The adjective figurative, as most, if not all, readers of this book will already know, is used to describe any use of language that is not literal. A spade is an implement used for digging. When we use the word spade, we will, in the vast majority of cases, be using it literally. We will be referring to an actual physical object that the person we are speaking to can see at the time or that he or she can easily visualize. When we use the word spadework, however, we are more likely to be using it figuratively. We will, again in the vast majority of cases, be referring not to the work of turning over the ground with an actual spade but to the hard or routine preparatory work required for any undertaking, work that may be mental rather than physical, work that may have nothing in common with the act of digging except that it is necessary, demanding, and fairly humdrum.When we use the word spadework, therefore, we are implicitly comparing one kind of labor with another. If we say, for example, Jim did all the spadework, we are implicitly saying that the work that Jim did was comparable to that of a gardener who prepares an area of ground so that seed can be sown or plants set. It is important to recognize this fact because comparisons, either implicit or explicit, are the basis of almost all figurative use of language. We are also, at least in theory, asking our listeners or readers to make the same comparison.In practice, most people know what is generally meant by spadework. If by any chance they do not, they can look the word up in a dictionary, which will give the figurative senses of most words alongside their literal ones. There is certainly no need for them to visualize someone working with a spade in order to understand what kind of work is involved. In fact, any attempt to visualize spadework as such is likely to lead to confusion rather than enlightenment.If you were trying to describe an object that was unfamiliar to someone, it might be useful to say that it was "shaped like a spade" or "about the same size as a spade" or that "you use it like a spade." When you say something of that kind, you invite your listener or reader to visualize a spade, an object that they are likely to be familiar with, in order to understand what the less familiar object is like. But it would make little sense to tell someone who was unfamiliar with a particular kind of work that it was "like spadework." That would, in the first place, involve comparing it with something that derived its meaning only from being compared to something else. In the second place, spadework as generally understood—that is, in its more common figurative sense—is too abstract and general a term to be much help in explaining a particular, concrete task.This simple example enables us to take our definition of figurative language a little further. Figurative language is based on comparison. The comparisons on which it is based usually refer to things that are, or used to be, concrete, familiar, and easy to visualize. This is how the many familiar words that now have dictionary-attested figurative senses originally acquired them. The adjective cold, for example, is used in meanings that extend into realms far from that of temperature, where the word literally belongs. For warm-blooded beings, the imaginative leap that had to be made from a cold day, cold water, or cold hands to a cold heart, cold comfort, or cold eyes was not a very great one, and the association between low temperature and lack of humanity or emotion is one that still comes naturally to almost every person. It must have come equally naturally to the people who developed the usual modern sense of spadework to equate basic humdrum work of any kind with the everyday labor of turning the soil. It might not come so easily to us today when gardening is thought of mainly as a leisure activity, and many city dwellers may not lay hands on a spade from one year's end to the next. This simply goes to show that an awareness of history, the history of everyday life rather than that of great events, is a great asset to anyone who wishes to understand figurative language and use it correctly.Figurative language as we know it today, then, derives mainly from an effort on the part of our ancestors to explain more abstract or complex concepts by relating them to simpler and everyday ones. There is a process of comparison implicit in the figurative use of words. Because we are now so familiar with the figurative senses of words such as cold or spadework, we tend to skip over the process of comparison and may even be unaware that a process of comparison is involved. That is where danger sometimes lies.
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