Blogging is Giving is a Responsibility
This is pretty random, but here's a page with a list of metaphors from George Lakoff and his semantic categorizing self (of the kind featured in Steven Pinker's The Stuff of Though (alright! the first Pinker reference of the second thousand blog posts)). Just the language of these, beyond the fact that as usual, I take such categories of metaphors as a better point of view of metaphors than any of those porffered by literary theory, take for instance:
Self-initiated Change Of State Is Self-propelled Motion
Self-initiated Change Of State Is Self-propelled Motion
2 Comments:
I kind of clicked through this at work this afternoon and didn't a whole lot of brain wattage into it and I don't know what literary theory tends to proffer on the subject of metaphors, but these seem useful to me. Off the top of my head** I don't know how firm such categories can be, or how firm they're supposed to be; semantic concepts seem fluid enough that relationships between them are going to be fluid. I wonder how much Lakoff's categories here indicate hardwired tendencies in humans' ways of thinking in the abstract and how much they reflect arbitrary cultural practices of thought.
Incidentally as I started clicking through the pages I thought, "Is this website from, what, 1996?" In fact based on the last-updated info at the bottom of at least one page it's from 1994. Which I guess explains the lack of a marble-patterned GIF tile background.
* [THOUGHT IS ELECTRICAL CURRENT ADMINISTERED BY THE BRAIN]
** [THOUGHT IS SOMETHING THAT SITS ON TOP OF YOUR HEAD LIKE A BIRD ON AN EGG]
The Internet is such a great repository for this kind of information. See, once upon a time, you'd have to construct this sort of intellectual classification system by writing it out on hundreds of 3x5 index cards, and no one would read them until your building superintendent came across them after your lonely death while cleaning decades' worth of old newspapers out of your apartment.
I'd be more excited about that Pinker reference if the title had all its constituent letters. Although it rhymes now, if you pronounce the last word as "Thuff."
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