Prolific Prose: The Metaphor

While exploring the assigned reading for my Verbal & Visual Rhetoric class this past week, I found one of the articles particularly interesting. It was an article by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, titled "Metaphors We Live By," and it focused on how we perceive the world through the metaphors around us. I've always believed that we shape the world in which we live by our words and actions, and even though our thoughts, but I never really stopped to think about how that world could change based on a change of perception. Many of the metaphors that we regularly use were prescribed to us by others.

Lakoff and Johnson gave an example of the metaphor Argument is War and used the following statements to back up that claim: Your claims are indefensible; He attacked every weak point in my argument; His criticisms were right on target; If you use that strategy, he'll wipe you out; and He shot down all of my arguments. The words in bold represent words most typically associated with fighting and war, but are being used to describe an argument. How much would our perception of argument chance the metaphor changed to some like Argument is a Dance?

I never realized just how ingrained metaphors have become into our daily lives. They are a part of our everyday vernacular and our thinking. We consistently refer to ideas and concepts in life in terms of more concrete things. Some of the examples in the article that stood out most to me were: She has a fertile imagination; He’s a giant among writers; They gravitated toward one another immediately; and The odds are against me. They all express these intangible concepts—ideas, importance, love, life—in terms with which can more easily relate—plants, size, physical force and gambling—and therefore help to share the world around us.

As designers, I think it's important to understand that metaphor is perception and that when it comes to design, perception is everything. Just because one audience perceives something in a favorable way does not mean that all audiences will. As one of my classmates pointed out during discussion, this is just one more element that we, as designers, must use and and be mindful of in our work.