SPORTS IN METAPHOR AND METAPHOR IN SPORTS

Abstract

or not clearly delineated in our experience (the emotions, ideas, time, etc.), we need to get a grasp on them by means of other concepts that we understand in clearer terms (spatial orientations, objects, etc.)” (Lakoff & Johnsen, 2003, p. 116). The relations between thoughts, reactions and metaphors have long merited thorough and productive linguistic explorations (Whorf, 1975). Many if not most of these proverbs and sayings, while used in America, are of British origin. Chaucer, Shakespeare, and other British writers originated and contributed a great deal to the preservation and popularization of some English proverbs used by Americans. Proverbs no longer come mostly from Britain. Born in America, many of them travel to British shores and enrich British English. Those two nations at least seem to share similar views on the world “What can be represented in clauses includes aspects of the physical world (its processes, objects, relations, spatial and temporal parameters), aspects of the ‘mental world’ of thoughts, feelings, sensations and so forth, and aspects of the social world” (Fairclough, 2003, p. 134). And yet, these words are related to experience too, albeit via a more distant and more mediated linkage. The role of the mediator is played by the symbol, or a whole plethora of symbols which we can array in a series conforming to the degree of their abstraction. That conforms to Korzybski’s (1948) general semantics which implies that abstractions always seek to be exemplified. According to Mckee (2003), just because people say when youions always seek to be exemplified. According to Mckee (2003), just because people say when you ask them that this is what they think about a particular text, it does not mean that this is what it means to them in their everyday lives. They exist independent from the conscience of each individual subject, even though they are not independent from the general and mutual subject, in this case: the community awareness. In such a situation, it no longer matters whether the conception includes more or fewer elements of images or abstractions, or, in other words, whether it is closer to sensation or notion. It does matter though, whether it results from a sport-related or some other experience, emotions (Ogden & Richards, 1923, p. 124), or through the process of detachment, separation and isolation of certain elements and underestimation of others, even though one could reasonably claim that every conception of sport, manifested in metaphor contains, or at least indirectly assumes a certain element of experience detached from the rest of the experiential whole in which it commonly appears, generalized, extrapolated or transformed by another action of the thinking apparatus. This again reinforces the notion of dualism between the empiric and actual participation in sport and the contemplative process that uses them as motivation. In his seminal work, Ernest Cassirer (1923) expanded the notion of meaning onto numerous symbolic forms which include human competition. Lakoff and Johnsen (2003, p. 159) say that people do not believe that there is such a thing as objective (absolute and unconditional) truth or individual sport-related experience, though it has been a long-standing theme in Western culture that there is.