Imagine the year is 1999. You are a dentist named Kurt, living in a small town in Pennsylvania.
One beautiful Saturday morning in May, you walk out to your mailbox, and you find a letter. You open it up to see a big headline that reads:
“There’s a new railroad across America”
“And it’s making some people very rich…”
Pretty intriguing, right? So you start to read.
The letter tells you how railroads made huge fortunes in the 19th century. But bankers were afraid to invest, so it was small, independent investors who connected America by rail — and got filthy-as-Johnny-Rotten rich in the process.
Finally, the letter explains what it’s selling:
A few companies are laying down a fiber-optic network to connect America by Internet in the 21st century, much like the railroad connected it in the 19th century. People who invest in the right companies have the chance to get rich like 19th-century railroad barons. Do you want to be among these shrewd investors?
Plenty of people did, back in 1999, when Porter Stansberry sent them this letter to launch his newsletter.
But imagine if Porter had written a slightly different letter. Instead of talking about a railroad, imagine he had used the headline:
“There’s a new goldmine in America”
“And it’s making some people very rich…”
This is pretty similar to the original. Another metaphor. Would it work just as well?
It’s unlikely. Here’s a relevant quote by one Linda Berger, a law professsor at UNLV:
“A reader who is asked to interpret a novel metaphor will be engaged in the creation of meaning, while the reader who is confronted with a conventional metaphor will do nothing more than retrieve an abstract metaphoric category.”
Stansberry’s “railroad” is a metaphor for an investing opportunity. Odds are, you’ve never seen this metaphor before.
A “goldmine” is also a metaphor for an investing opportunity. Odds are, you’ve seen that plenty of times before.
And that’s the difference Berger is talking about.
When you give people a novel metaphor, they start turning it around in their brains. They map aspects of the metaphor to their situation. So “railroad” becomes “Internet”… “tracks” become “fiber-optic cable”… “independent 19th-century investor” becomes “me.”
But what if you give a reader a conventional metaphor like “goldmine”? If Berger is right, and I suspect she is, then the reader says, “Oh, they must mean this is a big investment opportunity.” And if that turns your reader on, then he continues to read.
In other words, a novel metaphor is a shortcut between where your reader currently is… and where you want him to go mentally.
A conventional metaphor is shorthand. It can be useful to quickly express a concept in a few words. But it’s not gonna create any new insight.
Remember my post from yesterday? It turns out both Gary Bencivenga and Mark Ford were right. Cliches have their uses, and their limitations. And now you know why — and when to use shorthand, and when to create mental shortcuts.
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