What's the term for the kind of metaphor King uses?

January 15, 2009 10:32 AM

Is there a term for the particular type of metaphor that Martin Luther King Jr. used repeatedly in his "I Have a Dream" speech?

I'm thinking about phrases like "long night of . . . captivity," "withering flames of injustice," "lonely island of poverty," "vast ocean of prosperity," and so on. There's an overt link here between the metaphor's vehicle and its tenor through the word "of," but the phrase isn't a simile, per se. There must be a term for this, but I'll be darned if I can find it anywhere. Please help!

posted by Janey Complainy to writing & language (4 comments total)

Periphrasis? It's an evocative form of circumlocution, really.
posted by weapons-grade pandemonium at 11:26 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]

The best I have is that it looks like the construct state, where a noun is used to modify another noun, and they're generally linked by "of." So, for example, "mother of pearl" or "sheets of gold." The latter, of course, lacks any metaphorical content, and the former is sort of a buried metaphor.

I can't find any name for this in terms of a specfic type of metaphor -- I think the metaphors are just metaphors. The metaphoric content of "withering flames of injustice" is that it evokes injustice as a hot and destructive force, like a withering flame. That wouldn't change if it was phrased "injustice's withering flame," but it would no longer be a construct state. It would just be a metaphorical possessive.

What's interesting is that, as Wikipedia points out, the construct state is particularly common in Semitic languages, and as such tends to appear unusually often in the Bible. I think that's what MLK is really evoking with the repetition of this construction -- a sort of Biblical grandiosity. It may not even have been conscious. He was, after all, a minister, and if you're looking for some grand rhetoric the Bible should be one of your first stops no matter who you are.

It would be interesting to listen to Obama's inaugural address next week with an ear out for this construction. I'm willing to bet it will appear more than once.
posted by rusty at 11:47 AM on January 15 [1 favorite]

In Lakoffian conceptual metaphor theory, these constructions could fall under the EVENT-STRUCTURE METAPHOR, which actually incorporates a whole bunch of smaller metaphors involving space and time describing other abstract concepts, like states and emotions. A decent briefer found here.
posted by iamkimiam at 12:30 AM on January 16

Do you mean what figure of speech? If you ask for what kind of metaphor, you'll get linguistics answers. ;)

It's not paraphrasis. I don't know of a specific trope or scheme, but I'll say this: these metaphors are examples of both parallelism and repetition.

More specifically, they approach something like isocolon; however, these metaphors exist separately, whereas typical isocolon consists of successive phrases.

I think it's also safe to consider these metaphors examples of homeoteleuton.

As a writing instructor who makes frequent mention of figures of speech in class, my opinion is that you can fudge a little when matching Greek figures of speech to English syntax.
posted by hpliferaft at 10:53 AM on March 1