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It's worthwhile noting that metaphors are not just useful in
communication, but actually essential. Our internal representation of
the external reality relies entirely on metaphor (if you concede that
abstraction is a form of metaphor): printed words don't exist inside
my skull (apart from the serial number, perhaps), but through the
process of abstraction, they achieve existence therein. There's a
discipline known as "transformational grammar" (if I've got the right
name) in psychology that points out that our internal representation
must somehow be mapped to the external reality in the form of words,
again, an abstraction/metaphor. The issue for communicators comes down
to how accessible a metaphor is to the audience, not whether or not
metaphor is useful.
--Geoff Hart #8^{)}
BTW, this is pretty touchy-feely stuff... reminds me of a variant on
that old joke: "If a mime falls in a forest, and no one is around to
see it happen, does the mime make a sound?
