The angry Megalosaurus coming fast up Holborn Hill

When the new year is young I always have the impulse to do something sensationally novel in writing. But what? Is there anything which has not been done before? I answer: yes — coin a new metaphor. We take metaphors for granted and use them without thinking, mix them too, and abuse them constantly — whenever we say ‘literally’ we almost always mean metaphorically (e.g., ‘Chirac and the Chinese President literally fell upon each other’s necks’, the New York Times). In fact it was a genius who invented the metaphor, long before Homer (about 2000 bc in Egypt, which raised problems for those who carved the hieroglyphs, its syntax making no provision for metaphors; the priest-carvers took refuge in abbreviations, cf. Sir Alan Gardiner, Egyptian Grammar: Being an Introduction to the Study of Hieroglyphs, p. 411, para. 506). For metaphors allow us to escape from the restrictions of space, time and reality and range freely across the whole of creation — and fantasy — bringing incompatibles together and turning incongruities into vivid expressions of our meaning.