{"id":18930,"date":"2014-08-01T05:04:26","date_gmt":"2014-08-01T12:04:26","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=18930"},"modified":"2014-08-01T05:39:00","modified_gmt":"2014-08-01T12:39:00","slug":"the-viper-strikes-and-lives","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/amptoons.com\/blog\/?p=18930","title":{"rendered":"The Viper Strikes, and Lives"},"content":{"rendered":"

I have been fascinated by metaphor since I was an undergraduate linguistics major, when one of my professors assigned parts of Metaphors We Live By<\/a><\/em>, by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. In that book, Lakoff and Johnson argue that, as human beings, we use metaphor to give structure to the world around us. They point out, for example, that we describe the process of having or making an argument the same way we describe war. As examples, they offer this list of expressions:<\/p>\n

    \n
  1. Your claims are indefensible.<\/li>\n
  2. He attacked every weak point in my argument.<\/li>\n
  3. His criticisms are right on target.<\/li>\n
  4. I demolished his argument.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n

    Lakoff and Johnson don\u2019t stop there, though. They go on to show that we don\u2019t just talk about<\/em> argument as if it were war; we actually experience<\/em> it that way as well. Like wars, for example, arguments are won or lost; and the people on either side of an argument behave in some ways as if they are doing battle with each other, taking different lines of attack, or surrendering some points in the hopes of gaining others that will lead to victory. To illustrate by way of contrast, Lakoff and Johnson ask us to<\/p>\n

    imagine a culture where argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently. But we would probably not view them as arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. (5)<\/p>\n

    Other examples abound. One of my favorite classroom exercises is to ask my students to list all the slang expressions they know for for getting drunk and\/or high (the latter, of course, being a metaphor in itself). Here are some of the more common ones they come up with:<\/p>\n