A furthermorph is a word or phrase that refers to or reflects the natural world, beyond fauna and flora, in order to describe something other than that thing.
If we can be faunamorphic and floramorphic. why stop there? Our language is full of expressions drawn from weather, rocks, minerals, fungi, water, the atmosphere, and the cosmos. We call these furthermorphs.
Some are familiar: to be on thin ice, under the weather, over the moon, or to crystallize an idea. Others come from less obvious parts of the natural world. Together, they show how often we borrow from nature to describe people, situations, ideas, and everyday life.
The Furthermorph icon was designed by Mariana Fosatti at Artica Online.
The Natural World Beyond Flora and Fauna
“The quietude and outer simplicity of the lichens hides the complexity of their inner lives. Lichens are amalgams of two creatures: a fungus and either an alga or a bacterium. The fungus spreads the strands of its body over the ground and provides a welcoming bed. The alga or bacterium nestles inside these strands and uses the sun’s energy to assemble sugar and other nutritious molecules. As in any marriage, both partners are changed by their union.”
– Maria Popova, The Marginalian: Lichens
FUNGI
Mushrooms, molds, and other fungi inspire expressions about growth, decay, and spread: mushrooming, spreading like mold, mushroom cloud, slimy.
GEOLOGICAL
Rocks, minerals, mountains, and the earth beneath us give us language for strength, stability, difficulty, and change: rock solid, between a rock and a hard place, make mountains out of molehills.
ATMOSPHERIC
Air, light, clouds, and the atmosphere inspire expressions about mood, energy, and experience: walking on air, full of hot air, a breath of fresh air, throw shade.
HYDROLOGICAL
Water gives us ways to describe movement, uncertainty, change, and difficulty: go with the flow, test the waters, in deep water, weather the storm.
ASTRONOMICAL
We look to the stars, planets, moon, and sun to describe people, feelings, and possibilities: starry-eyed, over the moon, out of this world, the sky’s the limit.
GEOGRAPHICAL
Landscapes and places become expressions for direction, distance, possibility, and experience: the ends of the earth, polar opposites, on top of the world,
The Universe Within
In the end, furthermorphs show how deeply the non-living and the unseen inhabit our speech.
We compare our tempers to weather, our resilience to rock, our dreams to stars, and our creative bursts to the sudden growth of mushrooms after rain.
Whether it’s the way a friendship crystallizes, or how a plan evaporates, our language tells the story of a species that finds itself reflected in everything — from raindrops to constellations.
We are, it seems, a people of metaphors.
And every furthermorph is one more way we say:
“We are not separate from nature. We are made of it.”