WHAT’S THAT?” WAS MY SON’S FIRST PHRASE, and for a long time it was all he could say. As he learned to talk, I learned, in naming the parts of things for him, how often our language reflects our bodies. “We give a chair arms, legs, a seat and a back,” writes the poet Marvin Bell, “a cup has its lip / and a bottle its neck.” The ability to make and understand basic metaphors of this kind arrives with language, which is itself made of metaphor. Plumbing most any word will reveal what Emerson called “fossil poetry,” metaphors submerged below the surface of our current usage. Fathom, a means of
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"Plumbing most any word will reveal what Emerson called 'fossil poetry,' metaphors submerged below the surface of our current usage"…
