Talking In Code

Daniel Soar reports on a US government attempt to use George Lakoff's linguistic theories to analyze foreign cultures:

Lakoff’s basic idea was that the ‘target’ of the metaphor, an abstract concept like democracy, is explained in terms of the ‘source’, a familiar physical object or process. The analogy would often rely on some lingering ‘folk theory’ about how a process works. For example, according to the folk theory, anger would cause increased body temperature, increased blood pressure and agitation (ANGER IS HEAT). This leads to metonymic expressions such as ‘Don’t get hot under the collar,’ and ‘When I found out, I almost burst a blood vessel.’

Then, a series of ‘entailments’ would cause one metaphor (ANGER IS HEAT) to combine with another (THE BODY IS A CONTAINER FOR THE EMOTIONS) in such a way that a whole new concept results, as if by magic: viz, anger is the heat of a fluid in a container. This means that when someone is filled with anger we can say – or we could say, if we spoke in the language of 1980s English-teaching textbooks – that their blood boils and they have to let off steam before they flip their lid. The assumption is that conceptual metaphors like this reflect and constrain a person’s way of thinking. It’s all a great game, and the spy agencies, Beltway entrepreneurs and hangers-on expect to profit from it.

Steven Pinker's critique of Lakoff's theory is always worth a revisit. Lakoff replies here.