Language and metaphor

[Lenin McCarthy]

don't think so.  I think perhaps one can create new metaphors, or, weave new angles into old metaphors.  The thing is, different metaphors work for different people.  Because, of course, different people have different past life experiences and reference points with which to interpret the metaphors.

So starting from scratch and inventing an entire new system of metaphor would be throwing out the baby with the bathwater.  (HO FUCK, SEE THAT?)

However, perhaps tweaking with existing metaphors sets off some signals for folks that have never been set off before.

I think that was part of the idea, intentional or not, with BIP.  The BIP metaphor, at its most basic incarnation, has been helpful for many because it can tap into and sync with metaphors and ideas people already understand.  So you get that little poppy, "AHA!" moment.  That is that signal being activated.  A new thought, a new perspective that has some basis in ideas already understood. 

I agree. I think I just got a bit caught away by my enthusiasm in the OP. Tweaking and playing with existing metaphors, or even creating new ones, are powerful tools.

@Placid Dingo:
How politicians use language is very fascinating indeed. In Norway, every time a major politician does something stupid, they tell the media that they're "laying themselves flat". The original meaning of the phrase is to apologize without conditions and take the entire responsibility for what has happened, but after a while they started using it with conditions (as in "I apologize without conditions, if you consider what I did to be wrong.")! Now it has become a blanket phrase politicians use to evade responsibility, basically.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Even if we don't delve into metaphor, language itself manipulates our perceptions (at least according to General Semantics).

I recently came across an interesting example of this as I began learning Turkish. The turkish language has two different kinds of past tense, based on the individual's knowledge of events. If the person actually SAW the thing, the word ends in 'di'. If the person didn't actually see the thing, the word ends in miş. The language has a built in buffer that separates personal experience of an event from second hand experience of the event.

In discussing this, it appears to actually affect the Turkish perception of assumption. If someone says "gitmiş" (went) it has the implication that the statement is uncertain. If they say "giddi" (went) then it's perceived as fact.
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The comment LMNO made on language and numbers being metaphor is also a very interesting topic, but definitely a big rabbit hole. However, there is a lot of interesting discussions on the idea of words/numbers as metaphor. Crowley discusses this in his essay "The Soldier and the Hunchback" (2+2 is true, 2+2=4 is false), RAW discusses it in the essay "Never Whistle While You're Pissing" (Two scientists arguing if the 'Damned Thing' growing in the yard is a bush or a tree). Huxley also discusses this in Doors of Perception.

One doctor recently wrote on the topic of syneasthesia, positing that the area of the brain that deals in metaphor, is the same area of the brain that causes the "mental characteristic" of syneasthesia. As an example it shows two "alien letters" (one is a bubbly squiggle with soft round corners and the other has sharp points). He then asks which letter is called "wooble" and which is called "kitkit". 90% of respondents tied the word 'wooble' to the soft round one. (TED Talk: http://youtu.be/N9hy7oOhHxk ).Overall, positing the idea that words are metaphors and syneasthesia is simply a characteristic that connects the symbol and the idea in different metaphoric ways.

In the paper:"Metaphors We Live By" by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson they argue that not only do we use metaphor in speech, but we use metaphor in thought. They conclude that the way we actually experience life is through metaphor.

So to really bang up the BiP, we could say that we are all trapped in a windowless solitary cell, watching video screens that show us some of what is going on outside of our cell rather than actually looking outside the bars. But of course, that would be mangling the metaphor 

[Xooxe]

http://www.stanford.edu/group/knowledgebase/cgi-bin/2011/02/24/is-crime-a-virus-or-a-beast-one-word-can-make-a-big-difference/

Psychology Assistant Professor Lera Boroditsky and doctoral candidate Paul Thibodeau have shown that people will likely support an increase in police forces and jailing of offenders if crime is described as a "beast" preying on a community. But if people are told crime is a "virus" infecting a city, they are more inclined to treat the problem with social reform.

