoriginal
from overuse. “A cliché is really a brilliant metaphor that is a victim
of its own success,” observes Geary. In Metaphors we Live by, George
Lakoff and Mark Turner suggest our fundamental ways of talking about
ourselves are metaphorical, even when we think we’re being literal. For
example, we frequently refer to the past being behind us and the future
in front of us. But parts of the world see the past as being in front,
because it’s known. Does this influence what we consider possible or
even affect our whole frame of thinking?

This type of metaphor – where time is a journey, for example ‘we’ll
cross that bridge when we come to it’ – is also known as a ‘primal
metaphor’ as it’s so integral to our language, our way of thinking and
of viewing and experiencing the world. These are often imperceptible.
“Ordinary language is littered with metaphors that we don’t recognise as
metaphors,” says Geary. Many common idiomatic sayings are at their
heart metaphors, for example ‘between a rock and a hard place’.

Some
metaphors are termed ‘dead’ because we don’t even consider them
metaphors – for example, the common usage of ‘seeing’ to mean
understanding, as in ‘I see what you mean’. Allan says that as early as
we have evidence, it seems the same verbs have been used to mean
visually perceive and mentally perceive. But because we know a metaphor
generally draws on the concrete to express the abstract, we assume it
originated from the earlier meaning of physically seeing. Allan notes
that recent research in cognitive semantics suggests these ‘dead’
metaphors are, in fact, perhaps the most ‘living’ types, because they
are totally embedded in thought.

So-called ‘primary metaphors’ are metaphors that are entrenched in
language because of the way we physically function. For example, using
‘up’ to convey positive associations and ‘down’ for negative
connotations. These seem to exist because we aspire to an upright
position, explains Allan. We almost don’t have any choice; we can’t help
but think about things in those terms. 

‘Near universals’

It would be hard to prove there are universal metaphors used in every
language. But research has shown there are ‘near universals’ found
across multiple languages, including those of different language
families. The metaphor of vision to mean understanding is found in
language families that are so different, it seems unlikely one has
borrowed from another. There is also the metaphor for conveying intimacy
in terms of warmth, for example, ‘a warm friendship’. Hugging or being
physically close to people creates warmth; as a common human experience,
you would expect to find it in lots of languages.

It’s very difficult to avoid metaphors – given we often use them
unconsciously – but not everyone is a fan. There are ‘nuts and bolts’
people who seek a more direct, literal way of communicating or who are
‘deaf’ to metaphor. Pies says wryly, “they’re just not the people I want
to be stuck on a desert island with”. She explains there is a school of
thought that regards metaphor as “ornamentation of language, a sort of
‘dressing’… as if it’s possible to have a language that doesn’t have
metaphor in it.”

The
17th-Century philosopher Thomas Hobbes, coming from the Puritan
Protestant tradition, was against metaphors. Some perceived a conflict
between reason and imagination (or what Hobbes would have called
‘fancy’). For him, metaphors were akin to lying and deceit, “wandering
amongst numerous absurdities” as he put it, ironically using metaphor to
denounce metaphor itself. Classical literature abounds with metaphor,
for example Homer’s “wine-dark sea” used in the Iliad and the Odyssey,
often to describe a rough, stormy ocean.

Many of today’s metaphors have historical origins, even if meaning
has evolved over time. For example, ‘to take a parting shot’ originates
from Parthian shot, a cunning military tactic employed by the Parthians.
And the phrase ‘beyond the pale’ (‘pale’ comes from the Latin pales,
meaning ‘stake’) marked the furthest extent of a settlement, and also
has associations from Cromwell’s time in Ireland. These metaphors both
once had a literal meaning, which over time became figurative.

And some metaphors are in a similar vein whatever the language. In
Dutch, for example, you might refer to someone having the ‘skin of an
elephant’, whereas in English we would say ‘a thick skin’. And the
French equivalent to the English ‘when pigs might fly’ is ‘when hens
will have teeth’.

“Metaphors
often spring from the experiences of daily life,” says Pies, and the
culture of a country can inform its metaphors. For example, there are
many food metaphors in French – everything from ‘telling salads’
(telling tall tales) to ‘I have the peach!’ (I’m excited). While of
course we should be mindful of stereotyping, Allan says research has
shown it’s highly likely speakers will draw on something culturally
important.

Language without metaphor is impossible, according to Pies. “Language
is through and through metaphorical,” she says. Without it, language
would be dull, boring and flat: “We would just fall asleep!” 

It would also be “rather lonely, for the moment of understanding and
of being understood that metaphor makes explicit, not in a literal way,
but as a feeling, a moment of congruity, both imaginative and emotional,
is the experience of being alive…

“It is an aperture into another soul, a window that a person opens
and invites us to step through into a momentarily shared space… of
understanding and beauty.”

Far more significant than mere ornamentation of language, metaphor
has the power to shape the way we see and experience the world. Not bad
for something we learnt at school.

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Perhaps
it’s not so surprising that it should have been women, who historically
have all-too-well understood the paralysing parameters of enforced
distancing (and not just social, but economic and political as well),
who were compelled to fashion new words to cope with the feeling of
being cut off from the pulse of life.

Taking as our inspiration
such gifted wordsmiths as George Eliot and Jane Austen, Charlotte Brontë
and Dorothy Wordsworth, perhaps we can distil some helpful principles –
some New Rules, to do a Dua Lipa – for sculpting a vocabulary to
describe the surreal realities that will surely come to define these
tense and trying times.

