Language
"Hinterlands" makes extensive use of metaphors. For instance, the story's wormhole is referred to as The Highway. From this metaphor, Gibson creates several other metaphors. The Highway's travelers are referred to as 'hitchhikers,' 'flies,' and 'hicks.' These words have a figurative rather than a literal meaning. The story's title is also a metaphor, comparing the known space to a backwoods area that is far from civilization. The destination at the end of the wormhole is figuratively 'the big city.'
Read more about this topic: Hinterlands (short Story)
Famous quotes containing the word language:
“And what the dead had no speech for, when living,
They can tell you, being dead: the communication
Of the dead is tongued with fire beyond the language of the living.”
—T.S. (Thomas Stearns)
“Poetry is the universal language which the heart holds with nature and itself. He who has a contempt for poetry, cannot have much respect for himself, or for anything else.”
—William Hazlitt (1778–1830)
“This is of the loon—I do not mean its laugh, but its looning,—is a long-drawn call, as it were, sometimes singularly human to my ear,—hoo-hoo-ooooo, like the hallooing of a man on a very high key, having thrown his voice into his head. I have heard a sound exactly like it when breathing heavily through my own nostrils, half awake at ten at night, suggesting my affinity to the loon; as if its language were but a dialect of my own, after all.”
—Henry David Thoreau (1817–1862)