They suspected that Republicans would be more inclined to catch and incarcerate criminals than Democrats, who would prefer enacting social reforms. They found Republican participants were about 10 percent more likely to suggest an enforcement-based solution.

But the difference was substantially less than the difference triggered by the metaphor. Participants who read that crime was a beast were about 20 percent more likely to suggest an enforcement-based solution than participants who read that crime was a virus, regardless of their political persuasion.

"That shows that you don't have to have immediate political polarization on every issue," Boroditsky said. "You can figure out how to communicate your message and find the right set of analogies and metaphors that will lead people to the same conclusion."

http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0016782

Always good to question every metaphor, just to make sure its papers are in order.

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

Here's another gret article on perception in language, this time on the topic of colors (Colors being metaphors for light reflecting at specific frequencies):

http://arstechnica.com/science/news/2007/05/language-influences-color-perception.ars

Because the Russian language makes a distinction between light blue and dark blue (as two completely different colors, rather than shades of the same color), test show that they perceive colors in a different way than English speakers.

[Elder Iptuous]

huh....
separating blue into two different 'colors'?  that seems odd.

i have heard that Newton's description of the color spectrum originally did not include orange and indigo, but he added them for numerological purposes.  indigo always seemed contrived to me, but orange stuck out as distinct enough that it would be odd not to have as a separate color.  Then i heard on "A Way With Words" radio program that the word 'orange' (for the color) came into use only after the fruit was introduced.  previously, they simply said 'yellow-red' or 'red-yellow'... So i can see how my perception of what should be a fundamentally separate color in the spectrum is influenced by language.

but dark-blue/light-blue?
that's not even a hue.  it's a shade.  since the article didn't say anything else about terminology distinction of shades in other colors, i assume it is only blue?  i wonder why that would be the case...

[LMNO]

Uh... Turquoise, anyone?

[Elder Iptuous]

 
what about turquoise?

[LMNO]

It's a separate category of blue.  Or am I misunderstanding your point?

[Elder Iptuous]

oh.
well, i was saying that if you ask people the basic colors of the rainbow they will give you ROYGBIV, generally.  then i pointed that O and I were added arbitrarily to get the magic number 7.  i was saying that I seemed contrived to me, but O seemed a natural 'basic' color, but then found that there wasn't even a specific word for it until the fruit was introduced to europe.
this was only tangentially related to what Rat posted, though, i guess...

but as for the russian delineation between light and dark blue, that seemed extra odd to me, since it is a distinction between shade rather than hue, and i was wondering why they had this for one color, but not, presumably, for others.

turquoise is a blue/green color, but would generally not be considered a 'basic' color.  we certainly have color names for quite a few hues that don't make it into the acronym.

our cones are centered on Red Blue and Green (with significant overlap, iirc), so i guess if we were looking for a non arbitrary division of the color spectrum, it should be based on that, no?

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

There is a chaos of light frequencies... we order that chaos into words so we can speak about them. There's a video of RAW being asked to explain quantum physics simply... he uses an illustration about the place he lived and how for some things like the post office it was considered part of one town and for other things like police, it was someplace different and technically it was some unincorproated area. He concluded by saying its easy to deal with this because we know we put the lines on the map. However, with 'reality' we often forget that we put the lines there. Even things like hue and shade are concepts of our own creation, definitions based on how we decided to order the spectrum of color.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I have some major skepticism about the whole color/language issue. It strikes me as rather critically close to a certain anthropological fallacy that is essentially the interpretation of the failure of the anthropologist to understand their subjects as a failure of the subjects to understand a concept.

[MMIX]

I have some major skepticism about the whole color/language issue. It strikes me as rather critically close to a certain anthropological fallacy that is essentially the interpretation of the failure of the anthropologist to understand their subjects as a failure of the subjects to understand a concept.

There's  a thread about this somewhere isn't there? Care to remind me what your particular objections were?

