ON LANGUAGE AND METAPHORS. Why we are not in Kansas anymore.

I am supposed to study and learn the theoretical background of the latest edition of Norwegian Grammar. I have an exam on Monday.

I find this boring. Memorizing stuff is parroting. I don’t like being a parrot. Parrots only memorize and repeat, and never ask questions.

I like being a monkey more. Monkeys are inquisitory and curious, and they poke their noses in whatever piques their attention. Welcome to today’s musings of Maggie the Monkey.

Let me tell you about metaphors.

The theory of metaphors, and how they shape our life, our thoughts, our existence, our society - everything we “think about” and put into words, that be our own thoughts or the way we communicate with each other and about our own thinking, to another - are shaped and “contained”, given form by a set of structurizing conceptual cognitive capacities.

We have to “think” in concrete, distinguishable forms. If I tell you to think of a bird, you will not picture an abstract bird - or a group of letters signifying this inner concept in your mind that points to “bird” in the world outside of you. You will immediately go searching for a prototype in your mind that has all of the traits you have catalogued “bird” as. This inner picture of bird is “concrete” - a representation of your inner category of “bird”.

Your whole life is a collection of categories. Your inner conceptual world is experienced through your thoughts about what is happening “outside of you”, and the thoughts you use to categorize and process the “happening” is not yours.

Read that again.

None of your thoughts and the way you think are yours.

Not really.

You were born into a culture and a set of syntactical, structurized set of concepts and thought forms. This system is broadly called “language”. Language allows us to categorize thoughts. To imagine, and talk about, something other than right here, right now. By using language, we can bring up past events, we can plan ahead, we can use abstracts - like mathematics. Humans can imagine things that are not there, and put them into a place and time that is not here.

The implications of this is... enormous. Chances are you’re not even able to grasp the outskirts of the vastness of what this means, because the window you use to see these words through, is the window pane you are trying to spot. The words themselves. The realization I am trying to show you is the realization itself. I am trying to show you language by using language.

The leap from actual- to meta-view is... quantum, at best. It makes your head spin, because it is your head that’s spinning.

Tumbled down the rabbit hole yet?

Damn right, Dorothy. This is definitely not Kansas anymore.

Lakoff and Johnson, two linguistic scientists, published a book in 1980, titled “Metaphors we live by”. In the introduction, they state that: “Metaphor is for most people device of the poetic imagination and the rhetorical flourish--a matter of extraordinary rather than ordinary language. Moreover, metaphor is typically viewed as characteristic of language alone, a matter of words rather than thought or action. For this reason, most people think they can get along perfectly well without metaphor. We have found,on the contrary, that metaphor is pervasive in everyday life, not just in language but in thought and action. Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.”

I used to think of metaphors as “pretty word pictures” that only poets used. More or less. Well, poets, and maybe even one or two really good writers, or cliché song artists. “Your love is a rose” and so on. "My life is a country song."

Well, it actually is, but that’s another story.

Don’t get me wrong. Metaphors, especially in our school system - signifies “pretty word pictures.” They are broadly understood as explaining one thing by using the image of another thing.  Your face is a rising sun, for instance. Or my heart is a sunken boat. See what I did there? I pulled a field of concepts up from inside of you - all your knowing of what constitutes a sunken boat - and I merged it with an image of my heart. All of a sudden my heart has become a boat, and the symbol and container for all my love has taken on the properties of sunken-ness.

Pretty cool.

You have reshaped a completely new image and concept in your head. Using words. The process is awesome.

Let me continue.

What Lakoff and Johnson discovered, was that our entire thinking and world is shaped and constructed as, and through, metaphors. What does that mean? Well, that how we view time, for instance, is shaped by metaphors. How we us and spend money, is governed by the metaphors in our culture. Which way is happy? If I tell you to point to the past, in which direction do you point? It’s all structured by metaphorical thinking. It's all just illusion.

Metaphors are not only images we use in our mind to conceptualize the world and what is happening in it. They are also part of the way we structure our mind as well. And I think this process is reciprocal. That is - I structure my thinking after certain metaphorical traits. And at the same time, the traits will shape the metaphor.

This one is a bit harder to grasp if you do not have a clear concept of what the two consistents “look like” or “are”.

I’ll explain by telling a story. I am so lucky that I have found the love of my life. This love of my life, most of the time, are not as into linguistics and cognitive science as I am. Well. Let me re-phrase that. He’s not really into it at all. 

Unless I ask him.

Which I did.

This means that his point of view is radically different than mine, mainly because he's just not interested. He uses language, and he uses it well, and that's enough.

I'm different, because I NEED to know. Answers to questions like “what is language”. I need to know and understand

the deeper, underlying structures of what shapes our thoughts and our realities.

I have still not been able to explain why the question "Why is knowing what language is important?"

I only know that question is the magnificent answer in itself.

