Metaphors We Die By: How Patterns Of Communication Can Become Deadly

Previously, I, along with many of my fellow collegues, attended the Carey Lecture, “Metaphors We Die By: How Patterns of Communication Can Become Deadly” presented by John Lyne. I found a few of the points to be very interesting but I also found myself at times confused or lost. I believe this to be, in part, from the way in which John Lyne spoke. It’s not that he did not express the ideas well but rather that his nervousness was extremely present. Despite having a manuscript during the speech, along with the support of many collegues, he was still very nervous and that transcended onto the delivery of his speech. Aside from that, I found the speech to not be as strong compared to others that I have heard in terms of its structure. While the content presented was
strong, I was not able to easily pick up an introduction, clear main points, and a solid conclusion. However, although the speech was not perfect, John Lyne still raised attention to important points.
Lyne noted how much of our communication patterns today include metaphors. In this sense, just about anything literal can be taken metaphorically to some extent. However, there are dangers to metaphors because depending on how they are used, they can be good or bad. One of the ways in which metaphors produce consequences is in the sense that they can cause end of the line thinking. This is essentially when a certain perspective as far as it can go until it completely forgets all other perspectives. Some examples of this include the metaphors we use when talking about illnesses or about our brain.
Our brain is one of the most important – if not the most important – parts of our body.
One of the metaphors discussed was the metaphor of the brain. This refers to how when people talk about the brain, they refer to it like a computer. I found it humorous when Lyne said how if the brain could respond it would be rather insulted by such a statement; the first thing you do with a computer is hook it up to the internet. The way I came to understand this is that a computer needs the Internet to be able to access information and that information is provided by and influenced by many people. Our brains on the other hand, don’t need “connection” to access information. The strength of the brain can be seen in our ability to recall memories along with other information. It is not only our memories that are contained within our brain, but it the learned information that we have collected over the years and learned to cultivate to get the most out of it. By simply calling the brain a computer (or a machine) is to degrade it as something that can be artificially made and belong to anyone. This is why using such a metaphor is so damaging, because of the way if causes us to think about our body and
brain.
Another damaging metaphor mentioned revolved around illnesses, specifically cancer. When we talk about people with cancer, as well as cancer itself, most of the it is referred to as a “battle” or a “fight.” By doing this, we are using metaphors of war. This is not the first time that we have used metaphors of war to refer to things; there has been the “war on drugs,” the “war on poverty,” and the “war on terrorism” to name a few. These metaphors of war that we use are deeply rooted in how we think and talk about things that often times we forget that they are even metaphors in the first place; most of the time when we use them, it is often done unconsciously. This is an example of not only a damaging metaphor because it compares war to illness but also because it has become a dead metaphor. Once a metaphor enters common, constant, daily use, it is no longer recognized as a metaphor, but as a regular way of communicating. This is what is truly dangerous, the fact that so many metaphors have become dead ones that our communication is littered with them to which we are never aware.