[wirthjason]

How could someone write a post like this and leave off the great book “Metaphors We Live By” by Lakoff and Johnson?

Is particularly found the part about how metaphors “hide and highlight” information. In other words the metaphor we use necessitates how we think. We often frame arguments using the metaphor of war and that frames how we think. The other party is an enemy that must be defeated, its bloody, and there is a loser. However we could frame it as a dance, in which case they are a partner, and for the outcome to succeed they must move together in harmony.

Lakoff has written other fascinating books like how metaphors are used in politics as well as math (“Where Mathematics Comes From”).

[IIAOPSW]

I view it as a side effect of linguistic evolution. Sure you could have a bunch of complex rules to strictly type your nouns and limit the type of verbs that validly relate things in one type to another, but if you simply relax the constraint (or just not bother in the first place) metaphors fall out as a natural consequence. See, I just did it. "fall out". Words don't physically fall, but because there's no constraint on using this physical verb to relate non-physical concepts, I can make metaphorical expressions at no additional cost to grammatical complexity.

We do this all the time. We might say a certain fact or circumstance "tells us" something to mean its presence let us make a deduction. Eg "this equation tells us the flow is laminar in this regime". Examples of this sort of thing are abundant.

[kjhughes]

> Lakoff has written other fascinating books...

Favorite fascinating George Lakoff book: Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things: What Categories Reveal About the Mind

[slibhb]

The first part of Metaphors We Live By is fascinating. It describes how so much of language is made of dead metaphors. But then you get to stuff like:

> We often frame arguments using the metaphor of war and that frames how we think. The other party is an enemy that must be defeated, its bloody, and there is a loser. However we could frame it as a dance, in which case they are a partner, and for the outcome to succeed they must move together in harmony.

That's just silly. The reason arguments are described metaphorically as wars is because arguments and wars serve the same function: they occur when we disagree about something and are means of settling the disagreement. Dances, meanwhile, have nothing to do with disagreement and they don't settle anything.

[webnrrd2k]

Its not silly at all. First, we're discussing metaphors, and it's certainly possible to use different metaphors to describe or model the same situation.

There are dances that decide disagreements. Different cultures use dance for different purposes. What about dance contests? Break dancing? Krumping? People dance to attract partners, to establish social ranking, etc... all of which which are a forms of social contest.

[navane]

One way to see a negotiation is as a war, another way to see a negotiation is as a dance.