Response Paper - Metaphors We Live by
“Metaphors We Live By” As Lakoff and Johnson suggest in their article Metaphors We Live By, “Metaphors not only make our thoughts more vivid and interesting, but they actually structure our perceptions and understanding”. What I find most interesting throughout the duration of this article is that Metaphors We Live By gives us a source of examples that demonstrate our use of various metaphors used in everyday language and thoughts.
One of the topics that I thought was interesting was when the example of a metaphor used in this particular writing speak of arguments in terms of battles. This article demonstrates pervasiveness of a metaphor and how it provides an understanding of its use. It also talks about the language, meaning, and understanding. Some of the metaphors mentioned in the article were “Your claims are indefensible”, “His criticisms were right on target”, and “I demolished his argument”. The concept argument and the metaphor argument is that war reflects in our everyday language by a variety of expressions. Here, it is important that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. Being that there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle involved in the conversation, and an argument is thereby structured.
Another topic in the article Metaphors We Live By that made a good point was the idea of how metaphorical expressions can also be a foundation in our everyday activities. Lakoff and Johnson use the metaphor “Time is money”. In our thriving business world, the word time is a valuable asset, a limited resource, and is needed to be productive in our surroundings. The article uses the metaphors “You’re wasting my time”, “You need to budget your time”, and “You don’t use your time profitably”. Lakoff and Johnson get the point across that time is a valuable and limited asset to our culture.
Once the metaphor is learned, we can generate new instances of using it. Metaphors are not just items of language, but are used for
One of the topics that I thought was interesting was when the example of a metaphor used in this particular writing speak of arguments in terms of battles. This article demonstrates pervasiveness of a metaphor and how it provides an understanding of its use. It also talks about the language, meaning, and understanding. Some of the metaphors mentioned in the article were “Your claims are indefensible”, “His criticisms were right on target”, and “I demolished his argument”. The concept argument and the metaphor argument is that war reflects in our everyday language by a variety of expressions. Here, it is important that we don’t just talk about arguments in terms of war. Being that there is no physical battle, there is a verbal battle involved in the conversation, and an argument is thereby structured.
Another topic in the article Metaphors We Live By that made a good point was the idea of how metaphorical expressions can also be a foundation in our everyday activities. Lakoff and Johnson use the metaphor “Time is money”. In our thriving business world, the word time is a valuable asset, a limited resource, and is needed to be productive in our surroundings. The article uses the metaphors “You’re wasting my time”, “You need to budget your time”, and “You don’t use your time profitably”. Lakoff and Johnson get the point across that time is a valuable and limited asset to our culture.
Once the metaphor is learned, we can generate new instances of using it. Metaphors are not just items of language, but are used for
Cited: Lakoff, George, and Johnson, Mark. “Metaphors We Live By” (1980). http://theliterarylink.com/metaphors.html