Understanding figures of speech

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I don't understand how exactly not understanding figures of speech is possible.

For example: http://www.wrongplanet.net/forums-posti ... 75933.html

When I was reading something in a foreign language recently I came across the sentence "They sent her a blue letter". The first thing that occurred to me was an image of a light blue sheet of paper with words on it and an envelope also of light blue paper. I thought "Why would they send her a blue letter?". Next I thought "This must mean something symbolic, what can it be?" Blue sometimes means "sad", sometimes "sexually explicit" (as in "blue movie") and I suppose it can mean "cold" because people are supposed to go blue when they freeze and in meteorological maps blue areas are usually cold ones and red ones hot.

Next I thought "What does the context suggest?"- The context was about a woman displeasing her employers. So I then thought "What kind of letter does someone get when they displease their employers?" "Either a warning or a letter firing them". I couldn't tell which of the two it was but I assumed that in the past at some point people sent letters on blue paper to warn or fire employees. I asked someone what the expression meant and they said it meant to fire someone. I still don't know whether someone actually gets a letter on blue paper when they are fired or whether it just means "fired" without anything blue actually being sent.

So let's suppose it just means "fired" nowadays, regardless of whether anything is sent or whether if something is sent it is blue.

So now I have these two expressions, "to fire" and "to send a blue letter", and I know that they mean the same. Why can't I just learn that the one means the same as the other? Let's suppose there is an expression "bububu" and someone uses it to mean "to fire"- I can be told that "bububued" means "fired" and understand that whenever anyone says "Bill bububued Bob" they mean that Bill fired Bob. I can (and do) do exactly the same with "send a blue letter", which means that in future I won't puzzle about what it means. (Even if I don't know whether or not at the time the book was written people did still really send letters on blue paper when they fired people).

I suppose my point is that once you have had the meaning of a figure of speech explained to you it seems to be just like learning any other new word. You just need to remember the meaning. So I don't really understand how one can fail to understand a figure of speech once you have been told what it means (unless you just forget the explanation and have to start all over again).

If anyone has a good (and intelligible) explanation of how THEY would think differently to the process I have described in this post I'd be really interested to hear.

It only means that in German, as far as I know. I haven't seen it used to mean the same in English. (Don't want to teach people the wrong meanings of things).

In a case of the term 'blue letter' coming up in social situations I would most likely just nod and pretend that I know what in the hell they are talking about, even though I don't.

Of course now I know what blue letter means but my first thought was a letter on blue writing paper or ink.

With the ones I do know, I understand the meaning but also get a literal image in my head. Which is why I hate it when people say things like 'frying my brain' or 'out of the frying pan and into the fire'.

OUCH....squicky brain moment lol

@halligeninseln. I think your theory makes sense. However, for most 'normal' people, I think what happens is, they read something like, "blue letter" and they go "Oh! So and so got fired!" Somehow they just pick up on these things. For instance, they always told me, in school as a very young child, "Don't judge a book by it's cover!" Everybody else seemed to get that I wasn't supposed to pick up every book I thought looked interesting regardless of what the cover looked like. But later, I discovered, "Oh! When they say 'don't judge a book by it's cover', they mean, "don't judge people". It's sort of an inferred meaning that people somehow pick up, through analysing the context. For you and I, this is an often confusing process, most likely. But I think this happens much faster and much more efficiently in 'normal' people. HOWEVER, there is an exception to this rule, as I see it. If you are in a completely unfamiliar context, such as you were when you were reading about the blue letter, it becomes much harder to analyse the context, because there might be no context from memory or experience. For instance, I heard the King of Bollywood, Shah Rukh Khan, mention something about the changes that had been made in bollywood since the beginning, and he used a phrase, "Terrible 80's." I have no clue what he is referring to. If I was a Bollywood film buff and I was old enough to remember the "Terrible 80's" (which is something unique to india, I am assuming), I would go, "Ah! Yes! The Terrible 80's!" and I could figure out a context and therefore a meaning. But that is not the case. This is where your idea comes into play, and this is also the scenario that people like myself or anybody on this site fit into when they hear phrases like, 'the cat's meow' or even things like 'swag'. Does that make sense?

Ive heard of "getting your pink slip", but Ive NEVER heard of getting a "blue letter" until I read this thread. Ive even heard the expression an "Irish promotion" (for either a demotion, or a firing).

But not this "blue letter" business.


But most people figure out figures of speech from the context.
So if I did run across it would be easy to figure out what the speaker meant. I suppose at one time "blue letters" were litereally blue, and pink slips were pink, but like "green cards" and "black boxes" in airplanes they are rarely the color in thier name anymore.