I find it ironic that, after having been told I sometimes overdo metaphor in my prose writing, I'm reading a book which points out that I use metaphor almost every time I open my mouth. Haha! This book is fascinating, and it's got me spinning in circles right now. The fact that these terms are so ingrained in our minds that we use them without thinking is so, so cool.
My mind actually jumped back to an earlier post of mine for this class during Zen (it was my a priori one) because of this line: "All of this consistent detailed metaphorical structure is part of our everyday literal language about time, so familiar that we would normally not notice it" (Lakoff and Johnson, 43). I think for me so far, this realization about time has been the most interesting. In the blog post I mentioned, I'd said this: "We watch time pass - we see it change as
shadows shift and the sun goes up and down everyday, and technically,
that's a sense that we perceive through sight, and can name - we gave it
a name: time." And then I remembered the class during which we'd discussed time as a construction, a man-made creation that exists only because society decided to create sundials and clocks and calendars so that we can run on schedules, and found that connection oddly satisfying.
Language is fascinating. And that time realization is what I'm stuck on, because the American view of time is structured so incredibly different in other countries. My experience living in Rome would have driven a few of my friends mad, as they are always "on time" and the Italians are quite "lax" in our estimation.
I wonder then, do other cultures with different languages use metaphor the same way as we do in conversation? And is it possible to understand those metaphors if you just learn the language and haven't been raised on it from birth?
*Just read through this before posting. SO MUCH METAPHOR.
