Love's Metaphors

Anthropologists George Lakoff and Mark Johnson suggest that our thought patterns occur along the lines of certain conceptual systems. Sometimes these lines are not very obvious, and one way to figure out what they are, according to Lakoff and Johnson, is to look at languages, since talking and communicating is basically thinking. What they found through studying our use of languages is that, a lot of our concepts, displayed in our colloquial speech and written texts, are metaphorical. They are not just talking about the metaphors that we use consciously and purposely. They are talking about the ones that we don't notice. For example, some of the most common phrases we use when we talk about love are: I fall in love with him; I'm in for the long haul, I'm crazy about her. When we say these sentences, we don't think about the metaphorical feature they contain. But implicit as they are, these are the exact concepts that construct the way we perceive the subject matter of our speeches.

Let's look at the first phrase: I fall in love with him. The image of falling insinuates an involuntary characteristic of love. It happens accidentally, when least expected, like a hole in the ground. The direction in the act of "falling" also gives love a somewhat negative tenor.

The second example: I'm in for the long haul. Depicts love as a journey. There are some planning involved prior to the departure for a journey, but mostly the journey is unpredictable, and participants have little control over what is to come. This metaphor suggests a sense of passivity, and challenge since the journey is "long".

The message of the last metaphor: I'm crazy about her, is more obvious than the previous two. It not only implies that the people who chooses to engage in love made the decision without sense, but also suggests that the act itself is irrational.

Of course there are many ways to interpret a particular metaphor, there is no right or wrong way. What matters, according to Lakoff and Johnson, is how we act upon the basis of whatever inferences the metaphor suggests to us. Each person acts a different way because they interpret the reality through metaphors in a different way, therefore the reality is relative.

Bear in mind that this is just one of the social science theories about human understandings of the world, it is impossible to prove and hence not proven that our conceptual vehicles actually functions along the lines of metaphors. See the metaphor I just made there?



Source: http://pages.vassar.edu/theories-of-the-novel/files/2013/04/Metaphors-We-Live-By.pdf