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.
I like your final question about other languages and metaphor. We touched on it a bit in class, but it made me think of what you said at the beginning of this post, about perhaps "using too much metaphor" in your own prose writing. Maybe that's part of the answer -- some of us are just more creative in the way we use metaphor, so people notice it more, rather than those who just speak in "cliches." Maybe across cultures there are people who use the everyday, basic metaphors, and then there are some who see the world differently and can offer new metaphors to help us re-invision our experience. So maybe it's not something based on the language, but based on the creativity of the people who speak and experience within the language.
ReplyDeleteI wonder about people with sign language? If they are adopted into the same culture and have the same societal perceptions, but they don't have verbal language do they still speak in metaphor? Does that mean that they live by a different value set. As see in in Metaphors We Live By, our cultural values are shaped by what we often seem to have metaphors for, such as time and commodity. Do people without language share these? Thinking about television shows where they show the words that people are speaking, I wonder how those metaphors get interpreted by people within our own culture who have no verbal speech, or those from different cultures. There is a book entitled "The Spirit Catches and Me and I Fall Down" which is what this family thinks happens to their little girl when she has an epileptic fit. There are a multitude of problems with the family because of language barriers. Yet, they are using a metaphor for scientific speech. Do we then dictate a different barrier of metaphors based on job occupation? Or does the medical profession simply have different metaphorical terms. It is interesting to look at jargon and genre theory to debate what place metaphor has in the functioning of high-stress situations.
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