Surfaces and Essences: Analogy as the Fuel and Fire of Thinking (31 page)

As is the case for any categorization, filing a situation under the “sour grapes” label is the result of a judgment call. We opened
Chapter 1
with the idea that one is never confronted with a single isolated situation but is always in the midst of a vast multitude of situations, and that there is never just one single valid point of view to take but always a variety of reasonable points of view. For instance, in order to label a situation as “sour grapes”, one has to recognize that someone saw a rare opportunity, tried to seize the moment, failed and was disappointed, and in the end came out with some dismissive comments that would never have been thought up had the original goal been obtained. The man who cheerily said that it’s more romantic to chance upon a new restaurant while strolling about would doubtless have found dining at the posh restaurant that his friends had recommended to be boundlessly romantic had his reservation not been canceled. The great benefits of losing in politics would not very likely have sprung to the mind of the politician if he had just barely won the election instead of just barely lost it; in that case, he might more likely have thought to himself, “The world is my oyster!”

One way of verbalizing the essence of
sour grapes
situations is as follows: they are situations in which
disappointment turns a person into an intellectual opportunist
— that is, into someone who tries to paint a failure in rosy colors. The behaviors that are often called “seeing the silver lining” or “counting one’s blessings” are somewhat different from this pattern. They involve a person searching for small positive aspects that lurk unseen in a mostly troubling situation. In contrast to
sour-grapes
situations, which involve the expedient distortion of one or more beliefs,
seeing-the-silver-lining
situations are ones in which the protagonist, though upset, does not distort any beliefs but instead is
selective
in terms of which beliefs to focus on.

The fox-and-grapes fable is (by definition!) a prototype of the
sour grapes
category. However, it is a very poor member of the
silver lining
or
blessing-counting
categories, because the fox does not foreground any positive aspects of the frustrating situation that
he finds himself in. On the other hand, this fable is a good member of the
bad faith
category (that is, situations whose protagonist lacks honesty and sincerity). In this category are found many situations that have nothing to do with the reduction of cognitive dissonance. Some simple examples would be:

Any situation permits a host of diverse categorizations. The category that winds up being selected will determine the perspective that colors how the perceiver interprets the various facts that constitute the situation. The range of situations that have been explored in the preceding sections shows the impossibility of thinking of categories as having fixed boundaries and interpretations as being unique. To the contrary, categories evoked by fables are, like all categories, overarching frameworks that guide interpretations. The mental act of categorization shines a particular light on a situation. Thus the fox-and-grapes fable gives a first, basic sense for situations that clearly involve
sour-grapes-ness
, and later it helps us recognize this quality when it is less obvious. In the end, the fable enriches us with a sense for the various creative ways that people manage to find comfort in situations that in fact bother them.

We now take up once again the theme of
conceptual spaces
, which we introduced at the end of
Chapter 1
to describe the relations between languages and concepts. Each word or expression of a given language is thought of as a colored blob occupying a portion of a conceptual space (and each color is thought of as representing a language). The center of a conceptual space consists of the set of concepts most frequently used in a given culture. All the different languages that share the same culture cover the core of the conceptual space in different fashions, using blobs of different sizes and shapes, and of course different colors.

We also introduced the metaphor of a ring or shell of concepts, meaning those concepts that share approximately the same frequency or importance. We had built up the image of concentric rings or shells that, given a particular color, are filled up with blobs of that color, with each blob having its own unique shape and size, and representing a specific concept. At the core of a conceptual space, each color does an essentially perfect job of filling the space up, and as one moves outwards to rings that lie near the core, each color continues to do an excellent job.

If we keep on going out further, however, sooner or later we come to areas of conceptual space where single-word lexical items almost never suffice, and where each language has a quite different way of covering those zones. For instance, English has
the phrase “it’s nothing to write home about” (meaning “what happened isn’t particularly thrilling or memorable”, and if someone were to ask (quite reasonably), “How does French cover that zone?”, the answer would be that it’s not by reference to hypothetical postcards or letters that were never written or sent to one’s family, but in a radically different fashion. The French get this same idea across by recourse to the colorful (although rather nebulous) phrase “ça ne casse pas trois pattes à un canard” (“it doesn’t break three legs of a duck”). In some sense, the French phrase and the English phrase mean just the same thing, but they nonetheless convey the meaning in very different ways, since the concrete images that might be conjured up in the minds of speakers or listeners involve extremely different scenarios.

These differences between idiomatic expressions can be of any size. For instance, the closest French counterpart of the idiom “to be flat on one’s back” (meaning “to be very sick”) is “être cloué au lit” (“to be nailed to one’s bed”), which conveys a similar but much more painful scenario. So we get discrepancies between different languages’ ways of filling up a conceptual space not only in the sense that the blobs in the same part of space are shaped differently, but also in the way in which idiomatic phrases get across their messages.

Eventually, if we move out far enough, genuine
holes
will start to turn up — patches in conceptual space that one language covers very neatly with a single blob, but that the other simply doesn’t cover with any standard word or phrase, no matter how voluminous is its repository of lexical items. A typical example was given in the Prologue, where we mentioned the lack in Mandarin of a generic verb meaning “to play” applicable to any musical instrument.

