Tag Archives: Metaphor

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The introduction summarizes the conclusion thus:


This is an example what Sherzer has to say about metaphor:









Sherzer comes to this conclusion:



While this seems deep, it’s actually meaningless.







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The role of metaphor in science debate (Background)





What is not a metaphor? The question!





Brute facts of tiny ontology



Metaphor as model (or What is metaphor)






Action as an example of modelling



The languages of metaphor: Or how a metaphor do



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Binders full of women with mighty pens: What is metonymy

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Metonymy in the wild




In fairness, “binders” was most likely a slip of the tongue. http://edition.cnn.com/2012/10/17/opinion/cardona-binders-women/index.html


What is metonymy





Metonymy chaining


“You’ll find better ideas than that in the library.”




Metonymy vs. synechdoche


The distinction is:


Metaphor vs. metonymy



So for example:








Metonymy and meronymy





Metonymic imagery


he managed to conjure an image confirming every feminist’s worst fears about a Romney presidency; that he views women’s rights in the workplace as so much business admin, to be punched and filed and popped on a shelf http://www.theguardian.com/world/shortcuts/2012/oct/17/binders-full-of-women-romneys-four-words

The meme that sprang up around it consisted mostly of people illustrating this image, many of which can be found on http://bindersfullofwomen.tumblr.com (see one such image above).



Reasoning with metonymy







Warning in conclusion





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Pervasiveness of Obliging Metaphors in Thought and Deed

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  • United States is ancient Rome
  • China today is Soviet Union of the 1950s
  • Saddam Hussein is Hitler
  • Iraq is Vietnam
  • Education is a business
  • Mental difficulties are diseases
  • Learning is filling the mind with facts
  • Marriage is a union between two people who love each other
  • X is evolved to do Y
  • X is a market place












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How we use metaphors

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I was reminded by this blog post on LousyLinguist that many people still see metaphor as an unproblematic homogeneous concept leading to much circular thinking about them.  I wrote about that quite a few years ago in:

Lukeš, D., 2005. Towards a classification of metaphor use in text: Issues in conceptual discourse analysis of a domain-specific corpus. In Third Workshop on Corpus-Based Approaches to Figurative Language. Birmingham.

I suggested that a classification of metaphor had better focused on their use rather than inherent nature. I came up with the heuristic device of: cognitive, social and textual uses of metaphor.

Some of the uses I came up with (inspired by the literature from Halliday to Lakoff) were:

  • Cognitive
    • Conceptual (constitutive)
      • Explanative
      • Generative
    • Attributive
  • Social (Interpersonal)
    • Conceptual/Declarative (informational)
    • Figurative (elegant variation)
    • Innovative
    • Exegetic
    • Prevaricative
    • Performative
  • Textual
    • Cohesive (anaphoric, cataphoric, exophoric)
    • Coherent
      • Local
      • Global

I also posited a continuum of salience and recoverability in metaphors:

  • High salience and recoverability
  • Low salience and recoverability

Read the entire paper here.

My thinking on metaphor has moved on since then – I see it as a special case of framing and conceptual integration rather than a sui generis concept – but I still find this a useful guide to return to when confronted with metaphor use.

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Character Assasination through Metaphoric Pomposity: When one metaphor is not enough

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George Lakoff is known for saying that “metaphors can kill” and he’s not wrong. But in that, metaphors are no different from any other language. The simple amoral imperative “Kill!” will do the job just as nicely. Nor are metaphors any better or worse at obfuscating than any other type of language. But they are very good at their primary purpose which is making complex connections between domains.

Metaphors can create very powerful connections where none existed before. And we are just as often seduced by that power as inspired to new heights of creativity. We don’t really have a choice. Metaphoric thinking is in our DNA (itself a metaphor). But just like with DNA, context is important, and sometimes metaphors work for us and sometimes they work against us. The more powerful they are, the more cautious we need to be. When faced with powerful metaphors we should always look for alternatives and we should also explore the limits of the metaphors and the connections they make. We need to keep in mind that nothing IS anything else but everything is LIKE something else.

