During the final rallies of her election campaign, US presidential candidate Kamala Harris drew on one metaphor time and time again. She said that she was determined, or she saw a nation determined, ‘to turn the page on hatred and division’.

It’s an effective rallying call. It certainly sounded positive, inspiring even. But what can it possibly mean, literally? A page of what?

It’s a metaphor, of course. And the underlying metaphor is ‘life is a book’. How does that work?

Well, definitions of metaphors in language generally suggest we use them to describe person or object A in terms of person, animal or object B because A and B are similar in some way. ‘He’s a bit of a mouse’, ‘means’ he’s so shy he practically scurries away, like a mouse, when he sees someone. So far so good. But where’s the resemblance between a book with its cover, spine, dust jacket, and pages, and life?

There’s no obvious similarity, objectively speaking. If you think about it for a moment, ‘life’ is an ungraspable abstraction, while a book (for the purposes of this discussion) is a highly concrete physical object. When we speak about life as a book we’re using what’s called a ‘conceptual metaphor’, and ontological conceptual metaphors enable us to speak about abstracts it might otherwise be difficult, if not impossible, to describe.

Turning the page

The similarities don’t objectively pre-exist prior to the metaphor, but thanks to the metaphor people begin to see similarities which certainly shape not only how we talk about life but also how we think about it, how we conceptualise it. Thanks to the conceptual metaphor we can now refer to different periods of our lives as chapters, Kamala Harris could talk about turning the page, and anyone who has a change of heart can turn over a new leaf.

And once the conceptual metaphor is established in our minds, we build on that to imagine and actively create similarities. The Cobuild Dictionary notes a chapter can refer to a period in someone’s life or in the history of a country or institution. This wide coverage lets people elaborate the linguistic metaphor in colourful ways. Remember, a physical book has chapters. So, in examples I’ve gleaned from the Collins Corpus, we talk about the end part of life, a career, etc. as a closing chapter (‘Her final days in a rest home in London marked the closing chapter’). Conversely, a different phase of life can open the next chapter or a new chapter (‘We are entering the next chapter of the financial crisis’). In those cases, it’s still possible to have the physical book in mind, as it is when we talk about something being a closed book, in its meaning of a matter resolved beyond all doubt and one not to be reopened (‘reopened’ is also a hidden book metaphor): ‘I know the past is a closed book, but she doesn’t.’

And metaphorical chapters can be dark or triumphant, painful or glorious, sorry or remarkable, none of which you’re likely to apply to a physical chapter, so they’ve now become absolute metaphor.

He’s an open book

The ‘life is a book’ metaphor isn’t the only one to draw on books. You and I can be a book too, in answer to the conceptual metaphor ‘people are books’. Hard to believe? Well, people can be animals (‘Don’t be beastly!’ ‘What a pig!’ ‘You gannet!’), so why not go two steps and beyond down the Great Chain of Being to inanimate objects?

We may describe someone as an open book and we’re using that same metaphor when we talk about someone being easy or hard to read, or reading someone like a book. Some people are closed books (‘You’re a closed book. Whatever is going on behind those crinkly eyes, you never let on’) so that closed book metaphor has a dual application: to life, as mentioned above, and to people.

When we jokingly say Don’t judge a book by its cover, it’s that ‘people are books’ metaphor again. In addition, it makes use of another conceptual metaphor, ‘generic is specific’, that is, this specific ‘book’ aka person applies to everyone everywhere.

Some conceptual metaphors cross languages. For instance, ‘anger is hot fluid in a container’ (‘He was fuming’, ‘Smoke was coming out of her ears’, ‘Don’t blow a gasket!’) has parallels in languages as diverse as Chinese, Hungarian, Zulu and Tahitian. What about people as books?

I believe in Danish you can say ‘I can read you like a book’ (Jeg kan læse dig som en bog) and you can say ‘like an open book’ (som en åben bog). Spanish speakers can describe someone as (como) un libro abierto, (‘(like) an open book’), Italians talk about people being un libro aperto or un libro chiuso, with the same meaning of candour and being able to understand at a glance what a person is like, on one hand, or taciturnity and inscrutability on the other.   

However, when it comes to Don’t judge a book by its cover, the lexicographical truism that an idiom in one language mostly doesn’t translate word for word into another comes true. As also that the other language might not use a proverb at all. French, Spanish and Italian all have proverbs influenced by their religious past that mean literally ‘the habit doesn’t make the monk’, L’habit ne fait pas le moine, El hábito no hace al monje and L’habito non fa il monaco, respectively. But do people use them as much we use the English? In French you’re more likely to say (Il ne) Faut pas se fier aux apparences and the Collins Spanish Dictionary has a similar paraphrase, no hay que fiarse de las apariencias as well las apariencias engañan, ‘appearances can be deceptive’. The Jewish sage Rabbi Meir said, ‘Do not look at the flask [of wine] but what is in it.’ And the Arabic Almdaher khadda’ah, means, guess what? ‘Appearances can be deceptive’.

Finally, I’ll leave it to you, dear readers, to ponder whether taking a leaf out of a person’s book relates to ‘life is a book’, ‘people are books’, or something else.

By Jeremy Butterfield
Jeremy Butterfield is the former Editor-in-Chief of Collins Dictionaries, and editor of the fourth, revised edition of Fowler’s Dictionary of Modern English Usage.

All opinions expressed on this blog are those of the individual writers, and do not necessarily reflect the opinions or policies of Collins, or its parent company, HarperCollins.