Ubiquitous Rhetorical Language Illuminated Through German Verb Construction

A lot of what Killingsworth said of modern rhetorical theorists I found interesting. It is easy to think of figurative langauge as deceitful, therefor posing questions such as "Why can't we communicate without deceit?" or "Why can't we just say what we say what we mean?" or, as quoted from Killingsworth, "How could all this technical fuss improve our understanding of language and the world?" (122). But, as is more modernly accepted, figurative language is "pervasive", an integral, unavoidable part of our language, and thus would be erroneous to dismiss it. Figurative language, as a technique of rhetoric, was born, as it seems, simultaneously with language itself, and our entire language consists of "dead" and "dying metaphors" (122).

This concept of hidden "dead" metaphors became very apparent to me as I began to learn German. Germans have a very similar way of using verbs with prefixes (by this I mean "wake up/ reise auf" or "come back/ kommen zuruck"), but the way German's construct these verbs with prefixes within sentences is very different than the English language, and thus revealed to me how figurative this use was. The German verb for to rise is "reisen", while Germans use "aufresien" when saying wake up. This of course makes sense, because "auf" more or less means up. But when constructing a sentence the "auf" splits from the"reisen" and is sent to the end of the sentence. For example, when saying "I wake up every morning.", the translation would be "Morgens reise ich auf." (notice the "auf" at the end). Although this is a grammatical practice Mark Twain found to be "awful" (he writes a whole piece called "The Awful German Language"), the point is that "dead" figurative phrases, such as "wake up" or "feel low", are ubiquitous throughout language, even when unrecognized. German (as I'm sure it would be with attempting to learn any new language through grammatical rules as opposed to the deep woven memorization of our first language) helped me realized just how frequent figurative language was, especially through verb/prefix constructions.

The reason why figurative language is in fact so ubiquitous is how they so well represent human thought. Killingsworth says tropes are "not merely embellishments of language but ways of thinking" (122). Figurative language represent the "way we think" (a good example of this is the metaphor, which is, because of its comparison to the body, "the foundation of human thought" (126)). And why should we try to imagine language as not conforming to the way we think? If the goal of language is to relay our thoughts, then shouldn't language follow the same patterns of human thought? Isn't this most effective? Sorry "old Greek and Roman masters", but figurative language is just too ubiquitous, too necessary to understanding and thought to be unconsidered (or considered as simply "eloquence").