Metaphors

I recently wrote a piece about Autistic Focus which was basically an extended metaphor written by an autistic person about autism. There’s a stereotype that autistic people can’t do metaphors, and yet this one worked…

Except of course that I phrased it as a simile – I wasn’t saying that autistic people are UNIX and neurotypical people are Windows; I was saying that those groups have certain similarities to those operating systems in how they handle focus.

A simile is saying that X is like Y; they often shed important light on situations. A metaphor is saying that X is Y, when X is not Y. The classic example you learnt in primary school and that I still use as a reference 40 years later because I’ve got that sort of memory is that someone “flew down the hallway”, meaning that they ran fast. You’re fine with that sort of metaphor.

There’s a stereotype that says that autistic people can’t do metaphors. It’s wrong. An obvious example is the word “toilet”. There are dozens of ways to refer to one in English; almost all of them are euphemistic and metaphorical. “Toilet”, for example, comes from the French toiletter, meaning “to wash”. “Loo”, meanwhile, comes from the old “gardyloo”, a corruption of “Gardez l’eau”, which posh people used to shout when throwing nightsoil (another metaphor) out of the window. All of those you are fine with. Except throwing poo at poor people.

The point is that it isn’t metaphors that autistic people struggle with. It’s lack of clarity as to what the metaphors refer to.

Autistic academic and theologian Grant Macaskill argues that the types of speech that autistic people have trouble with are better labelled as “imprecise” or “unsystematic”.

A classic example of this for me is that the poet Ted Hughes apparently once said that all you need to know about him is that he was a caged jaguar. From my point of view, that could mean just about anything!

It could mean that he considered himself to be South American and loved to show off his luxuriant back hair. It could mean that he was feeling peckish and really wanted to be able to pop out for a few minutes to grab a crocodile to snack on, but couldn’t figure out how to open his front door because he always wore big furry mittens.

The issue isn’t with metaphors as an idea, or using one thing to signify another. It’s when the metaphors are being used in an unclear way. And I frequently struggle to understand language used in an unclear way, whether it employs metaphors or not.