I was reminded of this recently when listening to an LSE lecture by the journalist Andrew Blum who was promoting his book “Tubes: Behind the Scenes at the Internet”. The lecture was reasonably interesting although he tried to make the subject seem more important than it perhaps was through judicious reliance of the imagery of covertness.

But I was particularly struck by the last example where he compared Facebook’s and Google’s data centers in Colorado. Facebook’s center was open and architecturally modern, being part of the local community. Facebook also shared the designs of the center with the global community and was happy to show Blum around. Google’s center was closed, ugly and opaque. Google viewed its design as part of their competitive advantage and most importantly didn’t let Blum past the parking lot.

From this Blum drew far reaching conclusions which he amplified by implying them. If architecture is an indication of intent, he implied, then we should question what Google’s ugly hidden intent is as opposed to Facebook’s shining open intent. When answering a question he later gave prosecutors in New England and in Germany as compounding evidence of people who are also frustrated with Google’s secrecy. Only reluctantly admitting that Google invited him to speak at their Authors Speak program.

Now, Blum may have a point regarding the secrecy surrounding that data center by Google, there’s probably no great competitive advantage in its design and no abiding security reason in not showing its insides to a journalist. But using this comparison to imply anything about the nature of Facebook or Google is just an example of typical journalist dishonesty. Blum is not lying to us. He is lying to himself. I’m sure he convinced himself that since he was so clever to come up with such a beautiful analogy, it must be true.

The problem is that pretty much anything can be seen through multiple analogies. And any one of those analogies can be stopped at any point or be stretched out far and wide. A good metaphor hacker will always seek out an alternative analogy and explore the limits of the domain mapping of the dominant one. In this case, not much work is needed to uncover what a pompous idiot Blum is being.

First, does this facilities reflect attitudes extend to what we know about the two companies in other spheres. And here the answer is NO. Google tells let’s you liberate your data, Facebook does not. Google lets you opt out of many more things that Facebook. Google sponsors many open source projects, Facebook is more closed source (even though they do contribute heavily to some key projects). When Facebook acquires a company, they often just shut it down leaving customers high and dry, Google closes projects too, but they have repeatedly released source code of these projects to the community. Now, is Google the perfect open company? Hardly. But Facebook with its interest in keeping people in its silo is can never be given a shinign beacon of openness. It might be at best a draw (if we can even make a comparison) but I’d certainly give Google far more credit in the openness department. But the analogy simply fails when exposed to current knowledge. I can only assume that Blum was so happy to have come up with it that he wilfully ignored the evidence.

But can we come up with other analogies? Yes. How about the fact that the worst dictatorships in the world have come up with grand idealistic architectural designs in history. Designs and structures that spoke of freedom, beautiful futures and love of the people for their leaders. Given that we know all that, why would we ever trust a design to indicate anything about the body that commissioned it? Again, I can only assume that Blum was seduced by his own cleverness.

Any honest exploration of this metaphor would lead us to abandoning it. It was not wrong to raise it, in the world of cognition, anything is fair. But having looked at both the limits of the metaphor and alternative domain mappings, it’s pretty obvious that it’s not doing us any good. It supports a biased political agenda.

The moral of the story is don’t trust one-metaphor journalists (and most journalists are one-metaphor drones). They might have some of the facts right but they’re almost certainly leaving out large amounts of relevant information in pursuit of their own figurative hedonism.

Disclaimer: I have to admit, I’m rather a fan of Google’s approach to many things and a user of many of their services. However, I have also been critical of Google on many occasions and have come to be wary of many of their practices. I don’t mind Facebook the company, but I hate that it is becoming the new AOL. Nevertheless, I use many of Facebook’s services. So there.

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RaAM 9 Abstract: Of Doves and Cocks: Collective Negotiation of a Metaphoric Seduction

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Given how long I’ve been studying metaphor (at least since 1991 when I first encountered Lakoff and Johnson’s work and full on since 2000) it is amazing that I have yet to attend a RaAM (Researching and Applying Metaphor) conference. I had an abstract accepted to one of the previous RaAMs but couldn’t go. This time, I’ve had an abstract accepted and wild horses won’t keep me away (even though it is expensive since no one is sponsoring my going). The abstract that got accepted is about a small piece of research that I conceived back in 2004, wrote up in a blog post in 2006, was supposed to talk about at a conference in 2011 and finally will get to present this July at RaAM 9).

