Post History

Source: https://writers.stackexchange.com/a/18086
License name: CC BY-SA 3.0
License URL: https://creativecommons.org/licenses/by-sa/3.0/

I think this all depends on how _common_ the metaphor is.

Some metaphors are so common that speakers don't recognize them as metaphors any longer, and replacing them is unnecessary.

A very common metaphor is when you say that someone `breaches a subject`, meaning that this person gathers all their courage and addresses what everyone has been avoiding to talk about. This metaphor has become a standing phrase, and avoiding it would lead to ridiculously cumbersome paraphrasing.

Other metaphors are so rare that readers find them novel and poetic.

What you are talking about here is the middle ground, those metaphors that everyone knows but that have not yet (or will never) become irreplacable standard expressions.

The question is, wether or not your example actually falls in this middle category of cheap clichés.

I think not.

While the phrase may be of middle commonality, the _idea_ of two groups of people speaking different languages, comming from different planets or belonging to different species, is so common and widespread as to be almost irreplacable by any other view. Men and women, teens and their parents, workers and academics, foreigners and natives – almost all conflicts between members of clearly recognizable groups have been experienced and described in these or similar terms, because **the inablity to understand the other person is a common human experience** (and a fact that cannot be overcome, in my opinion), and because we seem to be unable to perceive the individuality of these misunderstandings and the persons involved in them but invariable see them as representatives of their respective categories. That is, even if the conflict between this one son and his father is very much unique, and the problem is not that they don't understand each other, we see a son and a father and that they live in different worlds. Their opposition appears natural and God-given to us.

And because this is such a universal perspective, any of the common metaphors expressing it are not cliché at all, but the common and normal and unremarkable descriptions of a basic "truth".

If you hadn't pointed that metaphor out to me, I wouldn't have noticed it.

Original score: 7