Thus, given any idiomatic phrase in English (and there are untold thousands of them), it makes reasonable sense to ask, “How does one say this in French?”, because fairly often there is a nearly-perfect counterpart phrase, but sometimes the answer is not what one wants to hear; indeed, sometimes the blunt truth is: “There is no standard way to say that in French.” Sometimes the answer is, in effect, “In the zone of conceptual space that is pinpointed and highlighted by that phrase in English, there is unfortunately a gaping hole in the French lexicon.” Of course the French language can always
describe
the idea, but in these kinds of cases it cannot do so by means of a standard lexical item known to all or most native speakers. We hasten to point out that exactly the same phenomenon of unexpected lacunœ is encountered also by French speakers seeking to say things in English.

And the farther out one moves from the center of the shared conceptual space, the more often one will encounter these kinds of regions that, although easily and naturally accessible in one language, are simply uncovered by another language. Eventually, each language, as it approaches its own outer reaches, offers only spotty coverage, growing ever spottier as one gets further out. If at this point you are envisioning something like a nebula or galaxy whose core is densely packed with stars but whose fringes are populated more sparsely, and which eventually tails off totally, yielding to the utter blackness of the cosmos, then you have in mind exactly the image that we wish to convey.

Eventually, then, every language simply gives out, and from a certain point onwards the conceptual space is simply empty, uninhabited. What does this imply? It implies that if someone wants to talk about things in that remote zone of conceptual space, they can’t just quote one standard building block, but instead must take a number of standard building blocks and string them together, thereby constructing a pathway that leads to the desired zone. In short, they must concoct new phrases or sentences. And if no single phrase or sentence will suffice, then a paragraph may be required. And if no single paragraph will suffice, then an article or a story may be required. In this fashion, arbitrarily remote spots in the black depths of conceptual space
will
be reachable by any language.

Here we are not primarily concerned with extremely remote, nearly empty areas of conceptual space. Instead, we wish to focus on little local pockets of conceptual space that are covered by one language’s lexicon while being uncovered by another’s. Are there any implications when some language hands to all of its speakers a ready recipe for picking out a small spot somewhere in conceptual space, while another language does not do so at all?

Let’s take an example. American English has the picturesque idiom, “That’s the tail wagging the dog!” Adult speakers of American English know what this means, which is to say, they readily recognize situations to which it applies and they can use it themselves in such cases, and they can also easily understand what is meant if someone else applies it to some situation.

In order to convey the meaning of this idiom, a speaker of American English cannot simply translate it word for word in the hopes that a French speaker will just “get it”, suddenly becoming enlightened. That strategy won’t work. One might try to get the concept across by giving an abstract description of the idea behind this idiom, and although doing so could be a good first step, it might be more helpful to provide a few quintessential examples of
tail-wagging-the-dog
situations, either by retrieving them from memory or by inventing new ones on the spot. Thus our imaginary American could recall or invent the story of seven-year-old Priscilla, a spoiled girl whose parents were eagerly planning a short vacation to New Orleans and were planning to take her along, but she didn’t want to go at all, so she threw such a violent temper tantrum that her folks totally dropped their plans and submissively stayed home. Hearing about this, friends of the family tsk-tsked and said, “That little
enfant terrible
has her parents wrapped around her little finger. Talk about the
tail
wagging the
dog!”

In order to convey the idea that
tail-wagging-the-dog
situations are not limited to those in which spoiled children have temper tantrums and foil their parents’ vacation plans, our American could then recount the story of the grand new city hall that was being designed to beautify the central square of Waggington. After the first sketches had been submitted by the architect, the town council complained that there was no provision for parking. The idea was sent back to the architect, who responded with a new plan that
included a parking area, but when this was submitted to the town council, it was again rejected because, they claimed, this time, that there wasn’t
enough
parking. After a couple more iterations of this, with the building growing smaller each time and the parking lot coming to dominate the entire design, one outraged citizen wrote a letter to the local paper that said, “So the need to park a bunch of cars is dictating the appearance of our new city hall? Well, if
that
ain’t the tail waggin’ the dog!”

As a brief third example, let’s mention the story of a runner who had to stop running each day when his kneecap started to hurt. Thus his kneecap dictated to him how many miles he would run. Another excellent case of the tail wagging the dog!

After a few such stories, the gist of
tail-wagging-the-dog
-ness would hopefully have been gotten across pretty effectively; from there on out, the French speaker would hopefully be able to use the American idiom appropriately, although at the outset there might be some need for fine-tuning to clarify where the idiom is eminently applicable and where it is less so, though of course the borderlines are blurry, so that native speakers won’t always agree. The French speaker might even start, at about this stage of the game, to feel a frustrating sense of French’s “vacuum” in this part of conceptual space, not unlike the slight sense of vacuum created by the lack of a familiar phrase corresponding to English’s “sour grapes”.

Here, we would like to even up the score by giving English speakers the chance to experience the just-described feeling of vacuum, and to do so we will cite a typical French idiomatic phrase, often attributed to the philosopher Denis Diderot, that has no good English counterpart (and of course this one isn’t unique; there are hundreds of others) — namely, “avoir l’esprit d’escalier”. What does this mean? Well, translated literally (in the manner of Jean-Loup Chiflet’s books), it means “to have the spirit of staircase”, but as an idiom it basically means “to come up with the ideal retort to an annoying remark right after one has left the party and is heading down the stairs”. In other words, to put it a bit more pithily, “to have staircase wit”. Although it is a frustrating thing to find the perfect parry only when it no longer counts, it is also a fairly widespread phenomenon in life, and so you would think that the famously rich English language would offer its speakers a stock expression that gets efficiently at this notion, but no. That’s just the way the cookie crumbles.