Back to the story. 

What I love about him is the ability to get straight to the point. The way he sees things is immediate, accurate and profoundly simple. Simple in terms of clear and concise. So, where am I going with this?

We were talking about metaphors. I had been working on an article by Lakoff, on how the metaphors that construct our cultural and individual life are created. We think and act “more or less automatically along certain lines” (Lakoff&Johnson). Since language is how we express our thoughts and actions, language actually is evidence of what actually makes up our brains. Pause and read that again.This is cognitive science.

I fucking love science.

So, I had been reading this article about metaphors, and was working on memorizing the different ways the human conceptual system is metaphorically structured and defined.

“Sweetheart, isn’t it mind-wrenching to actually consider why we think the way we do?” I asked. Alright, so I sprung this on him without even giving the slightest hint of what area of thought lay behind it. Or, to say it with a pretty word picture - I had been deep-sea diving all morning in a vast, difficult sea of language and cognitive grammar theories. I was so deep into the different thought patterns and conceptual understandings, that I was well on my way of growing fins and becoming a mermaid in an ocean of theories.

Bouncing ideas off of someone else, and trying to convey understandings into words, is the way I learn. If I have to explain something to someone who have NO clue what I’m talking about, I am able to detect and correct glitches in my own understanding.

I know. Poor bastard that happens to be in close vicinity of me when that happens.

Metaphors can be, and are, constructed along certain principles. They can be structural metaphors - which means that two concepts (or images) are paired up in your mind in a structural manner, thus creating a new concept. That’s all metaphors do, really - they are a way of making sense of things. 

We understand one concept by extending, changing, or expanding our knowledge of another (known) concept so that the two combined create something different. A structural metaphor happens when one concept is structured along the lines of another concept. Take the metaphor ARGUMENT IS WAR, for example. This is a typical metaphor that our culture lives by. The source domain is war, a domain where all the traits of war exist. Now, this concept of WAR exists in your mind, right - as well as in the collective mind. We know what war is. By adding a target domain to the source domain, a new metaphor is constructed, and we have now built an understanding of the target domain by structuring it as equal (or “like/as”) the source domain. If ARGUMENT IS WAR, the concept of arguing will follow the same “rules” as war.

So what that means, is that by adopting and integrating this conceptual metaphor - your behavior and view of life, will follow and shape itself according to your understanding of it.

Fancy, huh? Makes you want to think twice about what kind of metaphors you buy into.

Now, a structural metaphor is constructed in a way that allows us to comprehend one aspect of a concept in terms of another. This, in turn, means that certain OTHER aspects of the concept, will be hidden. As Lakoff&Johnson explains it: “In allowing us to focus on one aspect of a concept (e.g. the battling aspects of arguing), metaphorical concept can keep us from focusing on other aspects of the concept that are inconsistent with that metaphor”.

Another way metaphors are structured in our minds, is orientational. These metaphors don’t explain one concept in terms of another, but organizes a whole system of concepts according to another. Most of these metaphors are spatially oriented. 

GOOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN. Why? Because we are physical beings - and because we have bodies that function in a spatial environment, we structure our thoughts and language along the same orientational lines. This leads to metaphors such as “he’s in top shape”, “What’s coming up this week?” “He’s sinking fast” and so on. If I were to ask you how you would explain experiencing a foul mood, would you say you were “FEELING LOW”?

Have you ever thought about why?

Your words reflect your thoughts reflect your structured mind.

Ahhhh....

Let me chew on that for a bit. It just tastes so damn good.

You can’t really “Feel low.” Feelings have no shape or direction or physical “beingness”. You can’t point to a feeling and say that feeling is higher or lower than any other feeling because feelings are not visible, concrete or tangible (other than experiential inside your body). It’s not like sadness exists somewhere below the knee, while happiness is somewhere higher up (like in ear height, for instance). You can’t feel low. Get it?

It’s all just metaphors. We don’t even see them, because we are so immersed in the world constructed by them.

So we use metaphors like “I feel low” or “I feel depressed” to explain and express our experience of being human. The structure of the orientational metaphors is based on your physical life. GOOD IS UP; BAD IS DOWN because your experience of being in a body, where the body often lies down - on a lower level than standing up - are the basis of how you structure your conceptual words about the world.

I had been sitting in silence, marvelling over the implications of this, when I turned to my love and said:

“Have you ever wondered why HAPPY IS UP?”

and he looked at me and said:

“Well, duh. It’s because the sides of your mouth go up when you smile, of course”.

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And sometimes it can be said as simple as that.

“So why is this important?”

Well, it’s not.

Not really. Unless it is.

And when it is, it shows us what's really real. Pull the curtain from reality, expose the structures and the systems -and maybe understand what shapes a world.

In a way I am Dorothy, and the illusionist behind the curtain is not the Wizard.

It's the metaphors.

It's the words.