Rule no 1: Get your ‘-ness’ on

The
suffix ‘-ness’ can transform an otherwise unremarkable word into
something stranger and more affectingly abstract. The adjective ‘dark’,
for example, on its face is frank and factual, whereas ‘darkness’ is
more movingly evocative and poetic. Dorothy Wordsworth understood that
linguistic trick profoundly and exploited it to memorable effect when
describing an uncanny walk she took with her brother, William, in
Scotland in 1803, and in particular the misty sight of a little Gaelic
boy hooting as dusk was “shutting in upon the huge avenue of mountains”.

The
soulful scene, Wordsworth said, magically contained “that visionariness
which results from a communion with the unworldliness of nature”. It
was the first time, according to the OED, that the words ‘visionariness’
and ‘unworldliness’ are known to have been used. Today,
unnerving-nesses stack up around us: the unvisitedness of our parents
and grandparents. The unembracedness of our friends. The egglessness of
our pantries.

Rule no 2: You are what you ‘-r’

To
demonstrate the profound depths of one’s connection with a place or
feeling, simply fastening an ‘-r’ or an ‘-er’ to the end of a noun can
confer a new existential title. No one remembers now who claimed for
himself the broad domain of a ‘forest’ to become the original
‘forester’, or who it was that first bestowed the modest grandeur of
‘dweller’ onto an inhabitant of a simple ‘dwelling’. But as far as we
are aware, it was Jane Austen who, in a letter she wrote in 1800, seized
upon the alienness of a group of random gamblers who had gathered
around a casino table, none belonging to the place itself and all having
come from an undefined ‘outside’, to christen all such future strangers
as ‘outsiders’.

Such
sympathy with social misfits was characteristic of Austen’s generous
spirit. Sixteen years later, while writing her novel Emma, she turned
the word ‘sympathy’ into ‘sympathiser’ – the first recorded use of that
word. Who knows how the irrepressible Austen (as it happens, she
introduced the word ‘irrepressible’ too, in 1811, when writing her novel
Sense and Sensibility) would have described the congregants of our
bizarre new world: Zoomers and Couchers? Thresholders and Rainbowers? We
do know what she would likely have made of conspiratorial theories for
the virus’s origins peddled by charlatans – ‘pseudophilosophy’, a word
she is credited with coining in her unfinished novel Sanditon, on which
she was working when she died, aged 41, in 1817.

Rule no. 3: Join the Hyphen Nation

Another
way to reinvigorate a lacklustre lexicon is to pull together words that
have never been tethered before – a little like constructing an
impromptu meal from random reached-for tins dragged to light from the
fumbled darkness of a kitchen cupboard. (Chutney pasta anyone? Anyone?)
Charlotte Brontë was a genius of such curiously compelling compounds. To
her it is likely we owe the origin of ‘self-doubt’ and ‘Wild-West’ as
well as that activity to which many of us have found ourselves suddenly
engaging with obsessive vigour: ‘spring-clean’, which Brontë niftily
neologised in a letter she wrote in April 1848.

Rule no. 4: The Wisdoms of ‘-isms’

There
is no quicker way to elevate a word into grandiloquence than to stick
on to the end of it the suffix ‘-ism’, three small letters that can
canonise seemingly throwaway syllables and transport them into the realm
of respectable doctrine, system, or movement. The novelist George Eliot
(she who fashioned ‘frustrating’ for us) is also credited with
formulating, in a letter she wrote in 1885, something rather less
negative in its outlook and attitude: the term ‘meliorism’, or the
belief that the world’s suffering is healable if we all work together
for that end. To get us out of our infectiously fatiguing covidism, or
the dread that viral isolation will go on endlessly, perhaps we need to
do another Dua Lipa of faith and practise her cleverly coined ‘Future
Nostalgism’ instead? We can meet together in a great disco of the mind,
fuelled by the conviction that one day, in the not-too-distant future,
that beautiful, fragile, craved-for togetherism we all so desperately
miss, will resume again for real.

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Grotesque

To
the modern ear, calling something ‘grotesque’ is just a swankier way of
saying it’s grim and nasty. But this particular kind of ghastly
nastiness has an intriguing cultural backstory – one that plunges us
deep below ground and into the time-buried rooms of a long-lost palace.
It’s thought that the word ‘grotesque’ likely owes its origin to weird
wall designs that were rediscovered in Rome in the early 15th Century
when a young boy fell through a fissure in the city’s Esquiline Hill.

The
dark chamber into which the boy collapsed was a basement of the fabled
first-Century Domus Aurea – an elaborate compound built by Emperor Nero
after the great fire of 64 AD. Imagine the child’s shock when he found
himself surrounded by an elaborate braid of arabesque patterns into
which were woven a macabre menagerie of hybrid human-beasts. The space
itself was labelled a ‘grotto’ (meaning ‘cave’) for the manner
in which it was accessed by the many visitors it soon attracted
(including Michelangelo and Raphael), who were variously lowered down by
ropes or left to crawl inside. ‘Grotto’ in turn gave birth to ‘grottesco’
(or ‘resembling a grotto’). By stripping away its sense of shadowy
mystery and retaining only its hint of hideousness, our modern usage of
‘grotesque’ has muted the word’s edgy magic.

Silhouette

‘Silhouette’
isn’t so much a word one says as whispers. Like a compressed one-word
poem, silhouette’s syllables respire with an easy elegance that seems
utterly in harmony with the exquisite simplicity of the phenomenon for
which it stands: the fleeting shadow of someone cast against a white
wall. That is what it means, right? In fact, the word’s origin is rather
less liltingly lyrical than you might guess. It was coined in the 18th
Century as a kind of sarcastic dig against the economic policies of
Louis XV’s Treasury Chief, Étienne de Silhouette.

