Metaphors, idioms, rhetorical questions

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Do you have problems with idioms and metaphors? I often read that people with AS have it because ot their tendency to interpret things literally but I never found any information whether it's possible to have AS and not to encounter any problems of this kind.

Quite the contrary - I like creating my own metaphores very much. I was always the best student during our Polish literature courses when we were discussing poems and novels and we were interpreting that proverbial: "what the author wanted to say" - I always excelled in this because it was so logical to me, to judge on the basis of all pieces of information from said poem or book what a guy who wrote it had in mind - current of thoughts looks the same in each human being, after all.

I can elicit from my memory only few situations when I took a rhetorical question literally.

Well, I DO handle metaphors, etc... OK Some get upset because of how I relate things. At work JUST YESTERDAY I said "You asking me this question is like asking me why a car won't work when it has an empty fuel tank! Wouldn't it be smarter to just put gas in the tank and THEN investigate if there is another problem?"! Seriously, sometimes some people can be IDIOTS, but even explaining it in such terms doesn't seem to help. They STILL asked me "What is the fuel here?"! There was a code that someone changed that told the system to do what they didn't want. I figured it was senseless to look for other problems until THAT got fixed, because that would STILL cause the problem anyway and was probably the ONLY cause.

There HAVE been only maybe 5 times in my memory of the past 30 years when I answered a rhetorical question, and some NEVER struck me as rhetorical.

Still, My understanding of some jokes is skewed, etc... Some of that because I DO sometimes think of the literal meaning first. Frankly I don't think this is enough to change your idea about AS.

Yes but sometimes I catch what they mean when someone uses an idiom and I never heard it but it's obvious what it means.


I also make up my own phrases.

I have some difficulty with rhetorical questions. Most of the time if somebody asks me something, and the answer is blatantly obvious, I will wonder to myself whether or not they just are not noticing it... but I will still give a long winded explanation... just in case.

I can also easily use my own metaphors to describe things, but I have no clue what somebody else is implying when they use one. My boyfriend once had a doctor's office call him about an appointment he had completely forgotten about. He turned to me and was stressed out at first, but soon calmed down and said "I guess it's like getting a shot". I just looked at him with a blank stare, and he said "would you rather go into the doctors knowing you are getting a shot, or would you rather just get there and have them do it without you knowing?" My response was something like "well, I've had that happen before to me and I'd rather know about it first because that was a really bad situation. The needle bent in my arm!" lol. Now I understand what he meant after lots of explanations and him using lots and lots of other examples, but it took a really long time.

Occasional issues with rhetorical questions, metaphors is more complex. I tend to take things literally, but am now very fast at figuring out what the metaphor is referring to. My immediate thought is always the literal one, but then I'll either run through other meanings of the phrase quickly, or just try to think it out. It does mean that my speech can occasionally sound halting while I'm trying to figure out a metaphor. Also, I drive my wife crazy by making jokes based on metaphorical idea that I'll go on to describe in great literal detail. Really, drives her insane.

This seems pretty common. when I was a kid I'd get annoyed by metaphors. I understood them, but was annoyed when people didn't say what they mean. I think the shrinks have mis-interpreted all of us. We understand them, just think they're often extraenneous (sp?).

I like metaphores, especially if they're clever. I think I sometimes overuse metaphors. Like, I've just switched to a DSL internet connection after rowing sluggishly with dial-up. My computer, however, is like a 3-cylinder engine car. How about that for a metaphor? I don't even know if it's a good one.

Okay, I asked my AS husband whether I should post this or whether I was just being a grammar nerd*, and he said I should.

Most of the examples people are giving are similes, not metaphors. The basic difference is that a simile contains the word "like" or "as if," such as "my computer is like a 3-cylinder car."

He says this is important because it's very hard to interpret a simile literally, because the word "like" or "as if" makes it clear that the speaker is being figurative and making a comparison, whereas the lack of "like" in a metaphor means that it's much easier to misinterpret and take literally. Therefore, he thinks that while many people with AS usually don't have problems with taking *similes* literally, they may still have that problem with *metaphors*.

The examples given by nobodyzdream and 2ukenkerl are not issues of taking something literally when it's meant to be figurative; they're more examples of not thinking the simile is apt. (Though, btw, nobodyzdream's boyfriend's simile doesn't make a heck of a lot of sense to me either, and even if it did, I think that replying that you'd rather know in advance is a perfectly reasonable point of view and doesn't necessarily mean you didn't understand the simile, it just means you see the situation differently than he does.)

Or to be less long-winded, metaphors and idioms cause one problem (taking things at their literal meaning) and similes cause another (realizing the simile is a figurative comparison, but not believing it's apt).


*I am indeed a grammar nerd. By profession.