Metaphors...

After reading from metaphors we live by I thought about burke's idea of the proverb. In the reading several words are shown to have systemic use that stem from socio-historical usage. Time is money is a phrase I believe reflects the adaptability of language as well as its dependency on the contemporary views of that time. Bhaktin wrote that language has a root in socio-political context but Lackoff and Johnson (J&L) make the turn of phrase sound like the proverb; certain phrases work because they reflect a truth of the society they stem from.

The Icon comic reflected a lot of the same ideas we've been covering; language as symbols of symbols; words have different meaning depending on who uses them and who hears them, etc. but it raised a new idea in my mind. Language as a sense. The metaphor of the car as an extension of the self, we become part of it to go where we need to go. Like language what we say and how we say it either furthers our agendas or defers them. The tongue is a rudder, propeller, wing, an axel, or all of them. Though these metaphors all mean the same thing because they are the part of the vehicle that moves in the direction we chose to go.

So rhetoric is a part of the psyche. Assigning symbols and organization, as shown J&L's article, is how we become familiar with the world or learn how to operate in it. The way I view the orientation metaphor is as we grow we become more aware; the younger we are the less knowledge there is in our experience. So every good thing, because we have this association with knowledge and height, is going to higher than every bad thing. So I started working backwards from this point of metaphors and saw how this idea developed in my mind. Ideas are directions and the conduit metaphor showed the different ways of how to get from one logical conjunction to another.

When we hear a word our minds associate with many other associations to arrive at the specific meaning of its use. Words threaded together do the same yet when the sentence is heard it can have its meaning in the context with which it was used despite their individual meanings.

Work Cited:

McCloud, Scott. “The Vocabulary of Comics.” In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York: Harper Collins, 1994. 24-45. 

Lakoff, George, and Mark Johnson. Excerpts from Metaphors We Live By (1980). The Literary Link. Janice E. Patten. 2010. San Jose State University. Web.http://theliterarylink.com/metaphors.html.