I'm Inion Fogarty.

Welcome to the Thursday show where we talk to people doing interesting things in the world of language.

Today I'm here with Dr. Vicki Lai, a cognitive scientist and psychology professor at the University of Arizona.

Dr. Lai, welcome to the Grammar Girl podcast.

My pleasure. Your work is so

fascinating. Once I started looking into your research projects, I just wanted to read more and more

about how we use metaphors and what effect that has on our brain. Can you start by just

explaining how integral metaphor is to communication?

Yes. Metaphors occur quite frequently in daily speech.

And one study back in 1977 already said that speakers use about on average of 1.8 novel metaphors and 4.0 frozen metaphors per minute. So that's quite a lot.

What's the difference? I'm sorry, what's the difference between a novel metaphor and a frozen metaphor?

A frozen metaphor is something that is very, very conventionalized. We can call it like that.

For example, if you say the branch of a bank,

that's nobody would think, you know, that's metaphor, but branch is kind of coming from

the use of tree and tree branch. So then you say, okay, that's the branch of a bank. And that's,

nobody would think that's metaphor anymore nowadays. And that's the branch of a bank. And nobody would think that's metaphor anymore nowadays,

and that's the kind of dead metaphors that we call frozen figures.

A novel metaphors would be something new and interesting.

So I can give an example.

This example doesn't exist in English, but in Chinese you can say that let's stir fry the stock market. And that just means that you manipulate the stock market up or down or high or low, you know, in any possible ways like you would do stir fry.

Oh, that's great.

Okay, so we've got these two different kinds of metaphors, and we use them both, like, a lot.

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