We have two stores, & i was giving someone directions over the phone as to how to find a book i knew was on the shelf: I could just visualize it—but the person i was directing couldn’t find it. The next time i was over there, i looked for it & found it. It was just where i’d said, but in a different corner. My brain had stored certain features of the location automatically, & yet not all of the surrounding relationships correctly. And suddenly i realized this was how humans have Metaphor. As soon as you start storing memories by salient features, they are going to start coinciding; & sometimes in ways that can be seen as meaningful. This also connects to a mystery that long has had me wondering: the way Latin words translate into so many different English words. They had, so to speak, a net of looser weave; or, they called a lot of things by the same name we would have distinguished. Or, you could look at the Romans as having a poetic cast of mind even in everyday life. (Learning to express yourself in an artificial language with a limited vocabulary requires a similar effort.)