Metaphors We Live By, Book Review

This was a funny book. I’ve never read anything so intensely analytical, with such profound insights into things that I could have never even thought to think about. This is what was funny about the book to me, believe it or not. Most of our language is learned, which means that most of us have never questioned why it is what it is. The authors of this book quite exhaustively analyzed the metaphors which guide our metaphors which guide our metaphors. We learned why TIME is MONEY, why ARGUMENT is WAR, and why LOVE is ART. There are many aspects of our verbiage which are contingent upon an underlying architecture of metaphor. That’s what this book was about.

It was also about the “agreed-upon” nature of language. We have landed upon a certain paradigm of conversation and axiomatic dialogue and stuck to it religiously. On page 78-79, the nature of conversation is analyzed. Conversation is one of our social customs that has adopted a very certain structure. We have means of beginning conversations, continuing conversations, and ending conversations, programmed into our cultural lives. And we’ve agreed to certain rules of conduct and language within the parameters of this cultural paradigm. So when we participate in a conversation with each other it must fit within the expectations of society, otherwise it is not a valid conversation. When two people sit down for tea, culture is the third party. (see page 57)

Several years ago my friend Justin and I invented a game called Olympic Penguin. Olympic Penguin is played by basically spouting off language, right from the top of your head, and trying to reach a kind of Zen, poetic detachment. With much practice, we had become pretty good at this game. My parents came into town and took Justin and I to dinner. I thought we all had a nice time. On the way back to my apartment Justin and I started playing Olympic Penguin in the backseat, free-styling the names of streets with birds, lizards, mountains, music, antennae, pioneers, dark stars, Madagascar’s, etc. Utter, beautiful nonsense. When we arrived back at my apartment my parents just dropped us off, did not opt to come in for tea. The last thing my mom said to me was, “Son—don’t use drugs.”

I tell this story because it illustrates, to me, what the book is about. Why do words mean what we give them the power to mean? Words are a form of currency, in that without our agreements, they would simply be grunting, clicking paper, and would be practically meaningless. If I decided right now to erode my logic down entirely, and degenerate into a thread of nonsense, what difference would it really make? There’s still meaning somewhere in Olympic Penguin, even if it’s not readily discernible. Our tiny mouth noises have amounted to something, even if it’s only been symbolic: not the thing itself, but a grunted shadow of the thing NOT-itself. This is discussed in greater detail on page 198 of the text.

The conclusion of the book was much the same conclusion we had reached with our game: our words, when relying on more profound metaphors—new systems, improved systems—can arise to an aesthetic level which reflects the highest standard possibly available to our language. Achieving the poetic trance lent our words a mythological imprint.

Another part that interested me was on page 136, when it discusses how paraphrasing isn’t really possible. To try and paraphrase is an alteration of language, which, when analyzed the way these obsessive-compulsive cats analyze language, utterly changes the meaning of sentences. (Remind me to thank God I didn’t marry a linguist.)

I also found the discussion of some of the specific metaphors compelling. Most especially the TIME is MONEY metaphor. I’m WASTING my time watching TV. I’m SPENDING my time thinking about a book I read. Is that WORTH your time? It goes to show how an established metaphor figures so heavily into our national consciousness, in America, where time has literally become money, though the two are made of entirely different material. (What is time made out of? Atoms?) In the Middle East, time must be different. In the Rainforest, the Serengeti, the Falkland Islands, in Belarus, time must be conceived of differently.

Reference
Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (1980). Metaphors we live by. Chicago: University of Chicago
Press.