I believed “bear spray” was a metaphor for a gun. Eg if you were posting online about camping and concerned about the algorithm disliking your use of the word gun, were going into a state park which has guns banned, or didn’t want to mention “gun” for some other reason, then you’d say “bear spray”, since bear spray is such an absurd & silly concept that people will certainly understand what you really mean.
Turns out, bear spray is real. Its pepper spray on steroids, and is actually more effective than a gun, since its easier to aim and is optimized to blind & actually cause pain rather than just damage. [EDIT:] Though see Jimmy's comment below for a counter-point.
So far as I can tell, the common line that bear spray is more effective than firearms is based on an atrociously bad reading of the (limited) science, which is disavowed by the author of the studies. In short, successfully spraying a bear is more effective at driving off curious bears than simply having a firearm is are at stopping charging bears, but when you're comparing apples to apples then firearms are much more effective.
Here's a pretty good overview: https://www.outsideonline.com/2401248/does-bear-spray-work. I haven't put a ton of work into verifying what he's claiming here, but it does match with the other data I've seen and I haven't seen anyone be nearly as careful and reach the opposite conclusion.
these might all be relatively obvious but here are some I've found nice to notice
"I didn't hear that" when people's low level processing fails to parse words someone said despite being perfectly able to receive the audio. not usually playing fool, in my experience
That’s why I appreciate a “hey” or some other initial phrase before someone starts speaking to me. It gets me ready to parse words. For some people I talk to if I start speaking without that, I’ll mostly get a “what did you say?”.
The weight bit interests me. Is this where weights on a graph come from as well? Is that coincidence? I had assumed that they were called weights within the metaphor of a neural network as a graph.
I used to think "getting lost in your eyes" was a metaphor, until I made eye contact with particularly beautiful woman in college and found myself losing track of where I was and what I was doing.
I had a related one as a teenager: there are various expressions about women being too beautiful to look at or that it hurt to look at, etc. I thought they were all overwrought literary expressions - a woman you loved or had a crush on, sure, that's love, but just a random woman? - until I went to dinner in a group which happened to include such a woman.
(Thankfully, being a large group in a noisy restaurant, I could get away with not looking at her all evening; although I got a little angry this could even be a thing - I never signed up for that! I've wondered if or how long it'd take for that to wear off, but I never saw her again, so I have no idea.)
"Seeing the light" to describe having a mystical experience. Seeing bright lights while meditating or praying is an experience that many practitioners have reported, even across religious traditions that didn't have much contact with each other.
One's heart skipping a beat. I thought it was just a poetic way of saying something like "time stood still," but no, it turns out it does do that pretty literally.
On the opposite end, when I was young I learned about the term "Stock market crash", referring to 1929, and I thought literally a car crashed into the physical location where stocks were traded, leading to mass confusion and kickstarting the Great Depression. Though if that actually happened back then, it would have led to a temporary crash in the market.
When I was a kid and 9/11 happened, some people online were talking about the effect on the stock market. My mom told me that the stock exchange was down the street from the WTC and not damaged, so I thought the people on the Internet were all wrong.
When I visited Manhattan, I realized that "Wall Street" and "Broadway" are not just overused clichés, but the names of actual streets (you can walk on them!)
This feels closely related to Alexithymia or emotion blindness
Extremely common in: people with ADHD / Autism (potentially over half)
Fairly common in: people who have PTSD, people with substance abuse issues (possibly causal, alexithymia -> drugs to feel something), and men (male-normative alexithymia)
People with alexithymia often identify their emotions primarily through physical sensations
For me (a male with autism, ADHD and PTSD) I can tell I'm feeling scared or anxious if my legs get cold (I believe this is a common form)
Reminds me of how a few years ago I realized that I don't feel some forms of stress but can infer I'm stressed by noticing reduction in my nonverbal communication.
This FULLY explains my experience with panic attacks. I occasionally get all the physical symptoms, think something like "Huh, my heart is racing and it feels like air doesn't work. I wonder why?". I monitor my breathing and pulse for a while to make sure I haven't forgotten how to automatically-alive or something, and (since it's never been a heart attack before) go on with my day.
Would have been nice to know in elementary school when attempting to describe my experience with emotions (I thought I didn't have any) got me treated for depression for a year.