Unlike most academic endeavours, this one needs to come with a parental warning. The materials described contains profane sexual and scatological imagery as employed for the purposes of satire. But I think it makes a really important point that I don’t see people making as a matter of course in the metaphor studies literature. I argue that metaphors can be incredibly powerful and seductive but that they are also routinely deconstructed and negotiated. They are not something that just happens to us. They are opportunistic and random just as much as they are systematic and fundamental to our cognition. Much of the current metaphor studies is still fighting the battle against the view that metaphors are mere peripheral adornments on the literal. And to be sure the “just a metaphor” label is still to be seen in popular discourse today. But it has now been over 40 years since this fight has been intellectually won. So we need to focus on the broader questions about the complexities of the role metaphor plays in social cognition. And my contribution to RaAM hopes to point in that direction.


Of Doves and Cocks: Collective Negotiation of a Metaphoric Seduction

In this contribution, I propose to investigate metaphoric cognition as an extended discursive and social phenomenon that is the cornerstone of our ability to understand and negotiate issues of public importance. Since Lakoff and Johnson’s groundbreaking study, research in linguistics, cognitive psychology, as well as discourse studies, has tended to view metaphor as a purely unconscious phenomenon that is outside of a normal speaker’s ability to manipulate. However important this view of metaphor and cognition may be, it tells only a part of the story. An equally important and surprisingly frequent is the ability of metaphor to enter into collective (meta)cognition through extended discourse in which acceptable cross-domain mappings are negotiated.
I will provide an example of a particular metaphorical framing and the metacognitive framework it engendered that made it possible for extended discourse to develop. This metaphor, a leitmotif in the ‘Team America’ film satire, mapped the physiological and phraseological properties of taboo body parts onto geopolitical issues of war in such a way that made it possible for participants in the subsequent discourse to simultaneously be seduced by the power of the metaphor and empowered to engage in talk about cognition, text and context as exemplified by statements such as: “It sounds quite weird out of context, but the paragraph about dicks, pussies and assholes was the craziest analogy I’ve ever heard, mainly because it actually made sense.” I will demonstrate how this example is typical rather than aberrant of metaphor in discourse and discuss the limits of a purely cognitive approach to metaphor.
Following Talmy, I will argue that significant elements of metaphoric cognition are available to speakers’ introspection and thus available for public negotiation. However, this does not preclude for the sheer power of the metaphor to have an impact on both cognition and discourse. I will argue that as a result of the strength of this one metaphor, the balance of the discussion of this highly satirical film was shifted in support of military interventionism as evidenced by the subsequent popular commentary. By mapping political and gender concepts on the basic structural inevitability of human sexual anatomy reinforced by idiomatic mappings between taboo words and moral concepts, the metaphor makes further negotiation virtually impossible within its own parameters. Thus an individual speaker may be simultaneously seduced and empowered by a particular metaphorical mapping.
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Poetry without metaphor? Sure but can it darn your socks?

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Chinese poet Li Bai from the Tang dynasty, in ...

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Over on the Language Log, Victor Mair puts to rest that all English expressions have to be tensed and thus prevent timeless poetry. He shares his translation of a 13th century Chinese poet thus:

Autumn Thoughts by Ma Zhiyuan

Withered wisteria, old tree, darkling crows –
Little bridge over flowing water by someone’s house –
Emaciated horse on an ancient road in the western wind –
Evening sun setting in the west –
Broken-hearted man on the horizon.

And indeed, he is right. The poem exudes timelessness (if a lack of something can be exuded). It is more difficult for some languages than others to avoid certain grammatical commitments (like gender or number) which makes translation more difficult but there’s always a way.

What struck me about the poem was something different. It is so rich in imagery and yet so poor in figurative language . This is by no means unique but worth a note. In fact, there is no figurative language there at all if we discount such foundational figures as “sun setting in the West”, “broken-hearted” or “man on the horizon”. In fact, had I not known this was a Chinese poem, I could have easily believed it was a description of 17th century Dutch master‘s painting or even something by Constable.

