Each of us has a box (metaphorically speaking) filled with metaphors.  In our role as orator, we carry this box (our linguistic toolbox), filled with figures of speech, which we select to craft, and to deliver, the message we carry.

Continuing with a theme that ripples through our posts, often as an undercurrent, and now and then as a wave, words press our views upon our audience and reinforce our views in and to ourselves; and often the complacency of our audience, and within ourselves, entrenches these views, and thereby drains the words of complexity and strips them of luster. The words lose their meanings, or the meanings are veiled.   We take the words at face (non-figurative, non-metaphorical) value and unwittingly overlook the assumptions lurking within them. And therein lies danger.

Our interest today is in the mixture of metaphor that share a common root and typically appear as flat, a flatness that fosters coercion, a coercion amplified by the pedestrian cloak of, and around, the word.

Let’s have a brief look together, a joint tapping at the edges, and then let’s each have our own visit.

Version. A version to define (di)versions and (per)versions and animate quests for (con)versions through coercion. The variations of the versions threaten the chosen, consensus version. Beware the (re)version and (in)version that, unrestrained or unconstrained, would subvert the convention of separate versions into a durable, defining, controlling version.

Or should we fear the banality of the (accepted) version: the host dependant on its parasitic (di)versions that empower and sustain the version, through a symbiosis that leaves residual (a)version to those who challenge with (apparent or concealed) (sub)versions. But how can we tell the host from the parasite; who do we know who holds the version?

Whose version defines perversion; whose version propels conversions and stimulates subversions that threaten to create a new version? Until our immersion in the consensus version has drained the impulse to diversion?

From James Baldwin: “And we know that, for the perpetuation of this system, we have all been mercilessly brutalized, and have been told nothing but lies, lies about ourselves and our kinsmen and our past, and about love, life, and death, so that both soul and body have been bound in hell.”

Let’s each embark on our own visits.

Beware the banality of the modest metaphor.