Poetic and prosaic metaphors

Metaphor (some people say) is "the dreamwork of language," where ideas are combined in ways that are "special, odd, or startling." Metaphor is a "mutation" of language, a phenomenon that relies crucially on our recognition of its "deviance" or "nonsensicality." Metaphor, if it means at all (it may only "suggest" or "evoke"), does not mean as literal language does. Metaphor is the stuff of "playful prose and high poetic m't." Metaphor (say others) "covers the entire semantic, semiological and performative field of language" and "is natural and widespread in our speech, not having any apparent special status." Well, but (we say) there are ways and ways of being a metaphor. What some people are talking about are the "fresh" and "vivid" figures that puilulate in poetry, play, and the rudimentary stages of theory-building. For them, metaphor is essentially an rhetorical category, identified by its affective import. Whereas other people take metaphor to be essentially a semantic phenomenon, which crucially involves a perception of transfer of extension of meaning or application. In the standard story, moreover, there is no real conflict between these views. Metaphors begin their lives as novel poetic creations with marked rhetorical effects, whose comprehension requires a special imaginative leap. As time goes by, they become a part of general usage, now "stale," "worn," and "idiomatic"; their comprehension becomes more automatic, and their rhetorical effect is dulled. Finally, as "dead" or "frozen" metaphors, they are not psychologically distinct from literally-used terms. In point of fact, "most lexical items prove to be dead metaphors that ~vere alive and kicking at some time in the past." The natural conclusion is that there is a difference in conversational status between the "poetic metaphors" that strike our fancy and the "prosaic metaphors" that pass by unnoticed in our ordinary discourse. The former arise out of conversational implicatures, indirect speech acts, or whatever, while the latter are matters of literal or conventional meaning. Not surprisingly, this leads in turn to the assumption that we ought to be able to explain the rhetorical effect of poetic metaphors in virtue of their conversational properties, as something that grows directly out of the process of inference required in non-literal comprehension. The standard story does explain some of the differences in our intuitive reactions we have to metaphorical utterances. It is beyond dispute that metaphors do work their way into literality, and may lose some of their luster along the way. If you say in English "he answered in the wink of an eye" you occasion no special rhetorical effect; but if you say in French "I1 a repondu en un clin d'oeil," you may get credit for a slightly clever turn of phrase, ~imply because the French have not made this expression a commonplace. But there is more to the distinction between "poetic" and "prosaic" figures than that; ultimately, it transcends dimensions of relative novelty and conventionality. On the one hand, there are extensions of meaning that are so natural, so obvious, that they must surely be have been counted prosaic on first utterance--indeed, they must have been born along with the literal meaning of a term. For example, I imagine that the discovery that the word chicken could be used to refer to chicken meat could not have taken too long once it had been established that the bird was edible. Nor did it want a vast leap of imagination to realize that the word sun could be used to refer to the volume directly illuminated by the sun (as in "we were standing in the sun") or (to take an example from Sam Levin) that the