“So when we say that a concept is structured by a metaphor, we mean that it is partially structured and that it can be extended in some ways but not in others.” Page 13
Sometimes metaphors could hide other information from us and it doesn’t necessarily provide us with enlightenment without background information. For example, it wouldn’t make sense to us what the apple-juice seat is. It would only make sense if we were there when the actual conversation is taking place.
Metaphor: “Please sit in the apple-juice seat.”
Chapter 4: Oriental Metaphors
“These spatial orientations arise from the fact that we have bodies of the sort we have and that they function as they do in our physical environment.” 14
I get that there are up-down, front-back metaphors. What amazes me is how they connect the two dots together, how they reasoned that these metaphors exist because of how we operate. It’s mind-blowing yet oddly understandable.
“Get up…he sank into a coma…”
Chapter 5: Metaphor and Cultural Coherence
“Relative to what is important for them, their individual value systems are coherent with the major oriental metaphors of the mainstream culture.” 24
Some metaphors only make sense if you’re in a culture that uses that metaphor but some metaphors are also universal like MORE IS UP.
“Inflation is rising.”
Chapter 6: Ontological Metaphors
Quotes:
Human purposes typically require us to impose artificial boundaries that make physical phenomena discrete just as we are.
Merely viewing a nonphysical thing as an entity or substance does not allow us to comprehend very much. 27
It’s weird that we have this desire to label things and to capture them, to give them value and weight in order for us to understand them.
“He went to New York to seek fame and fortune.”
Chapter 7: Personification
“In each of these cases we are seeing something nonhuman as human…each personification differs in terms of the aspects of people that are picked out.” 33
Chapter 8: Metonymy
Metaphors that describe a whole as one of its parts. For example: America is symbolized by its national flag
Chapter 9: Challenges to Metaphorical Coherence
Some of the challenges of using a metaphor is when your statement doesn’t flow or doesn’t make sense. For example, it doesn’t go with the theory up is happy or down is sad.
Chapter 10: Some Further Examples
As the title of the chapter states, this is just basically a number of examples of metaphors that we live by, metaphors such as “Ideas are food,” “Ideas are people,” and “Ideas are plants.”
Chapter 11: The Partial Nature of Metaphorical StructuringSome metaphors are called “dead” because they can’t be applied to our daily lives. They only make sense within a context or within a culture but it is not a metaphor that the average person would use. However, just because they are dead, it doesn’t make them useful. These partial metaphors could also be used to make fiction/stories more interesting and inventive.
Chapter 12: How is Our Conceptual System Grounded?
“Thus UP is not understood purely in its own terms but emerges from the collection of constantly performed motor functions having to do with our erect position relative to the gravitational field we live in.”57 In short, metaphors are grounded from our own experiences, from the way we live.
Chapter 13: The Grounding of Structural Metaphors
Like the previous chapter, this chapter explains what metaphors are based on.
“ Both of these metaphors are culturally grounded in our experience with material resources.”
Metaphors we really live by:
- When we talk about mathematical equations, we use =, +, -, / etc.
- Insults such as: He's a dick, she's a bitch, they're pigs, he's an ass.
- The ground's gonna swallow me whole.
- I have the jitters. (?)
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