I have a beef with the theory of male-normative alexithymia; it does not distinguish well between hiding emotion, and outright not feeling an emotion.
Plenty of emotions are not innate but externally induced through social pressure and culture. It is perfectly plausible and normal for a man to not have particular feelings about X, until society repeatedly insists that X is Bad or Good, and the man should feel badness or goodness to conform.
For example, the feelings of sexual jealousy, and of grieving after someone's death seem to be extremely culture specific, in a way that is easier to explain if these emotions were induced by ritualistic actions and only then internalized, and not the reverse.
For most forms of exercise (cardio, weightlifting, HIIT etc.) there's a a spectrum of default experiences people can have from feeling a drug-like high to grindingly unpleasant. "Runner's high" is not a metaphor, and muscle pump while weightlifting can feel similarly good. I recommend experimenting to find what's pleasant for you, though I'd guess valence of exercise is, unfortunately, quite correlated across forms.
Another axis of variation is the felt experience of music. "Music is emotional" is something almost everyone can agree to, but, for some, emotional songs can be frequently tear-jerking and for others that never happens.
Weight lifters feeling "pumped" is similarly literal. I get this from rock climbing more often than lifting, but after a particularly strenuous climb, your arm muscles feel inflated--they're engorged with blood. It can take a minute for it to subside.
"Music is emotional" is something almost everyone can agree to, but, for some, emotional songs can be frequently tear-jerking and for others that never happens
I'm now curious if anyone thinks "this gave me chills" is just a metaphor. Music has literally given me chills quite a few times.
Moreover, both the runner's high and the pump correlate very obviously with the progress of the training, both in session and in the long term. Most forms of training usually start as grindingly unpleasant, then morph into a physical pump that directly causes emotional pump, and finally go back to mild grind once the body is exhausted.
With a repeatable training regimen this is easy to notice. For example, my runs are almost always 5km distance, and the "emotional high" lasts pretty much exactly between 2km and 4km, in near perfect accordance with my bpm an...
I thought the exercise thing (like runner's high, feeling pumped, etc) were all metaphors, but I was surprised to learn other people actually felt good after exercise. Whatever it is, I'm missing the mechanics, and exercise is pure duty (so I try to get it doing other things I enjoy, such as walking my dog and chasing children around).
I've had the opposite experience with music, when I said a harmony made me feel shivers and the other person didn't realise I was being literal.
My example is when people say "I enjoy life" they mean actually enjoying life-as-whole and not like "I'm glad my life is net-positive" or whatever.
Feeling pain after hearing a bad joke. "That's literally painful to hear" is self-reportedly (I say in the same way I, without a mind's eye, would say about mind's-eye-people) actually literal for some people.
Oh yeah, this. I used to think that "argh" or "it hurts" were just hyperbolic compliments for an excellent pun. Turns out, puns actually are painful to some people.
If I’ll probably see them again, I don’t miss people. I thought people saying they miss you were just being overly polite.
I also was kind of surprised when it turned out 'gut feeling' actually meant a feeling in your belly-area.
Added: I wonder if the notion of 'having a hunch' comes from something that causes you to hunch over?
At a party several years ago an attractive intoxicated person made a pass at me unexpectedly. As a long time married, this isn’t something that happens. At that moment it literally felt like my knees fell out from under me. It was so unlike any other sensation! Im convinced it must have been “weak in the knees”.
When I first had depression, I remember thinking everything felt dull, like all the color was sucked out of the world, but I thought this was a metaphor even in my own mind. But then I learned from this post that probably my color perception actually was messed up by depression https://slatestarcodex.com/2017/09/12/toward-a-predictive-theory-of-depression/
A few people referred to anaxithemia or overcoming it, I think most people don't realize how precise most expressions around feelings are.
"My arms are falling" is an expression in french to explain that you're shocked. I experienced myself my arms becoming impossible to move, as if filled with concrete, after going through some relational shocks (the same is true of "being blinded by X", some extremely intense emotions have literally made me blind for a few secs)
While I'm at it, some mental shocks literally feel like a physical shock! One of those felt for me like an egg being broken against my skull.
