A Momentary Flow

“Metaphors and other figurative language are deeply woven into the fabric of human communication, as this very sentence actually demonstrates. But how do our brains translate these metaphors into something they can understand? There’s a longstanding debate among neuroscientists regarding that question. Let’s look at the word “rotten”, which literally means “spoiled” but whose metaphorical usage has expanded its definition to include anything bad or unpleasant. We’re so used to these other usages that we might not even realize that they are metaphors, but we probably still can tell on an instinctual level that “these eggs are rotten” and “I’ve had a rotten time” are two fundamentally different usages.”