Thursday, September 20, 2012

What I've Been Reading

Metaphors We Live By by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Since the book intensely focuses on linguistics, one get a feeling of reading a college text book but yet it's an easy read. Author's pretty much decipher metaphors from every sentence we use under the sun.

  • Our ordinary conceptual system, in terms of which we both think and act, is fundamentally metaphorical in nature.
  • The concept is metaphorically structured, the activity is metaphorically structured, and, consequently, the language is metaphorically structured.
  • The most important claim we have made so far is that metaphor is not just a matter of language, that is, of mere words. We shall argue that, on the contrary, human thought processes are largely metaphorical.

All I could think of was how Hitchens used to decimate the mother of all metaphors: "I don't have a body. I am a body."




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