Metaphors We Live By

Emma trained as an industrial design engineer and strategic product designer, and her work explores how business-led activities can contribute to system-level change towards more regenerative and inclusive economic models.

In their book, Metaphors We Live By, linguists and philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest metaphors are tools that enable us to use what we know about our direct physical and social experiences to understand more abstract things like work, time, mental activity and feelings.

And many of us use metaphors all the time, often without realising.

We might talk about life being a journey and time being money.

So that was the sort of, as I say, the prehistory, the intuition.

And then I had the experience in the, uh, right around the time it came out, I guess, in the, in the '70s, of reading, uh, late '70s George Lakoff and Mark Johnson's book, Metaphors We Live By.

Yeah.

Uh, which was, as you know, a, a book, uh, on cognitive linguistics that basically pushed back on, uh, Chomsky and said the way we're gonna understand language is not primarily through grammatical structure.

Yeah, so that image came up.

came from the linguist George Lakoff and the philosopher Mark Johnson in their lovely little book called Metaphors We Live By, in which they note that a lot of common language, even if it's not consciously poetic, centers on certain metaphors, families of metaphors, and one of them being that argument is a kind of war.

Just look at the kind of language that people use to describe an argument, it's all borrowed from war.

I demolished his argument, he tried to defend it, I attacked it, and so on.

What's the website? I'm just like brightening it.

Have you guys ever read that book, Metaphors We Live By?

Mm-hmm.

George Lakoff.

Guys, I feel very satisfied with the conversation generated by my question.

I'll even say it's time to move on.

And we recommend Metaphors We Live By for further reading.

Uh-huh.