Memetic analysis of legal language has established that Latin maxims survive across centuries through specific evolutionary advantages: linguistic immutability, cognitive compression, and costly signaling. This paper argues that this account, while accurate, is incomplete. It identifies a deeper layer of legal genealogy that memetic analysis cannot reach on its own: the level of absolute metaphors in the sense proposed by Hans Blumenberg, that is, pre-conceptual images that resist terminological reduction and orient legal thought before any argument begins. I propose that Latin maxims are not merely perfect memes. They are absolute metaphors that crystallized before terminologization could complete, and their irreducibility derives from that arrest, not from conservatism or professional ritual. This framework is developed in explicit opposition to structuralist readings: absolute metaphors define what legal concepts are possible in a given environment, not which concept wins. The selection mechanism remains Darwinian. The second empirical case developed here is the LLMorphism construct proposed by Capraro (2025): the tendency to reinterpret human cognition through categories derived from large language models. I argue that LLMorphism is a candidate absolute metaphor currently undergoing memetic fixation, with measurable fitness advantages in contemporary institutional environments. The convergence of both cases suggests that the production of absolute metaphors is not a historical curiosity but a structural property of legal language under conditions of high-fidelity, low-variation transmission. The paper concludes with implications for the Ancestral Borrowing Analysis Network (ABAN) methodology and the Constitutional Lock-in Index (CLI): terminal nodes in genealogical trees are not data gaps but positive indicators of absolute metaphors with high institutional inertia.
Ignacio Adrián LERER (Fri,) studied this question.