The road is often used in English to mean a journey. The journey doesn’t have to be a physical one either.

My previous post, titled Beginnings, has several examples of the road being used as a metaphor for learning. Learning is a lot like a journey because they both have a start, an end, and can take a long time. In that post I use road both generally to represent any task that has a beginning, and specifically to represent the task of writing a blog.

I also use pave to mean something that prepares the way, making a task easier. Just as you pave cement to make it easier for cars to drive on a road, so too can you pave a metaphorical road to make whatever task the road refers to easier.

I’m sure most native English speakers would find the way I use “road” and “pave” in Beginnings to be completely natural. It is very common to see these words used as a replacement for anything that can be compared to a journey.

Perhaps the best way of understanding how road can be used as a metaphor is to see a few examples.

The road to hell is paved with good intentions.

This is actually a proverb. It means intending to do good things without actually doing them leads to hell; wanting to do good things is not enough. You could substitute road with way and paved with with made easier by and not change the meaning.

So-and-so paved the way for…

This is a commonly used expression. It is used when somebody does something first that makes it easy for others to follow.

• Paco de Lucia paved the way for Flamenco’s spread across the world.

• The discovery of antibiotics paved the way for complex and intrusive surgery.

A fork in the road.

An actual fork in a road is where a road splits off into two or more directions, but, when you see this expression, it refers to an important decision (not a fork stuck in the road).

There are many more ways in which fork and pave are used as a metaphor. Feel free to add any examples that you might come across.

I would also like to know if road is used in a similar way in your country, and how.

This entry was posted on Monday, October 1st, 2007 at 8:19 pm and is filed under EFL, English, ESL, Expressions, Proverbs, Idioms. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.