Recently I was talking with my mother about the progress of my grandmother who had just had a stroke, and my mother had referred to her mother as a new member of the “boob tubers.” Now my only response to this was “what is a boob tuber?” since I’ve never heard of such a thing in my life. Apparently a boob tuber is a “couch potato” which oddly enough made more sense to me. Still confused as to where my mother would come up with a boob tuber I did a little research.
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After discussing my findings with my mother the conversation continued. I told my mother that I needed to write this paper for my international mass communication class and explained it. My mother’s response: “just bite the bullet and do it.” I never realized how metaphorical my mother spoke until trying to scrape up information for this paper. This time I actually understood that my mother meant to deal with the pain and just write the paper. With this said, I did some research to find the origin of this phrase.
The origin of "bite the bullet" dates back to before there were anesthetics. When a soldier was injured the doctor would give him a bullet to bite while the doctor did the procedure. Usually the bullet was used when the soldier was having a body part amputated, which happened frequently since medicine wasn’t even developed enough to have anesthetics let alone advanced procedures.
It wasn’t until I was working on this paper over the last week that I realized that metaphors are used so frequently that most people don’t even realize what they are saying is a metaphor. There is a robust use of dead metaphors in the American English language. When paying attention to such metaphors, I noticed that the place I personally use a lot of metaphors is when I’m at work. I work as a server at a busy restaurant. It’s not uncommon to hear a coworker say “I’m in the weeds” or “I’m weeded.” I don’t expect to see the person actually standing in weeds but I know that it means that they have more tables then they can handle at the point. The origin of this phrase is probably another military phrase since being in the weeds could get your whole army killed. Similarly it’s common to hear the cooks say “a basket of rings just walked in” and I don’t expect to see an order of onion rings walk into the kitchen. At the same time I never think twice about what they are saying.
Metaphors are helpful in language to help create a culture. Without metaphors language may be without color and excitement. Metaphors do not dumb down language, but rather make it more vibrant. It is a lot more interesting to think about an order of onion rings walking rather then just thinking an order of onion rings has been ordered.
