Hacking Metaphors, Frames and Other Ideas
Background Sometimes a rather obscure and complex analogy just clicks into place in one's mind and allows a slightly altered way of thinking that just makes so much sense it hurts. Like putting glasses on in the morning and the world suddenly snapping into shape. This happened to me this morning when reading the Notes…
Read more →Over on the excellent 'Genealogy of Religion' , Cris Campbell waved a friendly red rag in front of my eyes to make me incensed over exaggerated claims (some) anthropologists make about metaphors. I had expressed some doubts in previous comments but felt that perhaps this particular one deserves its own post. The book Cris refers…
Read more →A few days ago, I tweeted a link to an article in TES : What Miss really means < It's always worthwhile re-examining ingrained inequalities http://t.co/GKhjc4VgUP #edchat #ukedchat #feminism — Dominik Lukes (@techczech) May 17, 2014 Today, I got the following response back: @techczech 'really means' talks about origins. It doesn't mean that to me…
Read more →The role of metaphor in science debate (Background) Recently, the LSE podcast an interesting panel on the subject of "Metaphors and Science" . It featured three speakers talking about the interface between metaphor and various 'scientific' disciplines (economics, physics and surgery). Unlike many such occasions, all speakers were actually very knowledgeable and thoughtful on the…
Read more →While people keep banging on about Chomsky as being the be all and end all of linguistics (I'm looking at you philosophers of language), there have been many linguists who have had a much more substantial impact on how we actually think about language in a way that matters. In my post on why Chomsky…
Read more →Drafty This was written in some haste and needs further refinement. Maybe one day that will come. For now, it will be left as it stands. Background This post outlines what I think are the key learnings from the output of the research of the field of linguistics that should be reflected in the general…
Read more →Metonymy in the wild Things were not going well for Mitt Romney in early autumn of last year. And then he responded to a query about gender equality with this sentence: "I had the chance to pull together a cabinet, and all the applicants seemed to be men… I went to a number of women's…
Read more →The great blog Genealogy of Religion posted this video with a somewhat approving commentary: The video started off with panache and promised some entertainment, however, I found myself increasingly annoyed as the video continued. The problem is that this is an exchange of cliches that pretends to be a fight of truth against ignorance. Sure…
Read more →I was reminded by this blog post on LousyLinguist that many people still see metaphor as an unproblematic homogeneous concept leading to much circular thinking about them. I wrote about that quite a few years ago in: Lukeš, D., 2005. Towards a classification of metaphor use in text: Issues in conceptual discourse analysis of a…
Read more →I just found out that both abstracts I submitted to the Cognitive Futures of the Humanities Conference were accepted. I was really only expecting one to get through but I'm looking forward to talking about the ideas in both. The first first talk has foundations in a paper I wrote almost 5 years ago now…
Read more →Update Part of this post was incorporated into an article I wrote with Brian Kelly and Alistair McNaught that appeared in the December issue of Ariadne . As part of that work and feedback from Alistair and Brian, I expanded the final section from a simple list of bullets into a more detailed research programme…
Read more →[caption id="" align="alignright" width="300"] Teacher in primary school in northern Laos (Photo credit: Wikipedia)[/caption] Most of us are all too happy to repeat clichés about education to motivate ourselves and others to engage in this liminal ritual of mass socialization. One such phrase is "knowledge is power". It is used to refer not just to…
Read more →Given how long I've been studying metaphor (at least since 1991 when I first encountered Lakoff and Johnson's work and full on since 2000) it is amazing that I have yet to attend a RaAM (Researching and Applying Metaphor) conference. I had an abstract accepted to one of the previous RaAMs but couldn't go. This…
Read more →Somebody commented on the Language Log saying "of course [...] Chomsky was a massively gifted linguist" http://j.mp/9Q98Bx and for some reason, to use a Czech idiom, the handle of the jar repeatedly used to fetch water just fell off. Meaning, I've had enough. I think we should stop thinking of Chomsky as a gifted linguist…
Read more →Making connections between ourselves and other people no matter how arbitrary, is an incredibly popular communal as well as private activity. The many algorithms for generating one's stripper, mobster or some other kind of name have graduated from napkins in bars to Facebook apps and now proper quantitative analysis of text samples. But deep down…
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