"Making nodes in one's head" means overthinking something. "Untying things" means getting helpful insights. However, it's literally what I went through during therapy. There is a literal feeling of untying an invisible "force field", and those nodes are almost always correlated with mental schemes that are uselessly complex. Some people are genuinely worried that you could actively harm your own mental health through overthinking, they're not just finding an excuse for switching topics!
"Vibes" and "vibe" are extremely concrete things for people who got into very special states of consciousness. The french equivalent for that, "ondes", felt so radio-communication related I thought it had to be some telepathy pseudoscience BS. Actually, people are talking about components of subjective perceptions, and some of those (e.g. color, or mood) literally feel/behave like waves when under altered consciousness, and engage in resonance effects as well. To the detriment of the image, however, there seems to be a real contingent that extends this observation to "and we can use them to do telepathy or influence fate".
Sorry, I'm being very pedantic, but how are "picturing" and "mind's eye" not metaphorical? It's not like there's an actual picture or an actual eye anywhere, in fact that's the whole point
There is (for me) an actual experience of a picture. It seems only slightly metaphorical to call the faculty of experiencing such pictures “seeing” by an “eye”.
One test for the possession of such a faculty might be to count the vertexes of some regular (not necessarily Platonic) polyhedron, given only a verbal description.
If you want to be truly pendatic, the "mind's eye" and "picturing" are analogies and not metaphors.
The mind's eye is like that of a physical, sensory eye, but doesn't replace it.
Analogy: "Joe looks at you, his eyes like gemstones"
Metaphor: "Joe looks at your with his gemstones"
Analogy: "I am picturing it in my mind's eye as if I had a second pair of eyes"
Metaphor: "I am picturing it with my second pair of eyes"
If you want to be even more pendantic, we could have a Idealist discussion of the metaphysics of sense and that all pictures are mental ...
"Home is where the heart is."
I thought this meant something like home is where longing is (your metaphorical heart), the place that you yearn for the most. Now I think it may simply mean that home is wherever your physical beating heart is. The message behind it being that you can adapt to feel at home most anywhere.
"Breathtaking."
I thought this was just an expression to explain natural beauty but I actually felt the breath leave me when I was young from suddenly seeing a sweeping vista of mountains and forest while riding on a bus when I was a teen.
Related; when you never realized a compound word had a literal meaning....
Cup board -- board to put cups on -- cupboard
Medi terrain -- between two continents -- Mediterranean
Etc.
Scripts and screenplays are very interesting examples of this.
Manuscript is a handwritten script (manual script), which seems a bit redundant before modern presses. A screenplay is a play written for the (silver) screen. i.e. a mirror upon which a film projector bounced off images from.
It only just occurred to me that a playwright is not someone who writes plays but akin to a Cartwright.
Mesopotamia -- literally "between the rivers. "
Hippopotamus -- water horse
Welcome -- "well-come" - coming in a state of wellness (I don't know if this approximates the modern health connotations, or is more general 'goodness' which may have in older forms of English indistinguishable). It reminds me of the Modern Greek expression γειά σου/σας literally "good health to you".
Speaking of metaphors and Greek, there's a lovely anecdote about the whimsy of seeing in Greece moving vans emblazoned with the word 'metaphora' on them. It being a compound word which originally meant to carry from one place to another. Which metaphorically is what a linguistic metaphor does: carry meaning from one topos to another.
I only realised the latter when I saw the Dutch word for this “middellandse zee”. The sea in the middle of the lands.
“Terranean” had never scanned separately to me
As someone with aphantasia, I can confirm: It has only just occurred to me that someone asking me to picture something in my mind might be asking that in a literal sense.
Annoyingly I have the recollection of having thought "oh, that's not a metaphor?" several times in my life, but I don't seem to have saved what the things in question actually were.
People with aphantasia typically think that when someone says to "picture X in your mind", they're being entirely metaphorical. If you don't have a mind's eye, that's a super reasonable thing to think, but it turns out that you'd be wrong!
In that spirit, I recently discovered that many expressions about "feelings in your body" are not metaphorical. Sometimes, people literally feel a lump in their throat when they feel sad, or literally feel like their head is hot ("hot-headed") when they're angry.
It seems pretty likely to me that there are other non-metaphors that I currently think are metaphors, and likewise for other people here. So: what are some things that you thought were metaphors, that you later discovered were not metaphors?