Literal language and metaphor

Literal language and metaphor are central to how the book represents Christopher’s effort to understand communication. He treats figurative expressions not as harmless ornaments but as words whose literal meanings conflict with what people intend. The resulting gap between verbal statement and implied meaning helps explain why he finds people confusing, and it shapes both his account of language and the practical methods he uses to interpret the world.

Metaphor as a Problem of Meaning

Christopher identifies two main sources of confusion in people. One is that they communicate without words: as Siobhan explains, a raised eyebrow can carry several different meanings, and even an exhalation may signal relaxation, boredom, or anger depending on its force, the speaker’s expression and posture, and what was said beforehand. Such cues require the interpretation of many circumstances at once, a task Christopher describes as too complicated to work out quickly.

The other source is metaphor. Christopher defines it as describing something with a word for something it is not, and traces the term to Greek words meaning to carry from one place to another. He notices an irony in that definition: the word metaphor itself works metaphorically. To him, however, the transfer of meaning does not make figurative language easier to understand. It creates a mismatch between the thing named and the thing meant, so he says metaphor should be called a lie. The issue is not simply unfamiliar vocabulary; it is that the intended sense cannot be reliably recovered from the literal words alone.

Expressions such as having a pig of a day, being stone dead, or keeping skeletons in a cupboard make the problem concrete. Christopher tries to form the image the words describe, but those images do not explain the speaker’s intended meaning. Imagining an apple in someone’s eye, for example, does not clarify that the expression means liking someone; instead, the image distracts from what the person was discussing. Figurative speech therefore risks displacing the subject rather than making it clearer.

Jokes and Simultaneous Meanings

A joke from Father supplies a compact example of the same difficulty. The joke turns on the word drawn, which can mean made with a pencil, exhausted, or pulled across a window. Its effect depends on allowing those meanings to operate together across a face and curtains. Christopher can identify exactly how the word works: one meaning applies to both, while the other two apply separately to the face and the curtains.

Recognizing the mechanism does not make the joke enjoyable for him. When he tries to hold all three meanings in mind at once, the experience resembles hearing three different pieces of music or listening to three people talk about different things simultaneously. He finds the combination uncomfortable, confusing, and unlike the calm of white noise. The passage distinguishes intellectual explanation from ease of experience: Christopher can analyze the joke, yet its dependence on concurrent meanings remains difficult to process. He consequently explains that the book will contain no jokes, connecting its declared form to his account of how figurative language affects him.

Literal Interpretation and Social Reading

Christopher’s difficulty extends beyond literary metaphor to ordinary social communication. The examples Siobhan gives show why a gesture cannot be read through one fixed dictionary meaning: its significance changes with the circumstances around it. A raised eyebrow may imply sharply different judgments, while a breath through the nose acquires meaning from its speed, force, facial shape, posture, and conversational context. Christopher’s account presents interpretation as a problem of weighing details that other people may leave unspoken.

He nevertheless describes a method for handling expressions that do not make sense. When someone says “See you later, alligator” or “You'll catch your death in that,” Christopher searches his memory for a previous occasion on which he heard the phrase. Recognition of a familiar expression gives him a way to respond without treating the words as a literal prediction or farewell involving an alligator. This is a learned, precedent-based strategy: he checks what has happened before rather than relying on an intuitive grasp of implied meaning.

Metaphor, Names, and Truth

Christopher applies his suspicion of figurative language to his own name. He explains that its meaning involves carrying Christ and connects it to the story of Saint Christopher carrying Jesus across a river. The story prompts him to ask what the saint was called before that act; Christopher answers that the account is apocryphal, and therefore, in his terms, a lie. The reflection brings the discussion of metaphor back to naming: even a name with a figurative or religious history rests on a story whose truth he questions.

Across these examples, the book sets implicit meaning against exact explanation and invented images against things that really happened. Christopher does not merely announce that metaphors confuse him; he dissects their operations, identifies the several meanings a word can carry, and tests what an expression asks a listener to infer. His account makes that analytical precision both a strength and a limit: it clarifies how figurative language works while showing why knowing the mechanism does not necessarily make its meanings feel natural or unambiguous.