In an effort to
bring France’s swelling debts under control, Silhouette proposed taxing
those who displayed signs of conspicuous wealth, such as the ownership
of expensive works of art. Soon, anything that smacked of extreme
frugality was said to be done ‘à la Silhouette’, including the
production of cheap likenesses of sitters cut out from black paper
instead of more elaborately painted portraits. It wasn’t long before the
nickname ‘silhouette’ stuck, the music of the word long outliving the
snippy circumstances of its coinage.

Picturesque

‘Picturesque’
is the word we reach for to describe the allure of a charming vista or
natural scene. Surely it is a word at furthest possible remove from the
realm of propaganda? In fact, it has a rather sinister political past.
Derived from the Italian word ‘pittoresco’, ‘picturesque’ was
seized upon at the end of the 18th Century by upper-class British
artists who had been inspired by the luminous Italian landscape
paintings they’d encountered while visiting the great hubs of European
culture on what became known as The Grand Tour.

But the
‘picturesque’ paintings that artists such as William Gilpin began to
create differed strikingly from the wide-open and liberating vistas you
find in paintings by such masters of ‘pittoresco’ style as
Claude Lorrain or Salvator Rosa. The winding paths and meandering rivers
that lead one’s eye from the shadowy foreground in a Claude painting,
to the soul-soaring horizons in his sun-soaked distance, are suddenly
shut down – the liberating journey of the eye is blocked.

Some cultural critics have suggested that
proponents of the British picturesque may have been motivated by fear
of political revolution spreading from France to England, and so
sabotaged its power in order to keep the aspirations of observers of
their work in check. No wonder the US transcendentalist Ralph Waldo
Emerson, who believed in the ascent of spirit, once asserted: “pictures must not be too picturesque”.

Panorama

Say
the word ‘panorama’ and the whole world opens up. Its sprightly
syllables launch the imagination outward as far as the soul can see into
a whirling and unbroken orbit of near omniscience. A ‘panorama’ implies
a vertiginous ascent and visual spin that places each one of us at the
very centre of all we survey. How strange then, to discover that the
word itself was in fact coined to describe an entirely indoor,
cloistered and windowless experience.

The word was introduced
around 1789, the year the Bastille prison fell, by the artist Robert
Barker to describe a contraption for which he’d sought a patent two
years earlier. The invention, modestly described in the application as
‘Apparatus for Exhibiting Pictures’, involved enveloping an observer in
an enclosed, circular chamber, or rotunda, whose cylindrical walls were
covered with a seamless and all-encompassing depiction of an encircling
vista. A popular panorama that Barker installed in London’s Leicester
Square attracted visitors for 70 years, from 1793 to 1863. The first
panoramas weren’t panoramic at all, but pretty prisons.

Surreal

These days, anything that’s out of the ordinary is called ‘surreal’. A writer for the Washington Post this month described the trend of scriptwriters suing their own agents as a “surreal turn”. The next day, a journalist for the Hollywood Reporter characterised the press conference
that the US Attorney General held before releasing the long-awaited
report on Russian interference in the 2016 presidential election as a
“surreal TV presser”. It wasn’t always so. The French intellectual who
coined the word ‘surreal’ a century ago had rather higher hopes for his
linguistic invention.

Writing
in a letter dated March 1917, the playwright and art critic Guillaume
Apollinaire attempted to capture the essence of a new ballet by Erik
Satie and Jean Cocteau. “All things considered”, Apollinaire said of the
production of Parade, in which performers pranced around in bizarre,
boxy costumes designed by the pioneering Cubist painter Pablo Picasso,
“I think in fact it is better to adopt surrealism than supernaturalism,
which I first used.”

Apollinaire would promote his minting of the
word ‘surrealism’ (by which he hoped to capture the ballet’s ‘visionary’
quality) by enshrining it in the programme notes, which he was invited
to write. Now floating in the air of avant-garde Paris, the term was
eventually picked up by artists (such as Salvador Dalí and René
Magritte) fascinated by the power of the unconscious mind to produce
images, symbols, and statements that supersede the realities of ordinary
reason and experience. Rather than a derogatory synonym for
‘preposterous’, ‘surreal’ was intended to signify our secret access to
universal truths.

Mobile

Few
words are as mobile in their meaning as ‘mobile’. Handy shorthand today
for ‘mobile telephone’, the word was also an abbreviation in the 17th
Century for the insulting phrase ‘mobile vulgus’, used
condescendingly to describe the hoi polloi. Eventually ‘mobile’, as a
stand-in for riffraff and rabble, was compressed further still to the
slur we still use today: ‘mob’.

In 1931, the US sculptor Alexander
Calder and the French avant-garde pioneer Marcel Duchamp added another
twist to the word’s meaning. Not knowing what to call his new kinetic
works, comprised of abstract shapes bobbing with perfect balance from
string and wires, Calder asked Duchamp for his advice. Duchamp, who’d
already shocked the world 14 years earlier by declaring a urinal a work
of art, did what Duchamp did best, and re-appropriated a readymade
construction by giving it a new spin. Voila: ‘mobile’.

Dude

Before
there was ‘bro’, there was ‘dude’: that informal address that slaps you
on the back with one hand, gives you a White Russian with the other,
and says, ‘hey, I woke up at noon too, man’. For the past 20 years, Jeff
Bridge’s portrayal of The Dude in the Coen Brothers’ film The Big
Lebowski (1998) has epitomised the seductive spirit of dudeness.
Dishevelled, stoned and disorientated, The Dude’s laid-back attitude is
difficult to square with the artsy origin of the word itself, which
seems to have entered popular discourse in the early 1880s as shorthand
for foppishly turned-out male followers of the Aesthetic Movement – a
short-lived artistic vogue that championed superficial fashion and
decadent beauty (‘art for art’s sake’) and was associated with
ostentatiously-attired artists such as James McNeill Whistler and Dante
Gabriel Rossetti.