But of course, the conceptual work we’re doing while reading this poem is not that different from the work we would do if it was full of metaphor. I’m working on a post of how adjectives and predicates are really very similar to metaphors and this is one example that illustrates the point. In order to appreciate this poem, we have to construct a series of fairly rich images and then we have to blend them with each other to place them in the same place.  We have to interpret “the broken hearted man on the horizon” is it just another image, the poet or ourselves? In other words, we have to map from the image presented by the poem to the images available to us by our experience. Which, in short, is the same work we have to do when interpreting metaphors and similies.  But the title is the clincher: “autumn thoughts” – what if the whole poem is a metaphor and the elements in it just figures signifying age, loneliness, the passage of time and so on and so forth. There are simply too many mappings to make. And there the escape from metaphor ends.

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Why don’t metaphorical hawks kill metaphorical doves?

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An Iraqi woman looks on as U.S. Army Soldiers ...

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A very common metaphor in the political discourse on war is that of doves (peaceniks) and hawks (war-mongers). It has been around at least since the cold war. But it stops at “doves=peaceful” and “hawks=aggressive”. It completely ignores other properties of the animals, e.g. the fact that “hawks hunt and kill doves”. I did a lot of searching a could not find any such extensions of the metaphor.

This is relatively unusual. Most metaphors in public discourse get dissected every which way. Look at “Iraq=Vietnam”, “Saddam=Hitler”, “Current financial crisis=X other financial crisis”. All of these were dissected and very inventively reassembled mapping by mapping. E.g. If Saddam is Hitler then we can choose between being France or Britain. If Iraq is Vietnam than we must count the wounded as dead and must look for media swaying public opinion. Etc. Etc.  We might argue that doves adn hawks are relatively dead metaphors but Palin’s crosshairs got dissected in minute detail and “having somebody in your cross hairs” no more implies that you’re going to shoot them than does being a dove imply you have wings.

So why didn’t anybody in the contentious debate over the Iraq war come up with this obvious extension of the “doves/hawks=democrats/republicans” metaphor? I would expect at least something along the lines of “the hawks went fiercely after the doves and tore them to shreds in the elections”. But there’s nothing. So, what gives?

I also posted this question (in a slightly shorter form) on Quora: http://qr.ae/c3td

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The most ridiculous metaphor of education courtesy of an economics professor

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Acclaimed academics have policy agendas just like anybody else. And often they let them interfere with a straightforward critical analysis of their output. The monumental capacity for blindness of highly intelligent people  is sometimes staggering. Metaphors and analogies (same thing for metaphor hacking) make thinkers particularly prone to mis-projection blindness. Edward Glaeser, a Harvard economics prof, is just the latest in the long line of economists and blowhards, who think they have the education system licked by comparing it to some -free market gimmick. They generally reveal that they know or care precious little about the full extent of the processes involved in the market and Glaeser is a shining example of this. His analogy is so preposterous and only needs so little thought to break down, I can’t believe he didn’t take a few minutes to to do it himself. Well, actually, I can believe it. It’s pretty,  neat and seductive. So who cares that it is pure non-sense. Here’s what he said:

Why Cities Rock | Freakonomics Radio: I want you to just imagine if for example, instead of having a New York restaurant scene that was dominated by private entrepreneurs who competed wildly with each other trying to come up with new, new things. The bad restaurants collapse; the good restaurants go on to cooking show fame. You have these powerful forces of competition and innovation working. Imagine instead if there was a food superintendent who operated a system of canteens where the menus were decided at the local level, and every New Yorker had to eat in these canteens. Well, the food would be awful. And that’s kind of what we decided to do with schooling. Instead of harnessing the urban ability to provide innovation, competition, new entry, we’ve put together a system where we’ve turn all that stuff off, and we’ve allowed only a huge advantage for a local, public monopoly. It’s very, very difficult to fix this. I think the most hopeful signs, and there’s been as you know a steady stream of economics papers on this, the most hopeful signs I think are coming from charter schools, which are particularly effective in urban areas. And it’s not so much that the average charter school is so much better than the average public school, but rather that in charter schools, because they can go bankrupt, because the can fail, the good ones will succeed, and the bad ones will drop out of the market. And certainly we’ve seen lots of great randomized studies that have shown the ability of charters to deliver great test score results.

