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Metaphors We Live By Response

  • Lakoff + Johnson give several examples throughout the text of linguistic metaphorical systems. Are there any you found odd, outdated, or different from metaphorical systems that you use, either personally or in your language, culture, or social sphere? For instance, do you speak about conversation as battle, or use orientational metaphors the same way the authors describe?

Since English is my first language, I found that all of the examples given in the text was directly relevant to the metaphors that are commonly used in my culture. I think that using battle terms or win/lose metaphors are very common in American culture, since our culture highly encourages competition. “Time is money” is a very common metaphor used in American culture, since we are a capitalist society and work around an hourly schedule.

  • Can you identify a metaphorical system that you commonly use? What do you think is the motivating rationale (“experiential basis”) behind that system – or is there one? Have you ever intentionally (or unintentionally) changed the metaphorical system that you use to speak about a certain subject, to reflect a different experience or worldview?

A metaphorical system that I commonly use are orientational metaphors. For instance, I often refer to my moods as being “up” or “down”. When I speak in these metaphors, I envision my life and emotions to be on a graph, where the baseline represents my content emotional state. Also often times, I refer to “up” being good and “down” being bad.

  • What metaphors/systems of metaphor are commonly used when discussing your topic? If “the essence of a metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” (5), what other kinds of metaphors might be useful for discussing your topic, or an aspect of your topic?

For my topic, “bark”, metaphors are commonly used to describe its strength. For example, “…bark protect trees…” and “…bark is tough…”. While bark physically protects trees, we have found ways to use it medicinally, so I would I want to apply the metaphor of strength to our internal well-being also.

1 thought on “Metaphors We Live By Response”

  1. Hey Dora, I like the way that how you analyze the metaphors, actually they can be related to our life and anything that happens around us. life is a book.

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