One day in the late winter of 1981, while perusing a book, I read: “TIME IS MONEY: You’re wasting my time. This gadget will save you hours. How do you spend your time these days? You need to budget your time. . . .
I bought the book, and within a matter of weeks was seeing metaphors everywhere. I remember listening to a baseball game on the radio and being stunned by how often the announcer dramatized the game in terms of death. “Putting a man out” was clearly killing, and “getting put out” dying. Runners were gunned down, cut down, picked off, or sitting ducks caught dead at the plate after trying a suicide squeeze. Or a batter might be safe at first, or still alive at the plate, or hanging on for dear life after fouling off four balls in a row. I wondered how much of the game’s excitement might have to do with evoking the symbolic threat of death.
He didn’t, however, convince Chomsky, who launched an attack against his former student that shook the linguistics world and brought Lakoff international attention at the tender age of 26. Some of the attention was welcome, some of it not. Since Lakoff and his coworkers had intended their ideas to be a friendly extension of Chomsky’s work, they were taken aback by what they regarded as a mean and petty assault.
More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor, a book Lakoff authored with University of Chicago literary critic Mark Turner, came out recently. In it, Lakoff and Turner argue that the use of metaphor in poetry is usually a creative application of metaphors already common to everyday speech and thought.
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George Lakoff: Because metaphor is not just a matter of words. It is a major mode of thought. We understand much of reality in terms of metaphor. To a large extent we think using metaphor, frame political and social issues in metaphorical terms, draw conclusions about how to live our lives on the basis of metaphor, and act on those conclusions. Most of the time we are not even aware we are doing it, since most metaphorical thought is automatic and below the level of consciousness.
TB: How did you come to notice the pervasiveness of metaphor in everyday thought and speech?
We realized that the metaphor was not in the individual words but in the way we understood what love was; it was in our conceptual structure. Metaphors were not about mere words but about how we conceive of reality. And metaphors were clearly not merely poetic but were part of our ordinary speech and understanding. I realized that we had a major counterexample to all sorts of theories. And here we were in an undergraduate performance-arts class talking about one of the students’ problems with her boyfriend.