As we know, metaphors (and their ilk) rely on projections from one domain to another. Generative metaphor (of which this is one) then try to base a solution on a new domain which is the result of the blending of the source domain.

So this is how Glaser envisions the domain of New York restaurants: there is competition, which drives up the quality of the food (note that he didn’t mention driving down prices, lowering expense per unit, and other tricks used by ‘wildly competing entrepreneurs’). Restaurateurs and chefs must strive to provide better food than others because there is so much choice, people will flock to their competitors for the better food.

This is how he wants to project it into schooling: give people more choice (and means to exercise that choice by using the intra city’s short commutes) and this will result in competition, the competition will increase experimentation and as a result the quality of education goes up. He also mentions test scores at the end but these have little to do with education (but why should somebody at Harvard know that?).

Of course, he makes most of the argument through a reverse projection, where he asks us to imagine what the New York restaurants would look like if they were run like a centralized public school system. He envisions the end process as similar to Apple’s 1984 commercial: a sea of bland canteens with awful food. But this is just so much elitist blather. Glaeser should be ashamed of himself for not thinking this through.

First, what he describes is only true of the top tier of New York restaurants. The sort of places the upper-middle glass go to because of a review on Yelp. The majority of places where New Yorkers (and people everywhere) eat their lunches and the occasional dinner are either real canteens, some local greasy spoon, or a chain that makes its consistent prices and dining experiences possible through resolute mediocrity. The Zagat guide is for special occasions, not daily nutrition.

Second, Glaser never asks how this maps onto schooling or education, in general. Probably because the answer would be that it doesn’t. Glaeser certainly refused to say anything useful about his analogy. He went far enough to promote his shallow ideology and stopped while the stopping was good. Let’s look at a few possible mappings and see how we fare.

So first we have the quality of the food. This would seem to map quite nicely onto quality of education. But it doesn’t. Or at least not in the way Gleaeser and his like would like.  Quality of the food that can impact on competition is a surface property. We cannot also always trust people that they can judge the quality apart from the decor of the restaurant or its reputation – just like with wine, they are very likely to judge the quality based on a  review or the recommendation of a trusted acquaintance. In Glaeser’s analogy, we’re not really talking about the quality of food but the quality of the dining experience. And if we project this onto the quality of a school, we’re only increasing the scope of the problem. No matter how limited and unreliable, we can at least judge the quality of the overall dining experience by our own reaction to our experience. But with schools, the experience is mediated through the child and the most important criterion of quality – viz an educated human being at the end – is deferred until long after the decision on quality has been made. It’s like judging the quality of a restaurant we go to for an anniversary dinner by whether we will be healthy in 5 years. Of course, we can force such judgements but arbitrarily ranking schools based on a single number – like the disastrous UK league tables that haven’t improved the education of a single child but made a lot of people extremely anxious.

The top restaurants (where the competition makes a difference) don’t look at food from the perspective of what matters for life, namely nutrition. It’s quite likely the most popular restaurants don’t serve anything particularly healthy or prepared with regard to the environmental impact. Quality is only important to them as one of many competitive advantage. They also use a number of tricks to make the dining experience better – cheat on ingredients, serve small portions on large plates, etc. They rely on ‘secret recipes’ – the last thing we want to see in education. And this is exactly the experience of schools that compete in the market. They fudge, cheat and flat out lie to protect their competitive advantage.  They provide the minimum of education that they can get away with to look good. Glaeser also conveniently forgets that there is a huge amount of centralized oversight of New York restaurants – much more, in some ways, than on charter schools. Quality is only one of the results of rampant competition and oversight is necessary to protect consumers. This is much more important in schools than in restaurants (but it almost seems that restaurants have more of it, than schools – proportionally to their importance).