It’s thought that ‘dude’ is an abbreviation of
‘Doodle’ in ‘Yankee Doodle’, and probably refers to the new-fangled
‘dandy’ that the song describes. Originally sung in the late 18th
Century by British soldiers keen to lampoon the American colonists with
whom they were at war, the ditty, by the end of the 19th Century, had
been embraced in the US as a patriotic anthem.

By then, an
indigenous species of fastidiously over-styled popinjays had emerged in
America to rival the British dandy, and it is to this new breed of
primly dressed aesthetes that the term ‘dude’ was attached. Over time,
the silk cravats and tapered trousers, varnished shoes and stripy vests
worn by such proponents of the trend as Evander Berry Wall (the New York
City socialite who was dubbed ‘King of the Dudes’) would be stripped
away, leaving little more than a countercultural attitude to define what
it means to be a Dude (or an El Duderino, if you’re not into the whole brevity thing).

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The
far-reaching exhibition has been put together by a team of five
curators, including Emma Harrison, the British Library’s Curator of
Chinese Collections and an expert in east Asia. She tells BBC Culture
how writing “starts off with incising, carving, and impressing, in
materials such as copper, stone, wax, and clay. And then there’s inks
laid on to surfaces of paper by hand, and then there is printing, with
mechanical processes, and then typing and computing.”

From
the 5th Century AD, when writing came to Japan from China, calligraphy
was regarded as one of the highest art forms in Japan – and has been
ever since. The exhibition includes an example of the calligraphy of
Japanese Emperor Shōmu and Empress Kōmyō, which survives from the
mid-8th Century AD. Both are extracts from Buddhist sutras (‘sutra’ is a Sanskrit word meaning religious teaching): one the sutra of ‘The Wise and Foolish’, the other the ‘Lotus’ sutra. The emperor and empress were pious Buddhists: late in life he would become a Buddhist priest, while she became a Buddhist nun.

The Diamond Sutra,
which was found in a cave at Dunhuang in China and dates to AD868, is
printed on paper and bears the distinction of being the oldest dated,
complete printed work in the world. It was created using the woodblock
printing method, the first method of printing to emerge. (The oldest
known example of woodblock printing of text, as such, was found in Korea
and dates to AD704-51.) The Diamond Sutra was so called by the Buddha
because it “cuts like a diamond blade through worldly illusion to
illuminate what is real and everlasting”. The scroll was made from seven
sections, each printed from a single block and stuck together to create
a scroll more than 5m (16ft) in length.

The
Mayan stele, mentioned earlier, is startling. As Harrison observes, “We
wanted to show the diversity of writing in all the places it is
believed to have independently originated, and one of these places is
Meso-America”. The 112 low-relief, block-shaped glyphs with which one of
the stele’s faces is covered are made up of closely arranged bulbous
forms – logograms (pictures of things and concepts, in the manner of
Chinese characters) and syllabic markers that help with pronunciation.
The purpose of the stelae was to celebrate Mayan kings and their
associates, like stone billboards, or perhaps rather like the public
statues dotted around cities today. The example in the exhibition dates
from AD600 to AD800 and was brought to the British Museum from Pusilhá,
Belize, in 1929. The text it bears hasn’t been entirely deciphered
(which is not unusual for Mayan text), but we know that it relates to
the reign of the Ruler K’ak’ Uti’ Chan, and that it tells us of his
lineage, his rise to power, and some of the historically significant
events during his reign (including warfare).

The earliest complete printed book in Europe was Johannes Gutenberg’s Bible,
which was printed in Mainz (Germany) in 1455 with the moveable type
technology (the printing press) that he pioneered. (In Europe, before
this time, books could only be reproduced by manually copying them out.)
The exhibition includes one of Gutenberg’s printed papal indulgences,
produced for Pope Nicholas V, and believed to have been completed
before his Bible. As Harrison points out, “Indulgences were intended to
reduce the amount of time that someone would have to spend in purgatory.
They were sold and filled in with the details of the person who bought
them.” Thus they were among the earliest examples of the standard blank
forms we know and dread today. The funds raised in this case went to
defending Cyprus from Ottoman attacks.

By
1480 there were presses across Europe, enabling an important
acceleration in the sharing of knowledge. In London around 1477, William Caxton used the printing press
to print Chaucer’s Canterbury Tales, the first major book printed in
England. Caxton was a publisher, editor, and translator who employed
skilled workers from continental Europe. The book uses a set of type,
Caxton Type 2, that he developed based on handwriting in the best
Flemish manuscripts. The large red initials were inserted by hand. It is
thought that around 600 copies of the book were printed, of which 38
copies survive around the world, most only as fragments. The copy in the
British Library is one of the few that is still complete.

In
Florence Nightingale’s notebooks, says Harrison, through her
handwriting “we see the extraordinary in the everyday; we see a person
we know, but through a different lens”. Nightingale, a social reformer
from a cosmopolitan English family, became legendary for transforming
medical care during the Crimean War (1853-6), and is thought of as the
founder of modern nursing.

The
pages here show Nightingale recording her activities and expenses for
the week 24 to 30 June 1877. Such practices have been less common since
the 1980s, with the steady rise of personal computers and keyboards. To
post-millennials and digital natives, the idea of a handwritten diary,
including a jotted account of finances, might seem as strange and remote
as the oracle bones.

The petition against the partition of Bengal in 1905,
Harrison observes, provides “a very important glimpse into a moment of
history”. It is a large object, which contains over 60,000 signatures.
The British colonial government was proposing to divide Bengal along
religious lines, with a Muslim east and a Hindu west. The partition, a
‘divide and rule’ policy, went ahead, although it caused so much outrage
and unrest that the British government had to reverse it in 1911. The
signatories wrote in English or Bengali - whichever language and script
they were most comfortable in. The petition is also an example of the
political and symbolic power of signing one’s name; the written
signature as a profound expression of one’s identity, a role that is
fading in the era of computerised administration, facial recognition,
and biometrics.

Harrison’s favourite object, of the 100-odd in the exhibition, is the Chinese ‘Double Pigeon’ typewriter.
(Double Pigeon is a brand name. The British Library’s example was made
in Shanghai, China, in 1975.) It is an extraordinary device, with a
fascinating history. Because Chinese is a pictorial language (the
characters designate things and concepts directly), it is necessary to
know at least 2,000 characters for basic literacy, and at least 6,000
for literary language. In total, there are more than 50,000 characters.
While the entire Roman alphabet and most everyday symbols fit
comfortably onto a Western Qwerty keyboard, a workable Chinese
typewriter would need to manipulate thousands of characters. As Harrison
notes, the Double Pigeon sums up “almost a century of experimentation,
and different approaches to the particular problem of distilling the
Chinese writing system into typewriter form”. It comes with a tray bed
containing 2,418 pieces of moveable type, organised according to
structural similarities and frequency of use. In case this isn’t enough,
the typewriter comes with two additional boxes of type containing 1716
characters each. A typing rate of 20 characters per minute is considered
good.

What
will the future bring for writing? “Five hundred years ago in Europe,
the use of moveable type opened up different opportunities that were
seized upon by a hungry readership… [leading to] a transformation in the
self-understanding of many people in European countries,” writes design
professor Ewan Clayton in the book accompanying the exhibition. “It is
undeniable that today we are living through another of those seismic
shifts in the order of the written word.”

Increased
digitisation is inevitable, though handwritten script seems unlikely to
disappear anytime soon. Harrison, for her part, says that she is happy
“to use a combination of different technologies. I would call myself
neither a technophile nor a traditionalist. I hop between the two.” One
kind of calligraphy that certainly hasn’t lost its potency – especially
its political potency – is graffiti, an example of which has been
created for the exhibition by the politically radical French-Tunisian
street artist eL Seed, whose work blends traditional Arabic notions of
beauty and form in the art of writing with the practice of graffiti and
street art. The piece quotes the poet Kahlil Gibran’s tombstone: “I am
alive like you”. While the users of the British Library may spend most
of their time handling printed and digital script, it seems that the
age-old art of calligraphy is alive and well.

Writing: Making Your Mark is at the British Library until 27 August 2019.

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Linguists argue about what all the ‘r’ sounds have in common; recent ultrasound-imaging research
at the University of Cincinnati has suggested that, whatever the front
or top of your tongue is doing with a rhotic, the very back root of it
is always tightening your throat.

Most
rhotics require more effort to say than the average speech sound, and
they’re among the last sounds children master… if they ever do. The
tongue-tip trill is particularly difficult, so it’s no surprise that
speakers might slip over to something slightly easier – economy of
effort is an important factor in sound shifts, though we’re also willing
to exert effort to make ourselves understood. But ease of saying and
hearing aren’t the main reasons for the difference between the ‘r’
sounds you hear as you travel through Europe. Fashion and identity are.

Roll with it

Long
ago, Latin speakers said ‘r’ with the tips of their tongues, just as
most Italian speakers do now. For a long time, French speakers did too.
But in Paris in the late 1600s, some of the smart set started saying a
back-of-the-throat ‘r’ – what linguists call ‘uvular’ – perhaps to save
effort, perhaps as a fashion. People such as the noted physician Nicolas
Andry de Bois-Regard counselled everyone to use the sound, because many
people had been converting ‘r’ to other sounds such as ‘l’ or ‘z’ or –
gasp – dropping it altogether. And so the uvular ‘r’ started spreading
gradually through France and the tongue-tip trill came to be seen as
‘vulgar’ or ‘provincial’.

And then it spread from there, city by
city, among the fashionable set, into Germany and the Netherlands and up
to Denmark… or so the old story goes. But it’s not quite that simple.
There’s evidence that the back-of-the-throat ‘r’ had already shown up in
some dialects of German by that time, and not even among the
fashionable city set. Nonetheless, the main spread of the uvular ‘r’
through Germany and neighbouring countries did follow the fashionable
city folks and travelling merchants. Berlin had it by 1700; it took hold
in Copenhagen in the late 1700s and spread from there back through
Denmark; it moved into southern Sweden by the late 1800s and stopped. It
spread too into Norwegian around Bergen, which has a long history of
trade with Germany.

It
also moved into the Netherlands, but in any given place in the
Netherlands you can hear some speakers who say ‘r’ with the tongue tip,
some who say it uvular, and some who say it mid-mouth like Americans,
and what’s preferred by young women (who are typically the bellwethers
of language change) varies from city to city. Next door in Belgium,
though, Flemish (another name for Dutch) avoids the uvular ‘r’. It may
have something to do with Belgium also having French speakers: your ‘r’
declares your language group.

Uvular ‘r’ also travelled west.
Spanish resisted it (except for a few places), but it took Portuguese by
storm. Portuguese, like Spanish, has two kinds of ‘r,’ a heavy one (as
in carro) and a light one (as in caro). In the late
1800s, some influential speakers in Portugal’s larger cities started
saying the heavy one like the French ‘r’; it may or may not have been by
direct influence from France. Within a few decades it had taken over
almost completely. It went to the next level in Brazil: depending on
where you are and who you’re talking to, you might hear ‘r’ as something
like a Dutch ‘ch,’ or a ‘h,’ or – in some contexts – no sound at all.
So the Brazilian version of the heavy ‘r’ means that ‘carro’ sounds to
us like ‘ca-hoo’, and ‘Rio’ sounds like ‘hee-oo.’

Meanwhile,
that other ‘r,’ the light one, stayed more or less the same… until
recently. Now some urban speakers in Portugal are starting to say it the
American way after vowels. Rural speakers near São Paulo, Brazil, have
been doing that for years, but it hasn’t spread because they’re not
fashionable – people call their accent fala caipira, ‘hillbilly talk.’

We
English speakers have insisted on going our own way. By a thousand
years ago, English probably had several versions of ‘r’ across the
country; historical linguists are still arguing about the details. What
we know for sure (thanks to variant spellings) is that by the time of
Shakespeare, people in some parts of England were starting to drop it
after vowels for economy of effort. But ‘r’-dropping didn’t get the
endorsement of the ‘right’ sort of people until the late 1700s, at which
point it caught on so briskly that colonials returning to England after
the American Revolution expressed surprise at the change.

The
‘right’ sort of people? Well, the ‘upper-right’ sort of people, if you
look at a map. R-dropping came to dominate the part of England roughly
north and east of the A5 motorway –plus London of course – excepting
areas of Lancashire and Northumbria (and stopping at Scotland, where, as
in Ireland, there is pride in not sounding English). The Irish don’t
drop ‘r’; think of the word ‘Ireland’ – the English pronunciation sounds
like ‘island’, whereas the Irish enunciate the ‘r’, so it sounds more
like ‘oirrland’. And the Scots not only don’t drop it, they trill it, so
‘Fergus from Aberdeen’ really sounds like ‘Ferrgus from Aberrdeen.’

The
southwest English ‘r’ is internationally associated with pirates,
thanks to actor Robert Newton, a native of Dorset, who played Blackbeard
and Long John Silver in Disney movies in the 1950s. He’s famous for
‘Arrrr, matey,’ but you’ll hear every ‘r in ‘There be treasure’ too.
Then there is the farmer stereotype (‘Get orrf my land’.) Now the
‘r’-dropping is spreading into the southwest as well.

And then
there are the Geordies. Already by the 1700s the ‘Northumbrian burr’ –
an uvular ‘r’ – was a point of pride. It remained one until the mid-20th
Century, when, in the space of about one generation, under the pressure
of popular culture, education and fashion, it almost completely
disappeared.

The American way

Americans
have not been immune to trends, either. Rich and well-educated people in
port cities – most notably Boston and New York – soon picked up the
British ‘r’-dropping fashion. So did plantation owners in the South, and
– from them – others in their area. Poorer people in the South who
lived in the mountains away from the plantations did not. Their reward
for keeping all their ‘r’s? Their accent is now – as in Brazil –
stereotyped as ‘hillbilly.’ But don’t assume a strong mid-mouth ‘r’
always goes with rural; heavy use of the same sound is also a
distinctive mark of the Beijing dialect of Mandarin.

The
prestige of ‘r’-dropping lasted a long time in America, but it started
slipping after the Civil War, and slid right downhill in the 20th
Century. Nancy Elliott, of Southern Oregon University, studied the
speech of leading men and women in US films from 1932 through to 1980,
and found a steady decline in the rate of ‘r’-dropping, even by the same
actors: Fred Astaire went from 80% ‘r’-dropping in the 1930s to 28% in
the 1970s; Myrna Loy, from 96% to 7%. At first, more ‘r’-dropping was
associated with higher social status and more polite speech; leading men
dropped their ‘r’s more when talking to leading ladies and less when
getting into fights, and richer people dropped their ‘r’s more than
poorer ones. But by the 1960s the prestige associations had switched: a
few rich people (villains, for example) still dropped their ‘r’s, but it
was increasingly a mark of lower class.

The
‘r’-dropping of New York can be heard in a New Yorker accent saying
‘New York,’ which has often been rendered in print as ‘New Yawk.’ The
common joke phrase for the Boston accent is ‘Ya cahn’t pahk ya cah in
Hahvad Yahd’ (‘You can’t park your car in Harvard yard’). A well-known
American actor who could be counted on to drop his’ r’s was Humphrey
Bogart. In “Here’s looking at you, kid” you don’t hear an ‘r’ in
“here’s”. In the word ‘world’ sometimes he would say the ‘r’ but
sometimes it would sound more like ‘woild.’ A more recent counterpart to
Bogart is Harrison Ford, but he always says his r’s – in Star
Wars lines like “He’s the brains, sweetheart” or “Never tell me the
odds,” you hear the ‘r’ in “sweetheart” and “never,” which Bogart would
have dropped (“sweet-haht,” “nevah”).

It’s
not ovah, though. The prestige of different ‘r’ sounds in different
places is just going to keep shifting. It’s about not just fashion but
identity. We could call it the Doctor Who-Are-You of speech sounds.

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An
additional irony is that ‘Brexit’ has become a rallying cry for those
who want a more distant relationship with Europe, when the word ‘exit’
is a borrowing from Latin. “Because of the word itself, we have been
painted into a corner,” argues Cardiff University linguist Lise
Fontaine. “By accepting this term, by repeating it, by making it so
frequent that it comes out automatically, we have closed down
alternative perspectives and ideas about ending the UK’s membership with
the European Union.” These alternative perspectives might have included
more attention from the outset to Northern Ireland, which is of course
part of the UK but strictly speaking not part of Britain (the large
island of England, Wales and Scotland).

Fontaine’s research
into the semantics of ‘Brexit’ shows that after a brief flirtation with
the ‘Brixit’ spelling, ‘Brexit’ became standard. But in the early days
‘Brexit’ was marked with quotation marks, boldface, definitions, and
terms like ‘so-called’—showing that even with a standardised spelling,
the term’s usage hadn’t become fully normalised.

Indeed, ‘Brexit’
didn’t take off for several years, until the lead-up to the 2015 general
election in the UK. One of Cameron’s campaign pledges was for a
renegotiation of the British relationship with the EU. It was from this
period, and especially following the announcement of the referendum,
that ‘Brexit’ exploded. Fontaine recalls suddenly hearing the term
everywhere in cabs and pubs. In 2016 Collins Dictionary named it the word of the year. By the end of 2016 it was a global word, according to the Oxford English Dictionary, which has also noted related coinages like ‘Brexit dividend’.

In
addition to the flourishing of new terms, Brexit has brought certain
words into new or changed prominence. ‘Unicorn’ has become a term used
to discredit ‘unrealistic’ Brexiteers, with the European Council
president Donald Tusk sharing a letter from a six-year-old featuring a drawing of the mystical creature.
‘Backstop’ is another example. Until late 2017, web search results for
‘backstop’ were dominated by sports fans or finance experts. It’s since
become synonymous with the open border between Ireland and Northern
Ireland – a sticking point in the Brexit negotiations.

Turning ‘Brexit’ into art

‘Backstop’ and its variations are just a few of the many terms that appear in The Brexit Lexicon,
a video installation by artist Simon Roberts. This artwork contains two
parts: an 80-minute video of a newsreader reciting an alphabetised list
of words and phrases related to Brexit; and a projection of the
teleprompter he’s reading. The effect is overwhelming.

Roberts
has been collecting these terms since the day after the referendum,
whose result shocked him into wanting to make artwork about Brexit. It
was a laborious process to collect this lexicon. For two years Roberts
scoured social media and news media to make note of nearly 5,000 new
expressions describing some aspect of Brexit. Early on he noticed an
infusion of technical terms, and then a flowering of political
soundbites. There was also a clustering of expressions around specific
events, such as the July 2018 Brexit plan agreed at the Chequers country
house. This gave rise to, among many other phrases, ‘Chequers
Blueprint’, ‘Chequers Checkmated’, ‘Chequers Euro-fudge’ and ‘Chuck
Chequers’.

It’s clear from The Brexit Lexicon that ‘Brexit’ has spilled outside the political realm. Since the referendum there have been dozens of new company registrations with ‘Brexit’ in their names, as well as applications for trademarks for items like Brexit biscuits and Brexit energy drinks.

The international spread of ‘Brexit’

A few aspects have helped ‘Brexit’ become ubiquitous. One is the playfulness of English, particularly British English.
The British tabloids have excelled at punning headlines in the
post-referendum era. A sampling of the newspeak collected for The
British Lexicon – including ‘All the Authority of a Smacked Blancmange’,
‘Fudgiest Fudge in the History of Euro-fudge’, and ‘Ambitious Managed
Divergence’ – shows the variety of dark humour, bureaucratese and
linguistic novelty people have employed in attempts to explain Brexit.

“English
has a long and rich tradition of verbal humour. British media in
particular are no strangers to various kinds of wordplay,” says Gordana
Lalić-Krstin. She and Nadežda Silaški, who teach language at the
University of Belgrade, have researched other neologisms (or new terms) influenced by Brexit.

‘Brexit’has given rise to possibilities like ‘Califexit’
(which could be the title of a Red Hot Chili Peppers album, and defines
California leaving the US) and ‘Fixit’ (which sounds like a plumber’s
tool, but refers to the possibility of Finland leaving the EU). Silaški
and Lalić-Krstin have also recorded this structure being used in terms
like ‘Mexit’ (for the retirement of footballer Lionel Messi) and
‘Trexit’ (if a US resident decides to leave the country due to Donald
Trump).

These reshapings are helped along by the international reach
of English. “The global dominance of English, especially on the
internet, means that words spread fast, and may be adopted by different
languages or by different varieties of English more readily than ever
before,” Lalić-Krstin says. “‘Brexit’ is an internationalism, ie a word
that is recognisable globally and has entered many other languages in
its original form and meaning, instead of being translated.”

There’s
also the malleability of the word itself (and of parts of speech in the
English language more generally). Fontaine comments: “‘Exit’ is one of
these very flexible words that doesn’t easily get classified as a strict
noun or as a strict verb. So I think that ambiguity is something that
is an advantage for this kind of word, where you can capture a meaning
that’s got movement to it, but use it as a noun instead. It opens up all
kinds of potentials that it wouldn’t otherwise have.” Even though dictionaries are generally classing ‘Brexit’ as a noun, it’s undergoing a process of denominalisation, or verbing, such as in references to Brexiting.

Fontaine
calls ‘Brexit’ a complex nominal, or a noun that packs in a great deal
of meaning. Rather than using a wordy phrase like ‘the possible exit of
Britain from the European Union’, Fontaine says, “it’s kind of got
sentence grammar in a slot that’s normally filled by a noun.”

“Its being a blend (a portmanteau), in itself a playful formation, almost invited people to toy with it
and produce words such as ‘bregret’, ‘regrexit’, ‘Brexitesque’ or
‘Brexitannia’,” says Lalić-Krstin. “These words are compact yet very
expressive.”

And
though ‘Bremain’ is the converse of ‘Brexit’, Fontaine explains that
“their individual grammar is quite different”. For one thing, it’s not
as flexible: “You can’t talk about ‘the Remain’. It doesn’t have a noun
counterpart.” And it’s less compelling as a word because, according to
Fontaine, “There’s nothing exciting. There’s no risk, there’s no threat.
It’s not newsworthy.”

