Post #3

            I never realized how metaphors and concepts impact my everyday life. Until I read the first two paragraphs in “Metaphors We Live By” by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. The way Lakoff and Johnson portrayed metaphors to be “poetic” and “extraordinary language” I always connected them to writings or movies. Yet they structure our language and even what we see everyday. So far they have helped me connect with what we have learned so far by the discussion of how metaphors impact our everyday language. I look back to the topics on race in the digital world, and the examples I have used before to learn that metaphors correspond with those topics as well. I hae talked about how on twitter there are racial twitter accounts and they use references in metaphorical terms saying that “so and so is like a…” Metaphors are all around us.

            The main point that stuck out to me was the concept of war and arguments. In my other English 360 class this same topic came up in our reasoning with rhetoric. The discussion was arguments are also an everyday concept. You reason from knowledge by gaining more or using what you know. This connects with chapter one of Metaphors We Live By, by the interaction metaphors take place in arguments. You make metaphors with what knowledge you have already consumed to connect to reality. “The essence of metaphor is understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another” Lakoff and Johnson state. This works perfectly with an argument or dance as the metaphor, you can create on thing and connect it to something else and still know what is being said.

            Even as I am writing this blog post right now I am starting to notice all the metaphors in the songs I am listening too. For example in Every Rose Has it’s Thorn, (Yes I am listening to Poison) the whole chorus is a metaphor that as beautiful or wonderful a girl can be she has an evil side. Now as I am listening to all my songs I am trying to pick out all the metaphors that are being used.

            Then there are all the different types of metaphors, and what each are used for depending on the situation, I remember learning about that in high school in one of my English classes but I never really connected with it. After reading through Lakoff and Johnson, the connection between this weeks reading and the past two chapters we have read from Nakamura and Chow-White is a bit clearer. “Though the polar oppositions up-down, in-out, etc., are physical in nature, the orientational metaphors based on them can vary from culture to culture.” (Lakoff and Johnson) Even as digitally race is surfaced, metaphors are even different from culture to culture not only physically. I would have never made that connected that through different groups of people orientations of metaphors are different. This concept was very interesting to me and helped me connect with the past readings.