So, what is a “faunamorph”? And what is a “floramorph”?

 

Ready to talk turkey? Then let’s not beat around the bush. At one time or another, we’ve probably all used the term “anthropomorphic” or “anthropomorphize” – i.e., to attribute human behavior or characteristics to a being or object not human, especially an animal. Well, fair is fair, so I decided to coin a converse term: “faunamorphic.” In short, just as we humans tend to anthropomorphize animals, we have a strong penchant to “faunamorphize” one another. We love to ascribe animal forms, attributes, behaviors, and traits to humans. When we do so, we employ words or phrases that can be called faunamorphs (my very own, patented/copyrighted, neologism). And the Fauna Morph and Floramorph Lexicon collects and categorizes many thousands of examples as a result of 33 years of ferreting out peachy words and phrases.

 

The most obvious faunamorphs are direct comparisons of people with animals: top dog, tomcat, horse-faced, mulish. At other times, faunamorphs are “as-if” words – metaphors  such as “to feather your nest” or similes like “busy as a beaver.” Note, too, that many faunamorphs refer to humans by using animal parts (horny, hoof it, tail someone, paw one another), animal products (milk the system, cream the other team, vote for pork, honeyed words), animal sounds (what a hoot!, tell a howler, buzz saw), and so on. Hence, faunamorphs entail more than just the ways in which animals look or act.

 

For example, still other faunamorphs refer to the relationship between humans and animals (“to get right back on your horse and ride it”), or to an animal-human situation (“to shut the barn door after the cows have gotten out”), rather than to a specific animal behavior or characteristic. They should be in the lexicon, too, so holy mackerel! They’re in.

 

Inclusion in the list also has to do with how humans perceive and then name other humans or things. For example, an elephantine man looks to us like an elephant and a catty woman acts like we imagine a cat acts. Likewise, cattails look to us like the tail of a cat. A butterfly table and a butterfly valve appear to have the shape and wing action of that beloved insect. Clearly, it seems to help us to metaphorically describe and categorize in this very way, many objects that we use or see on a daily basis. In other words, we have a broad tendency to refer to inventions and utilitarian tools and other items – not just one another – in terms of animal characteristics. So, these words and phrases are also faunamorphs. And that’s the bees knees!

 

Many faunamorphs originally had very literal and specific meanings (e.g., don’t look a gift horse in the mouth) that have since either faded into the past, or have taken on broader, more generic meanings. Note that these words or phrases now qualify as faunamorphs, which they would not have back when they were taken literally. Another example is “one-horse town,” which used to be a distinct possibility, but is now a disparagement.

 

Some faunamorphs are actually quite poetic, as in the phrases, “spread your wings” or “soar with the eagles,” but they have become clichés over time and have lost their literary freshness. Others have their actual origins in poetry, plays, and prose, such as “the best-laid plans of mice and men” or “the worm turns.” The former is taken from Robert Burns (“To a Mouse”), and the latter comes from Shakespeare’s Henry VI: “The smallest worm will turn being trodden on.” The Bible, as one might imagine, is a mammoth source of faunamorphic phrases: “A leopard cannot change its spots.” (Jeremiah 13:23) But on the whole, faunamorphs stem from human imagination and ingenuity. But also from our deep, if unconscious, awareness that we homo sapiens are, in fact, animals. Fauna is as fauna does.

 

And what about floramorphs? It follows that a floramorph is a term or phrase that draws on plants to describe human characteristics and behaviors, and perceptions thereof. I have already used several floramorphs above (beat around the bush, in a nutshell, stems from, peachy). The existence of floramorphs in our daily speech were a strong motivator to branch out from the earlier faunamorphic explorations to establish that we humans not only consider ourselves to be fauna, but deep down we believe that on a grander scale, we are environment, pure and simple. All of it.

 

Finally, in deciding whether a term or phrase deserves to be categorized as a faunamorph or a floramorph, the key question to ask oneself is the following: does the word or phrase refer to an actual animal or plant? Or is it a metaphorical one? Or a simile? In a nutshell, when we use faunamorphs or floramorphs, we leave the world of precise reality and we enter the world of resemblance, of as if.

 

To illustrate, dog-and-pony show contains not just one, but two faunamorphs, but neither dogsled nor pony cart qualifies as a faunamorph, because they refer to a real dog and a real pony. Wallflower is a floramorph; lapel flower is not. To watch someone eating like a pig is a faunamorph, but to eat a pig is not…although if that person ate an entire pig, they could be described as pigging out and be accused of hogging the meat dish. Finally, to say someone is as strong as an oak is a floramorph, but to describe that same person as sitting on a solid oak chair is not. They would be better off sitting like a bump on a log.