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I have some major skepticism about the whole color/language issue. It strikes me as rather critically close to a certain anthropological fallacy that is essentially the interpretation of the failure of the anthropologist to understand their subjects as a failure of the subjects to understand a concept.

There's  a thread about this somewhere isn't there? Care to remind me what your particular objections were?

The argument seems to be that people whose language doesn't have a specific name for a color but lumps it into another color group, can't actually visually distinguish the color. This bears striking similarities to some of the "noble savage" fallacies perpetuated about other groups; "They don't have a word for rape; they don't understand the concept".

Compare and contrast this with the myth that the Inuit have (varying number) of words for snow. The implication is that they recognize more varieties of snow than do English-speakers. This, of course, is false; even if the myth were true, it would simply be a matter of describing the same thing differently.

Now, I'm a colorist by trade. I recognize and can distinguish between hundreds of colors (I also have an anomaly of the cones which causes me to see more yellow than other people see, which leads to occasional hilarity). I know names for colors that other people would probably just call "green". This doesn't mean that the difference in the colors is invisible to them; it just means that they don't have names for them. If I said "hand me the charteuse and the olivine", most people would have no idea what I was saying. If I said "hand me the two pukey-greenish colors there", they would know what I was talking about. If I said "Hand me the more yellowy of the two pukey-greenish colors" most people would hand me the chartreuse, without even knowing the words "chartreuse" or "olivine".

To say "these people have no word for pink; therefore they cannot see pink" seems like a wide-open invitation for fallacy; Consciously, they see red because that color is called "red". That doesn't mean that they are physically unable to distinguish between


and


it just means that they use the same word to describe them, and until you let them know what difference they should be looking for ("the light red one") there's no frame of reference to impel them to make a distinction.

The interesting thing is that even the studies themselves don't make the claim that the language directly affects color perception, but rather, memory. It's people's misinterpretation of what that means that has led to "people who don't have a name for pink can't see it".

[Bebek Sincap Ratatosk]

I agree with you on those examples of previous tests and assumptions, Nigel. However, this paper is about a somewhat different test. It's not stating that the English speakers don't "see" the difference in color, but rather that the Russians detect the color difference/matching more quickly across goluboy/sinay than English speakers across light blue/dark blue.

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780/F1.large.jpg

In the above linked figure, Russian speakers more quickly match the top color to the left color, English speakers reaction time is slower. They tested both spatial (like above) and verbal, with the following results:

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780/F2.large.jpg

The paper doesn't argue that English speakers 'don't' see the colors, but rather the speed at which they identify the difference is slower.

From the abstract:

We found that Russian speakers were faster to discriminate two colors when they fell into different linguistic categories in Russian (one siniy and the other goluboy) than when they were from the same linguistic category (both siniy or both goluboy). Moreover, this category advantage was eliminated by a verbal, but not a spatial, dual task. These effects were stronger for difficult discriminations (i.e., when the colors were perceptually close) than for easy discriminations (i.e., when the colors were further apart). English speakers tested on the identical stimuli did not show a category advantage in any of the conditions. These results demonstrate that (i) categories in language affect performance on simple perceptual color tasks and (ii) the effect of language is online (and can be disrupted by verbal interference).

The abstract, full paper and figures can be found here:

http://www.pnas.org/content/104/19/7780.abstract

The full paper talks about previous tests which relied on memory and subjective judgement. The test was designed to account for that difference by using the objective color matching figures like the one above.

. The critical difference in this case is not that English speakers cannot distinguish between light and dark blues, but rather that Russian speakers cannot avoid distinguishing them: they must do so to speak Russian in a conventional manner. This communicative requirement appears to cause Russian speakers to habitually make use of this distinction even when performing a perceptual task that does not require language. The fact that Russian speakers show a category advantage across this color boundary (both under normal viewing conditions without interference and despite spatial interference) suggests that language-specific categorical representations are normally brought online in perceptual decisions.

[Mesozoic Mister Nigel]

I covered that in my last two sentences. That was my whole quarrel with the way laypeople seem to be interpreting those studies.