metaphors in our minds

While examining the readings this week I saw a lot of similar ideas. Lakoff and Johnson propose some strong ideas about the use of metaphors in our daily speech and McCloud presents several parallel ideas about cartoons. Both authors offer this notion that humans prefer to dodge reality and use unrealistic ideals to portray their thoughts.

First, Lakoff and Johnson include many examples of how we use metaphors so frequently in speech that it's as if they are not metaphors, but literally mean what they are trying to portray. They present the idea that "linguistic expressions are containers for meaning." They stress that words are just words that make up sentences that without the meaning behind them would have no purpose without the preconceived notion of what they stand for. They use the example of the sentence "please sit in the apple-juice seat" and go on to explain that out of context, this sentence makes absolutely no sense and has no purpose, but once meaning is given to the words (a guest must take the seat with the only glass of apple juice) the sentence has purpose.

McCloud also battles with this idea of the meaning behind a symbol (which in his case is a cartoon instead of a word.) McCloud breaks down an image of a man from a realistic portrait down to the most simplistic cartoon face, explaining how in the end the cartoon face looks nothing like us, but we accept that as a man's face. He even goes as far as to drawing squiggly shapes with a small eye and pointing out that our minds will even see those as faces. By displaying this example, McCloud insists that our minds are more comfortable with a simple less-definable image than a complex one.

Both Lakoff, Johnson and McCloud seem to be wrestling with this idea of language's identity. McCloud sees this in the form of language in images whereas Lakoff and Johnson in actual words as text. Both delve into how our minds work and what they do with either a word or an image of a cartoon when they see it. Lakoff and Johnson's description of orientational metaphors connects with McCloud's ideas that as humans we view the world and everything in it in relation to our bodies and our selves. One of Lakoff and Johnson's examples is "happy is up and sad is down," demonstrating the only way we can relate these feelings to the physical world is through our humanly experiences. McCloud displays this idea in his example of a drawing of a car and our first instinct to see it a a face (because we are projecting our own image onto it).

Lacoff, Johnson and McCloud all propose some specific ideas about the meaning behind words and images as rhetoric. They see metaphors and cartoons as containers for our own projections, each one individual to the person. Whether it be a smiley face or phrases comparing an argument to a war, these analysts have looked beyond text and tried to discover why we interpret things the way we do.

Works Cited:

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

McCloud, Scott. “The Vocabulary of Comics.” In Understanding Comics: The Invisible Art. New York:

Harper Collins, 1994. 24-45.