A Figure of Thought

Abstract

Me tametaphorical Issues‘ By George Lakofi’ A Figure of Thought For two millenia we were taught a dogma that was largely unquestioned and came to be viewed as definitional. Metaphor was called a figure of speech. As such. it was taken to be a matter of special language: poetic or persuasive language. As a matter of language. rather than thought, it was viewed as dispensible. If you had something to say, you could presumably say it straightforwardly without meta- phor; if you chose metaphor it was for some poetic or rhetorical purpose, perhaps for elegance or economy, but not for plain speech and ordinary thought. Metaphor was seen as contrasting with ordinary, everyday literal language, language that could be straightforwardly true or false, that could lit the world directly or not. Teaching Berkeley undergraduates forces one to question traditional values — even if those values have stood for two thousand years. In 1978, I taught a small undergraduate seminar (there were five students) in which metaphor was one of a number of topics. I had received a pre-publication copy of the Ortony collection on Metaphor and Thought, and we were discussing the papers in the volume. One day one of the students came in too upset to function. She announced that she had a metaphor problem, and asked the small assembled group for help. Her boy- friend had just told her that their relationship qhad hit a dead-end streetq. lt being Berkeley in the '70's. the class came to the rescue. The metaphor makes sense, we soon figured out, only if you‘re traveling toward some destination. and only if love is viewed as a form of travel. if you happen onto a dead-end street when you're traveling toward a destination. then you can't keep going the way you've been going. You have to turn back. qWhat I really want,“ the woman said, “is for us to go into another dimension‘. There is nothing like a disappointing love-afl'air for calling a philosophy of long standing into question. Metaphor, on the traditional view, was supposed to be a matter of speech, not thought. Yet here was not just a way of talking about love as a journey, but a way of thinking about it in that way and of reasoning on the basis of the metaphor. In our culture, there is a full-blown love-as-journey meta- phor that is used for comprehending and reasoning about certain aspects of love relationships, especially those having to do with duration, closeness, difficulties, and common purpose. English is full of expressions that reflect the conceptualization of love as a journey. Some are necessarily about love; others can be understood that way: Look how far we ’ve come. It’s been a long, bumpy road. We can’t turn back now. We're at a crossroads. We may have to go our separate ways. We’re spinning our wheels. The relationship isn’t going anywhere. The marriage is on the rocks. These are_ordinary, everyday expressions. There is nothing extraordinary about them. They are not poetic, nor are they used for rhetorical efiect. The most This is a column which appears regularly in the journal Metaphor and Symbolic Activity, Hillsdale. NJ.: Erlbaum. 3S‘l