The Death of Metaphor

In their first book, Metaphors We Live By (1980), Lakoff and Johnson put forward the view that conventional metaphors – or dead metaphors, as they are commonly called in English – are very much alive. The very title of the book carried the suggestion that our daily existence is structured metaphorically: that the worn-out phrases we commonly use are symptoms of a vast system of unconscious metaphorical thought which underlies language, action and understanding. This perspective on language – borrowed from AI research – has been developed in a series of publications and has become influential. I argued against this position in a longer work (Pawelec 2005). In this place, I would like to show in more detail the problems inherent in Lakoff’s approach to the life and death of metaphor. This venture is not meant merely as an exercise in criticism of some limitations of the theory of conceptual metaphor. My aim is to question the boast that this theory is a significant improvement on traditional study of meaning and much closer to “what people find meaningful in their lives” (Lakoff, Johnson 1980: ix). I share, though, the assumption accepted by Lakoff and Johnson that the theory of metaphor is central for any adequate theory of meaning, as metaphor is “the omnipresent principle of language” (Richards 1965: 92). Let us start with the limitations, however. In order to see them better, we should have some grasp of the basic notions. When is a metaphor alive? To quote Samuel Johnson, when “it gives you two ideas for one” (cf. Richards 1965: 93). One could say that we are aware of a metaphoric use of a word if its conventional meaning (‘the vehicle’ in Richards’ terminology) does not fit the object described (‘the tenor’). To give an example: