April is metaphorical English month here on Macmillan Dictionary Blog and over on the dictionary. We have some great contributors and contributions lined up for you. To kick off, our regular guest blogger Stan Carey discusses the importance of metaphor. Stan blogs over on Sentence first and tweets @StanCarey.

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A character in Sarah Kane’s play 4:48 Psychosis says that “the defining feature of a metaphor is that it’s real”. This might seem a strange paradox if we think of metaphors as the imaginative literary flourishes we were taught to look out for in Shakespeare. They are that, but they are more, and the truth is therefore more interesting: metaphors are deeply integrated in our everyday language – its idioms, phrases, even words themselves.

Of course, it depends on how we define metaphor, but if we take figurative language to be metaphorical, then a great deal of language is metaphorical. Many everyday words have followed a path of increasing abstraction from relatively concrete origins. “Followed a path” is obviously metaphorical: it describes progression through time in terms of a path, something we might physically walk along.

For a subtler example, take a word I used a moment ago: depend. Its modern use is chiefly abstract, but its original sense was “hang down”, like a pendulum. Its meaning has slid from physical reliance to figurative reliance. Why did this happen? Guy Deutscher, in his book The Unfolding of Language, writes that “what lures the stream of metaphors down towards abstraction is nothing other than our need to extend our range of expression”.

Creating and using metaphors helps us make sense of abstract ideas and complex events by relating them to more palpable and familiar things, such as our bodies, the objects they encounter, and our experience of three-dimensional space. As Michael Rundell has shown, this role of metaphor could help language learners get a handle on the seemingly chaotic cluster of English phrasal verbs. It’s also a useful insight for more fluent speakers.

Metaphors tend to be based on a key conceptual correspondence. This is one reason they’re so productive. We can retain a metaphor’s central idea, but extend it and play with it and still be understood even as we conjure up unprecedented descriptions. Our natural creativity with language gives words whole constellations of related meanings. Hence, as Rosamund Moon points out in her introduction to metaphor, “when a word has several different meanings, some of those meanings are usually metaphorical”.

Abstraction has become so commonplace in our thoughts and words that we tend to ignore what lies beneath it. Familiarity has fostered invisibility. The psychologist Julian Jaynes expressed it in a memorable metaphor:

Abstract words are ancient coins whose concrete images in the busy give-and-take of talk have worn away with use.

You can read more about metaphor in these posts on Macmillan Dictionary Blog and in a series of recent articles in MED Magazine.

It’s still sporting English month here on the blog, but it’s not long till metaphor month kicks off in April, so now seems an appropriate time to think about the figurative uses of the word league.

Last year, Red Bull won the Hungarian Grand Prix just a week after Ferrari had dominated the German Grand Prix, leading Ferrari’s Felipe Masa to say ‘In Germany, we seemed to have the fastest car, and just a few days later Red Bull were in a different league to all the other teams’.

A few days ago, Autosport.com published an interview with British F1 driver Jenson Button, who drives for the McLaren team. In the course of the interview, Button ‘admitted McLaren is still not in the same league as Red Bull and Ferrari’.

Simple semantic analysis suggests that being in a different league must mean pretty much the same thing as not being in the same league. But it doesn’t. There’s a clue in the fact that Button ‘admitted’ not being in the same league.

If you’re not in the same league as someone else, then you’re a long way short of reaching their standard. And if someone is in a different league, then they are much better than whoever they are being compared to.

Both expressions allow for the fact that the stronger of the two might have other rivals. But if someone is in a league of their own, then they are so powerful that there is nobody who can compete with them.

Cricket is the most quintessentially English game, but is famously incomprehensible to anyone who hasn’t been brought up with it. (The phrase in the title here makes perfect sense to an aficionado of the game but could easily be misinterpreted by anyone else.) George W. Bush – not the sharpest knife in the drawer – thought cricket “looks a bit like polo and baseball combined, only without the horses”. Hmmm … not quite, George.

One of the things that puts people off cricket is its apparently unfathomable vocabulary. But the language of cricket is just one of thousands of “sublanguages” in English, and like most aspects of language it has its own logic. Once you have cracked the system, it all becomes much clearer … and anyone learning any language will find it much easier if they understand some underlying “rules” about how language works.

So the idea here is not to indoctrinate readers into the language of cricket, but to use this as a medium to explore how language functions at a more general level. Cricketspeak is a microcosm of the English language, and of language per se. Think of a language as consisting of, first, a central core – the common vocabulary we need for any and every form of written or spoken communication – then, an infinite number of sublanguages, such as the terminology used by beekeepers, oncologists, online gamers, or language-teachers. Sublanguages tend to embody most of the features of a language system, so by learning about one particular sublanguage you can actually learn a lot about language in general.

That’s the premise behind this short series of blogs, which will show how most linguistic concepts can be explained and illustrated through the language of cricket. Future blogs in the series will look at concepts such as:

• word-formation: for example, how we often take English nouns and turn them into verbs (have you Facebooked anyone recently?)
• figurative language: metaphor, metonymy and similar processes are pervasive in all languages – and they have a key role in the way we attach meanings to words. These concepts can all be illustrated through the vocabulary of cricket.
• terminology: every sublanguage has its distinct terminology, and cricket – with terms like googly, yorker and doosra – is no exception.
• polysemy: how common words develop new and often specialised meanings: when we say a cricketer is on strike this has nothing to do with refusing to work, as we’ll see later. Most of cricket’s vocabulary is based not on obscure terms, but on very ordinary words (like the ones in the title above) that have taken on new meanings. Rabbit, duck, and lobster, for example, all have special meanings for cricket fans.
• gender, class and other sociolinguistic issues: like any other activity, cricket is played in a changing world, and its language reflects these changes.
• regional variation: how the same concept can have different names depending on where you are. Cricket started in England (well, probably – more on that in the next posting) but has spread to many parts of the world, and different speech communities have their own take on the language. There’s an incident in the movie Slumdog Millionaire where the kids are chased off a patch of private land where they’re playing cricket: the game’s epicentre is no longer the UK, but India – and this has implications for the language too.
• wordplay: this is a feature of language worldwide, and cricketspeak has plenty of examples.
• language change: everywhere in the language, older words fall out of use and new ones come along – but what are the mechanisms by which these things happen? Exploring obsolescence and neologism in cricket will help to reveal the rules behind these processes.

These are some of the topics we’ll look at in coming blogs. The principle behind all this is a belief that language is almost never random: the way it works and the way it develops tends to be governed by systems – some of which are mentioned above. These systems aren’t always easy to pick out among the idiosyncrasies of real communication, but they’re always lurking in the background. The more we understand about them, the better equipped we’ll be to teach, learn, and use languages – and cricket is as good a medium as any for this kind of exploration. Watch this space.

Read part 2 (origins) here and part 3 (terminology) here.