But that is only one part of this important mismapping, which is the process of competition. Many economists forget that the market forces don’t work on their own. They work off the backs of the cheated and underserved. Bad restaurants don’t go out of business by some market magic. They go out of business because enough people ate there and were cheated, served bad food or almost got poisoned. And this experience had to have been bad enough for them to talk about it and dissuade others from visiting. With restaurants the individual cost is relatively minor (at least for those comfortably off). You have to contribute one or two bad meals or ruined evenings a year to keep the invisible hand doing its business among the chefs of New York. (This could be significant to someone who only goes out once every few months but still something you can get over.) Also the cost of making a choice is virtually nill. It takes no effort to go to a different restaurant or to choose to eat at home. Except for the small risk of food poisoning, you’ve made no investment in your choice and the potential loss is minimal.

However, in the case of schooling, you’re making a long-term commitment (at least a semester or a year but most likely at least four years). You can shrug off a bad meal but what about a wasted half-a-decade of your child’s life? Or what if you enrolled your child in the educational equivalent of Burger King serving nothing but giant whoppers. Everything seems fine all along but the results are clogged intellectual arteries. Also the costs of a school going out of business (and here Glaeser is one of the honest few that admit to bankrupt schools as a desirable outcome of competition in education) are exceedingly high. Both financial and emotional. Let’s say a school goes out of business and a poor parent has invested in books, school uniform and transportation choice only to have to start this again in a new school. Or how about the toll that making new friends, getting used to new teachers, etc. takes on a child. How many ruined childhoods is Glaeser willing to accept for the benefits of his ideology? As far as I know, the churn among New York restaurants is quite significant – could the education system sustain 10% or even 1% of schools going out of business every year.

And more importantly what about great schools going out of business because of financial mismanagement of capitalist wannabes? Not all market failures (maybe even not most) are due to low quality. Bad timing, ruthless competition, impatient investors and insufficient growth have killed many a great product. How many great schools would succumb to one of these? And won’t we see the same race to mediocrity once the ‘safe middle ground’ of survival is discovered? How many schools will take on the risk of innovation in the face of relentless market pressures? For a Chef, one bad recipe is just a learning experience. For a school, one unsuccessful innovation can lead to absolute disaster.

But all that is assuming that we can even map the “quality of education” onto quality in any sphere of commercial activity whatsoever. What business do you get a product or service from for four or eight years that requires a daily performance of a complex and variable task such as caring for and educating a young person is? Not your electricity provider who provides a constant but a non-variable service, nor your medical care provider who offers a variable but only periodical service. Also, “the consumers of education’s” requirements keep changing over time. They may have wanted a rounded and fulfilling education for their child at the start but just want them to get to university at the end. You can measure quality by test scores or graduation rates but that still doesn’t guarantee success for roughly 10-20% of students even in the best of schools.

To conclude, fine food plays a role in the prosperity of restaurants but so does convenience and habit. The quality of education is too complex to map successfully on the quality of food (and possibly any single commercial product). And even if that was possible, the cost of making the market forces work is incomparably higher in education than in dining. Glaeser’s proposed model for reform is just as likely to produce pinnacles of excellence as ruthlessly competitive MacDonald’s-like chains of garbage.

There’s nothing wrong with using metaphors to try to look for ways to improve education. But generally, these should be very local rather than global and always have their limits carefully investigated. That means detailed understanding of both domains and meticulous mappings between them as well as the relationships between them. Not all mappings need to be perfect and some need not be there at all (for instance, computer virus is still useful metaphor even though it doesn’t spread through the air), but this should be done consciously and with care. Steve Jones once said of evolution that metaphor is to it like bird excrement is to statues. The same often goes for education, but it doesn’t have to.

Finally, this analysis didn’t necessarily imply that the current system is the best there can be or that it is even any good (although I think it’s pretty good). Just that reforming it based on this cock-a-maney metaphor could be extremely dangerous. New solutions must ultimately be judged on their own merit but with the many market metaphors, very many their merit is irretrievably tied to the power of the initial metaphor and not any intrinsic solution.

UPDATE: It seems I may have a been a bit too harsh on Glaeser. Obsevational Epidemiology posts this quote form his book (the one he was promoting on the Freakonomics podcast):

All of the world’s older cities have suffered the great scourges of urban life: disease, crime, congestion. And the fight against these ills has never been won by passively accepting things as they are or by mindlessly relying on the free market.

Ok, so he’s not just a mindless free-marketeer. So why on earth would he suggest the above as a suitable metaphor to base educational reform on?

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