Columnist Francesco Salamone emphasizes the importance of recognizing the language and metaphor influences that shape our perceptions.
Credit: Grace ChenYou say you are in the “trenches” during midterms. I took a “shot” at applying for a job, but I am unsure how to “market” myself. You “paid” attention and “invested” time and effort in your lab report. I “killed” my presentation. Our understanding of the world is fundamentally shaped by metaphors so ingrained in language that we barely notice them. As an international student, I unconsciously adopted the metaphors of violence and money prevalent in contemporary English, and this has morphed my understanding and perception of the world. I miss how, in my native language of Italian, I do not “pay” for attention, I lend it (“prestare”); or I do not “spend” time, I pass through it (“trascorrere”).
It is a scientific fact that the more you stare at something, the more your eyes will stop seeing it — language included. In “Metaphors We Live By,” philosophers George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that our everyday thoughts and actions are shaped by a metaphorical conceptual system that structures how we perceive and navigate the world. Put simply, metaphors are not just for poets — we all use them to understand ourselves and our world. The two deeply ingrained systems in contemporary English are ones of dominance (“master” a skill, “hit” a target) and of markets (“invest” time, “sell” yourself). Let me give you my “two cents” about it.
At Penn, time is money, a limited resource, and a commodity to use. We “invest” time in clubs, relationships, and applications, but we are “wasting” it if we are not productive. My senior friends would have me believe they are “running out” of time. What if their time just is, unencumbered and unregimented? I do not believe in “having” time; rather, time is something I “make” based on what matters to me.
Metaphors are also directional, since we arbitrarily decided that more is up and less is down (my article views just went “up” by one). For instance, our friendships are additive: We “add” each other on Instagram or Snapchat. Social media friendships are also “requested” or “sent” and certainly not given or built. In some sense, this unilateralism implies a concession, where a superior “up” grants friendship to an inferior “down.” What if we collectively thought of friendships as plants to cultivate, or even better, seeds to diligently plant and patiently nurture?
Another example I must annoy you with is treating the Penn experience, not to say life as a whole, as a container: We want to get the most “out of” it and we hope to live it “to the fullest.” Our own aspirations are also containers we desperately try to “get into” as if we were inferiorly “out.” We forget that only in a strict sense does one get into consulting, let us suppose, and that there is no such thing as getting into consulting; you just consult. It is not surprising, then, that we treat college in the same performative way that the market necessitates of us.
I hope that by now you are calling me pedantic, because perhaps I am. I do not fool myself. After all, what difference does a word make? Well, I cannot help but think that all this talk of winning, getting into clubs, investing time and effort, is at least in part contributing to making us feel irreparably inadequate. I suspect these metaphors are reductionist and mislead us to denote our experiences as mere successes or failures as opposed to what they are: just experiences. However, their ubiquity is good for productivity and they persist.
What we are forgetting is that a rose losing its petals does not regard itself as a negative failure just as much as a caterpillar becoming a butterfly does not enjoy a positive success. They both just are. I cannot fail just as much as I cannot succeed. But if we are not our “wins” and our “returns on investments,” then what are we? Who are we? Well, we are, and this is disappointedly it. We are us. Something mysterious, constantly evolving.
We tend to see ourselves in terms of our linear happenings, mistakenly assuming that this defines our existence. It was Spanish novelist Javier Marías who taught me that our lives are also made of our omissions, our unmet desires, and our ineffable voids. We believe we can tell our lives in a reasoned linear way, but as we start to do this, we realize they are crowded with gray areas, unexplained and inexplicable episodes, choices not made, and missed opportunities. We are not only merely what we choose, but also what we have not chosen in the process of choosing.
The truth is that life is, by definition, ineffable. We live in language, but our home is not in language. Language frustrates us. This means we have to be careful when we use language; we have to develop the emotional granularity to understand our experiences, and as I hope I briefly demonstrated to you, our current language sometimes fails us. Replacing deforming metaphors is not easy. We are habituated to the vision of ourselves and the world that it provides, yet no one said it needs to be this way.
How we define a problem is often part of the problem. I am part of the problem if I tell you that I am in the trenches for midterms or that my time on social media was wasted. We have to do the laborious but inevitable exercise of inventing alternative metaphors.
What is at stake when we ask what our language does to us is nothing less than our ability to remain fully human — not merely to communicate with one another, but to understand and live with one another. I am not asking you to be as pleonastic as me, but rather not to be oblivious to the metaphors you live by. I guess all I ask is that you pay attention, that you be mindful of how one small change in the way you talk could change you, us, all.
FRANCESCO SALAMONE is a Wharton junior from Palermo, Italy studying decision processes. His email address is frasala@wharton.upenn.edu.
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