If You Yoyo Are You on Your Own?

In an article entitled "The YOYO theory: YOu're on Your Own" published in Paper Magazine in February 2002, David Hershovits describes the ethic of rugged individualism espoused by airline pilots in the wake of the terrorist acts of September 11, 2001. The acronym YOYO (for You're On Your Own) had formerly been reserved for the case in which an air traffic controller bid a pilot adieu as he left the controller's airspace. However, in view of the airline hijackings on that fateful September 11 th , the acronym represents the extent to which a pilot at the helm of a hijacked airplane is largely left to his own devices – a fate Hershovits implies extends metaphorically to all Americans. Below we describe how the principles of can elucidate meaning construction in this example and point out how the text creates irony by manipulating our inclination to construct conceptual integration networks. Conceptual blending is a set of general cognitive processes used to combine conceptual structure in mental spaces (Fauconnier & Turner, 1998). Mental spaces are very partial representations of the entities and relations of a particular scenario as perceived, imagined, remembered, or otherwise understood by a speaker (1994). Blending takes place in a conceptual integration network, an array of mental spaces which typically includes two input spaces, a generic space, and a blended space. Input spaces represent information from discrete cognitive domains, a generic space contains structure common to the two inputs, and the blended space contains structure from both inputs, as well as its own emergent structure. Emergent structure arises out of the imaginative processes of blending. The first process is called completion, and involves the juxtaposition of information from different spaces; completion, as in pattern completion, occurs when part of a cognitive model is activated and results in the activation of the rest of the frame. Finally, elaboration is an extended version of completion that results from