eli5: How come when referring to stuff that we can’t see and is more of a theory, ie: society, space-time, family unit, we refer to it as a “fabric”

Question

“The fabric of society”. “The fabric of time and space”. “The family fabric”. Etc.

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Answer 1

Human brain is very good in doing association, so our way of speaking often uses it without even noticing. We use figure of speech, sarcasm or other ways to express ourselves when the literal meaning of what we say is different from the actual meaning.

One such thing is metaphor. Metaphors are widely used in our communication, because our world is often more explainable if we take an everyday object or phenomenon, and use a key trait of it so we can explain another thing.

For example an avalanche is a lot of unstoppable snow coming suddenly. We can use this key trait to say avalanche of blessings (lots of suddenly coming blessings), avalanche of events (lots of things happening at a time).

One reason we use metaphors is because we want to emphasize a trait of one thing by associating it to the other thing. For example time is often used in different metaphors. If you want to emphasize that time goes forward similarly to a water flow, you can say the river of time or time stream. But if you want to sell the concept that events come in cycles over time again and again, you can use a similarity to something that rotates like wheel of time.

“Fabric of something” is such a metaphor when we want to make association between the entangled interconnectivity of components in a literal fabric and another thing like society.