The Death of Dead Metaphor

METAIVIETAPHORICAL ISSUES The Death of Dead Metaphor George Lakoff Department of Linguistics University of California, Berkeley The term qdead metaphorq is a holdover from a traditional folk theory of language that has turned out not to be workable. According to the old theory, the locus of metaphor was language not thought, ordinary everyday language was qliteral,q and only novel poetic or rhetorical expressions were candidates for being metaphors. Metaphorical qlifeq was seen in poetic novelty alone, and mundane unpoetic language supported no metaphorical life. A qdeadq metaphor was defined relative to that theory as a linguistic expression that had once been novel and poetic, but had since become part of mundane conventional language, the cemetary of creative thought. As we saw in this column (L4, 000-000), the term qliteralq is a cluster con- cept, defined relative to the old theory. When empirical research showed the old theory to be wrong, the term qliteralq split. The four senses making up the cluster had to be distinguished, and one could no longer use qliteralq in its old overly simplistic sense in discussions of metaphor. Like qliteralq, qdead metaphor“ has been has been defined in a theory- dependent way. As that theory dissolves under the scrutiny of empirical research, the meaning of “dead metaphorq cannot remain constant. What were called dead metaphors inthe old theory have turned out to be a host of quite disparate phenomena, including those metaphors that are most alive -- the ones that we use constantly in everyday thought. If one wants to keep the term qdead metaphorq, it will have to come to mean something very different in contemporary theories. To see where the problem lies, we need to consider some examples. Let us begin with a clear case, something that would be a dead metaphor in any theory, old or new: the word pedigree. The word comes from the Middle English pedegru, which in turn came from the Old French pie dc grue, which meant qfoot of a crane.“ Why foot of a crane? The answer is that family-tree diagrams of period used a three-line claw-shaped mark to indicate family lineage. The family-tree diagram looked like a crane’s foot. What was the metaphor‘? Conceptually, it was a mapping from one conventional image (a crane’s foot) to another (a family—tree diagram). The term for the source image, pie de grue, was used for the target image, the family-tree diagram. At the time this metaphor was alive, it was a one-shot metaphor, not a sys- tematic one. It was used for one term only. It did not map one complex conceptual structure onto another, as rich metaphors do. It merely mapped one conventional mental image onto another. The was no whole system of source-domain terminol- ogy mapped onto a corresponding system of target-domain terminology, as for example in the LOVE IS A JOURNEY metaphor discussed in this column (L3, 215- 225); only one expression from the source domain was used. One image-mapping, one linguistic mapping, and nothing else.