‘Inspiration’

We are often totally unaware of where the words we use come from — even, or especially, words we use all the time. The prime examples of this are dead metaphors. Before the horrors of the Marne and the Somme in World War I, for example, nobody spoke of someone who wouldn’t budge as being “entrenched” or of “retrenchment.” Now “retrenchment” is a piece of jargon in IT business strategy, as well as in foreign policy and military affairs.

The deadest of metaphors have no known origin, and there are more of them than most people notice. Think of just the words that evoke our breathing: When we are “inspired,” we are filled up with breath or with air. But “inspiration” has long since ceased to be understood as a metaphor for inhalation. We speak of “a stroke of inspiration” as a cliche, though it makes no sense for a breath in to stroke. “Respire,” the combination of inspiration and expiration, is something we think of as referring to breathing. But when is the last time you thought of expiration as something you do with your lungs? That metaphor is totally dead, expired. Kind of makes you think differently about when the time on the meter expires, doesn’t it? Don’t let your parked car suffocate.

Then, finally, there’s “conspiracy,” a word much in vogue. It used to be less metaphorical: The Kennedy assassination conspiracy or the Watergate conspiracy or the moon landing conspiracy (false, true, and false, respectively) actually referred to plots that could only have been pulled off if people had gotten together in one room and formed a plan in secret, then lied about it. In that room, they would have done what we weren’t supposed to do when we were asked to “social distance,” namely “breathe together.”

The weird thing about the way “conspiracies” are discussed right now is that the end of the phrase is often left off for conversational purposes. The lone word now stands in for the full phrase “conspiracy theory.” No physical togetherness is needed to initiate and carry out a plot today.

One of the ways metaphors die is when we use stock phrases so often we recite them by rote, so we can intone them without knowing the original meaning. It happens to adages and long phrases, too, the phraseological equivalent of a dead metaphor. There’s a joke version of this in Anchorman, when Ron Burgundy says, “When in Rome,” but doesn’t know the ending: “Do as the Romans do.”

It plays for laughs in Will Ferrell’s mouth, yet there are plenty of examples of this in real life. How many readers of this column know that when you’re hungover and you try to drink it off, your remedy is the “hair of the dog that bit you,” a reference to a long-popular folk medicine intuition that the thing that hurt you can heal you in a smaller dose? Or the last time you noticed two people having the same idea and intoned the old self-complimentary chestnut about how “great minds think alike,” did you know how it ends?

“And fools seldom differ.”