Again, we speak of our feelings being "harrowed." The word harrow first meant, and still means, the drawing of a frame with iron teeth (itself called a harrow) over ploughed land to break up the clods. From this meaning it has come to have the figurative meaning of wounding or ruffling the feelings.
Another word connected with agriculture which has passed into a general sense is glean. We may now speak of "gleaning" certain facts or news, but to glean was originally (and still means in its literal sense) to gather the ears of corn remaining after the reapers have got in the harvest.
We speak of a nation groaning under the "yoke" of a foreign tyrant, or again of the "yoke" of matrimony, and in the Bible we have the text, "My yoke is easy." In these and in many other cases the word yoke is used figuratively to denote something weighing on the spirit; but the original use of yoke, and again one which remains, was to name the wooden cross-piece fastened over the necks of two oxen, and attached to a plough or wagon which they have to draw.
The word earn reminds us of a time when the chief way of earning money or payment of any kind was field-labour; for this word, which means so many things now, comes from an old Teutonic word meaning field-labour. The same word became in German ernte, which means "harvest."
Another common word with somewhat the same meaning as earn is gain; and this, again, takes us back to a time when our early ancestors won their profits by the grazing of their flocks. The word gain came into English from an Old French word, but this word in its turn came from a Teutonic word meaning to graze or pasture. The first people who used the word earn for other ways of getting payment than field-labour, and the word gain in a general sense, were really making metaphors.
Some of our commonest words take us back to a time before our ancestors even settled down to cultivate the land, or perhaps even before the days when they had learned to tame and give pasturage to their flocks. Some of our simplest words contain the idea of travelling or wandering. The word fear, which would not seem to have anything to do with journeying, comes from the same root-word as fare, the Old English word for "travel." Probably it came to be used because people travelling through the wild forests and swamps of Europe in those far-off days found much to terrify them, and so the word fear was made, containing this idea of moving from place to place. But again this was a metaphor. Until after the Norman Conquest the word fear meant a sudden or terrible happening. Only later it came to mean the feeling which such an event or the expectation of it would cause.
We may become tired in mind or body from many causes; but when we say we are "weary" we are literally saying that we have travelled far over difficult ground, for the word weary comes from an Old English word meaning this.
Some of our words are really metaphors showing the effect which different aspects of Nature had on the men who made them. When we say we are astonished we do not mean that we are "struck by thunder," but that is what the word literally means. It comes from the Latin word attonare, which means this. The words astound and stun contain the same hidden metaphor, which we use in a plainer way when we say we are "thunder-struck," meaning that we are very much surprised.
In the Middle Ages people believed that the stars had a great effect on the lives of men. If the stars were in a certain position at the time of a person's birth, he would be lucky all his life; if in another, he was doomed to unhappiness. From this belief we still use the expression "born under a lucky star" to describe a person who seems always to be fortunate. But the same metaphor is contained in single words. We speak of an unfortunate enterprise as "ill-starred," and the metaphor is clear. But when the newspapers speak of a railway "disaster," very few people realize that they are speaking the language of the mediæval astrologers, men who studied the fortunes of nations and individuals from the stars. Disaster literally means such a misfortune as would be caused by adverse stars, and comes from the Greek word for star, astron, and the Latin dis.
The words jovial and mercurial, used to describe people of merry and lively temper, are metaphors of the same kind. A person born under the planet Jupiter (the star called after the Roman god Jupiter or Jove) was supposed to be of a merry disposition, and a person born when the planet Mercury was visible in the heavens was expected to be lively and ready-witted. When we use these words now to describe people, we do not, of course, mean that they were born under any particular star, but the words are metaphors which literally do mean this.