Good Manners can open doors that the best education cannot...

Hmm, what does " Good manners can open doors that the best education cannot," mean? If you think of this literally, it actually means that good manners turn the doorknob and education can't. What's the point of being education if you can't open doors while manners can? That's pointless, even I can turn doorknobs and I'm neither education nor manners!

But come to think about it, I don't think Clarence Thomas meant it literally. In that case, he must have meant it metaphorically. I apologise, for 'metaphorically' is not a proper word and does not exist in the dictionary, at least not the ones I checked.

However, 'metaphorically' comes from the word 'metaphorical' which means a word or phrase that is not concerned with real objects or physical events, but with ideas or events of a non-physical kind. Basically in an abstract form.

So, what I think it means is that no matter how smart one is, he or she must still have good manners to have more opportunities in life. However, I disagree with this explanation (even though it's my own).

Having good manners must be taught and if it is taught, then it must be a form of education, is it not? That is as good as saying Education and Manners are related in some kind, and they're about the same except one can open doors but the other can't.

So in a way, this is like a "Which came first, the chicken or the egg?" question which is impossible to actually solve, because there is no exact answer. I'm sure you can see why, if one says the chicken came first, I can argue that the chicken came from an egg, but if one says the egg came first, I can say some chicken must have hatched the egg.

I do not think there is a definite answer, but I suspect that my answer is correct in some form.

I may have talked too much and I hope you weren't bored by my lecturing, but I think I can bring 'metaphorically' to the professionals to publish in Longman , unless it is what Mrs Tay calls a 'coin' and is a new word which has not been published in a dictionary yet.