Imagine trying to describe everything you see, think or feel with only 120-140 words. That’s the challenge posed by Toki Pona, a constructed language developed by Sonja Lang in an effort to simplify her thoughts while struggling with depression.

At first, my appreciation for the language was due to its impossibly cute script:

But once I really thought about its tiny lexicon, I wondered about metaphor. Every word is expected to stretch: lete means ‘cold’, ‘raw’ or ‘to cool down’. Kili is ‘fruit’, ‘vegetable’ or ‘mushroom’. The question is what happens to the literal-figurative distinction with such underspecification?

Consider two metaphors, drawn from the poets Emily Dickinson and W S Merwin:

1. Hope is the thing with feathers.
2. Everything I do is stitched with your absence.

Now rendered in Toki Pona (translated by my spouse):

1. Wile li ijo pi selo waso – literally: ‘Desire is a thing with bird skin.’
Wile covers want, need, desire, longing, and will. Bird skin is more descriptive than metaphorical.

2. Weka sina li kama lon insa pi pali ale mi – literally: ‘Your absence enters into all my actions.’
Spatialisation echoes the joining effect of stitching, but the translation lessens the metaphorical feel.

In English, metaphor stands out against a background of literalness, a departure from a more ‘default’ use of language. In Toki Pona, the literal-figurative distinction forms a spectrum, since words are always stretched to specify meaning. That shifts the burden of sense-making from writer to reader. In English, metaphor is a writer’s flourish. In Toki Pona, resolving tension falls heavily on the reader.

I used to think alongside Ludwig Wittgenstein that the limit of my language is the limit of my thought. But Toki Pona makes me rethink that. Minimalism in language doesn’t reflect a minimalist world. Meaning-making is inevitable, and constraint simply shifts where the complexity lies.

There were about seven birds of different colours that I used to see wobble around my neighbour’s urban chicken run. I frequently passed it on the sidewalk. Peering through the fence, I’d feel a bit of unease. I was a not-quite-vegetarian then: I’d given up some meat due to concerns about animal welfare, but still ate chicken. Yet here I was, charmed by these same feathered creatures.

What I felt was cognitive dissonance, a concept first described by the psychologist Leon Festinger in the 1950s. It’s the psychological discomfort someone experiences when what they know or believe is inconsistent with what they do. For instance, you might believe it’s wrong to lie but do it anyway, or know that a major corporation is harming people but still buy its stuff – and that might cause you some internal disharmony. Sometimes, people deal with that by rationalising their behaviour (eg, ‘everyone else does it’). Other times, they change.

A new paper by the researchers David Fechner and Sebastian Isbanner suggests that my increasing cognitive dissonance may have put me over the fence (so to speak) into vegetarianism. They compared several groups of people: those who ate meat and had no plans to change; those who were considering no longer eating meat; and those who had actually made the change. They found that cognitive dissonance (gauged by how uneasy, uncomfortable, etc one felt thinking about eating meat) was higher in the potential-vegetarian group than among the meat-eaters, and higher still among vegetarians.

Other factors differed too, such as how feasible a vegetarian diet seemed to them. But according to the researchers, the results suggest that cognitive dissonance helped to explain why some people who believed in vegetarianism’s benefits actually adopted it. When it comes to morally loaded behaviours, believing might not be enough. Our conflicts might have to stare us in the face.