Sometimes it’s tough to know when someone is being literal or just speaking in figurative terms. Myself, I’m a very literal person. But even I can generally tell when people are speaking in word pictures, or using imagery to convey an idea. I know that some things are just impossible to be taken literally. But metaphors, imagery, idioms, and the like are valuable tools in order to illustrate an idea to people. They can open people’s understanding to something that they might not, otherwise, see. But if you take figurative language literally you’ll easily end up confused.
The ideas we convey using these word pictures are probably under-appreciated. Without realizing it, we somehow illustrate an experience or an idea that others can easily relate to. Imagery has that advantage. Imagery is really just a kind of way to paint a mental picture with words. I personally believe that’s why people often say ‘the book is so much better’ when they’re talking about a book made into a movie. We have the advantage, when reading, of creating our own mental images of what we’re reading about. Our imagination is a pretty fertile ground for creating the backdrop for the screenplay of our liking; THX and Dolby surround just can’t compete. We had this image in our minds from the book we have already read, and comparing it to someone else’s creation just leaves us feeling disappointed.
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But beyond just simply using imagery, there are ways to use that imagery to speak in a metaphorical sense. We use word pictures, but word pictures to illustrate an idea, not to illustrate a scene. For instance, if something ‘goes over your head’, it doesn’t literally go over your head. If you didn’t know that until now, probably a lot of things have gone over your head already. Or, if someone says ‘that was a shot across the bow’, it doesn’t mean you’re in a naval battle and someone just unleashed one of their canons at the front of your Victorian era sailing vessel. It’s a metaphorical way of someone sending you a warning in a confrontational way. Anyway, these things can be helpful in illustrating the reality of something without speaking in real terms. And they color our language in a way that, without it, would leave it somewhat dry and lacking in punch. These metaphors don’t just make the complex understandable, but provide depth and color to the language as well.
So, in finding out what’s figurative or what’s literal it requires knowing the speaker’s background, the context, and some skills in discerning the statement’s likely usage. Sometimes people are too literal to take things figuratively. And sometimes people are too figurative to take things literally. But finding a balance in that is kind of up to us. We may have been too figurative in the past, or too literal in the past, but somehow we missed the message because of it. We can learn from these times to look at the message first before we impose a false understanding of what’s really being said.