‘Brexit’ past and future

It
may seem that Brexit has captured the world’s imagination like no other
single political coinage. But a precursor is the Watergate scandal in
the 1970s. Watergate has continued to influence neologisms decades
later, such as ‘Monicagate’ (for the affair between Monica Lewinsky and
Bill Clinton) and ‘Piggate’ (for an unsavoury allegation involving David
Cameron and an Oxford dining club).

As for the future of
‘Brexit’, regardless of what happens on 29 March? “What should happen
with a word that’s this common and this frequent is that it should soon
have a metaphoric use,” says Fontaine. It remains to be seen whether
‘pull a Brexit’ will refer in the future to dividing a country down the
middle, or to ushering in a new period of prosperity and sovereignty.

The Brexit Lexicon will be at the Format Festival in Derby, UK from 15 March to 14 April.

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“When
I was two, our family moved to a rural town in the Kansai area to be
with my father’s aging parents,” writes Mari Fujimoto in the
introduction to the new book Ikigai and Other Japanese Words to Live by (published by Modern Books), which translates 43 of the most poignant phrases in the language. “I fondly remember spending Obon,
the festival that honours one’s ancestors, at the house of my
grandparents (both of whom were over 100 years old).” More than just a
childhood memory, her experience reflects an outlook – one of many that
appear in the book, questioning dominant Western values.

More like this:
- What the earliest fragments of English reveal
- Around the world in 80 words
- The ancient ‘viral memes’ still with us

Fujimoto
– director of Japanese Studies at the City University of New York – is a
linguist by training, and believes that by discovering words and
phrases unique to other cultures, we can gain a wider understanding of
our own lives. “It’s important to give another perspective, see that
other life,” she tells BBC Culture. “In the West we tend to seek
perfection, and we always feel like we have to be perfect, we have to do
as much as we can, and meet other people’s expectations. Thinking about
the way my grandparents were, and the traditional way of Japanese life,
I thought we could stop and look around and accept the things that we
don’t normally appreciate, like getting older.”

Calmness
seeps through many of the phrases, whether it’s derived from accepting
elements beyond our control or being respectful in all our encounters.
South African artist David Buchler – who has written short essays for
the book – has lived in Japan for seven years. “When I speak to people
in Japanese, I’m very aware of what I’m saying and my gestures and being
polite, thinking about how my words would affect them,” he tells BBC
Culture. “It’s a very different approach to talking.”

The book
covers vast topics including ‘harmony’, ‘gratitude’ and ‘time’ – but it
isn’t an abstract dictionary. Instead, Fujimoto offers a way into a
culture that can often seem remote to foreigners. So, for Shibui,
which “recalls the beauty revealed by the passage of time”, she writes:
“Inhering in an aesthetic of calm – colours subdued and brightness
muted – this word reminds us to appreciate the things that improve with
age. There is a grace in maturity, and the experiences of life mark
their objects with a pleasant richness. You might experience shibui in the colour of leaves in early winter, or an old teacup on a table.”

It’s
a philosophy finding a receptive audience: by teaching us to find joy
in the objects we own, Japanese tidying guru Marie Kondo has become a
Netflix hit and a lifestyle brand, having a knock-on effect on charity shops;
while the 21st-Century mindfulness movement offers bite-sized
meditations to practise when we’re on our way to work, cooking our
dinner, or wandering around a supermarket.

“Learning
the language calmed me a lot – the way I approach things is more
beneficial to myself,” says Buchler. He picks out the phrase ‘mono-no
aware’, or ‘the ephemeral nature of beauty’. “It’s basically about being
both saddened and appreciative of transience – and also about the
relationship between life and death. In Japan, there are four very
distinct seasons, and you really become aware of life and mortality and
transience. You become aware of how significant those moments are.”

The
book reinforces how much a country’s climatecan affect its vocabulary.
“Japan is a small country, the actual habitable area on the island is
very limited, and it’s surrounded by the ocean,” says Fujimoto. “The
condition of living in pre-modern Japan was harsh… people had to learn
how to live with that – you can’t always be bitter about what nature
might bring. Rather than being upset or trying to resist, they figured
out the wise way to appreciate and deal with the things that they have.”

“I
recall typhoons destroying the crops and a massive earthquake stole
thousands of lives in my prefecture,” writes Fujimoto in her
introduction. “That is how the Japanese developed their way of life:
living in harmony with nature, a philosophy that sits at the heart of
Shinto, the ancient indigenous spirituality of the Japanese people… This
belief system developed into a uniquely Japanese way of appreciating
beauty today.”

Fujimoto
acknowledges that there are certain “essential elements of beauty, such
as symmetry, composition, youth and liveliness” – but, she argues, “We
tend to be attracted to those ‘positive’ qualities, whereas opposing
qualities, such as ugliness, imperfection, age and death, are considered
distasteful in the Western world. The traditional Japanese aesthetic
is, conversely, founded on the undeniable truth of nature; everything in
nature is transient; nothing lasts, and nothing is perfect. There is a
beauty in all the varied spectra of life, from birth to death,
imperfection to perfection, ugliness to elegance.”

The
book reinforces the benefit that understanding words particular to
different languages can bring: we can see the world in two different
ways, holding both viewpoints simultaneously. “If you just switch a gear
you can see more beauty in the world,” says Fujimoto. “Just a little
change of mind or perspective: we have so many great things around that
we don’t notice or appreciate.”

Ikigai and Other Japanese Words to Live by (published by Modern Books) is out now.

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