These Difficult Times

"Do you know that the hard thing to do and the right thing to do are usually the same thing? 'Easy' doesn't enter into grown-up life: to get anything of value, you have to sacrifice."
— Robert Spritz in “The Weather Man”
(Steve Conrad. Paramount Pictures. © 2005.)

What is so interesting to me about this movie quote is that it reveals a commonly-used and extremely powerful metaphor: difficulties are solid. (For more on the ubiquity and power of metaphor please see George Lakoff and Mark Turner’s More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide To Poetic Metaphor (University of Chicago Press. Chicago: 1989.) here.)

This association is everywhere. You’ll find it in aphorisms: “Life is hard,” “If it don’t come hard, it don’t come right.” And you’ll find in regular street conversation: “It was a hard decision,” “Boy, dealing with children is hard to do,” “Oh man! My holiday season sucked. I had a tough time shopping.”

A tough time? What is a tough time? How can time be tough? How is it that we view abstractions as being solid? Why does this association exist? Furthermore, if you look carefully at this metaphor, you can seen that the difficulty mentioned in every case is thought of as a solid object, a hard object. Why this connection between difficulty and solidity?

And conversely, why does there appear to be a corresponding and opposite association between ease and fluidity? (i.e. “It was smooth sailing,” “Yo! It’s like buttah!” “I’m living on easy street.” Notice all the connotations of fluid motion, sailing, melting butter, streets. You get it.)

There is a big reason for these associations: we use them because we have nothing better to use. They are all we have. I find the English language in specific to be tragically deficient in this area. (Other languages I believe are also deficient, but I don’t speak Japanese or Swahili — I’m looking into this.) And it is in need of major addition. We are ill-equipped with a robust language about difficulties, adversities, and trials. In other words, we lack strong terminology for difficulty.

We depend upon these metaphors (difficulties are hard solids; eases are soft fluids) because our sense of language sprouts forth from our bodies. Our bodies become the framework for language. So, can we use a metaphor that is beyond our bodies to get beyond this and extend our language for difficulty?

This we will have to wait and see.