Squibs: Non-Industrial Metaphors for Anger
Feb. 3rd, 2016 07:37 am![[personal profile]](https://www.dreamwidth.org/img/silk/identity/user.png){kind=small}
hrjIn response to last week’s squib about metaphoric thinking that mentioned the “exploding steam boiler” metaphor for anger that’s prevalent in English, several people were interested in hearing about what metaphors for anger were used in English before the development of steam power. To answer that question more accurately, I’d have to cross-check examples against historic language usage, but I can certainly give some examples that don’t rely on modern technology for their source domain. (As a brief terminology guide: “source domain” is the field of experience from which the language is taken, while “target domain” is the field of experience the metaphor is talking about. So the steam boiler is the source domain and anger is the target domain. It is a convention in the field of cognitive linguistics to express a metaphor in the format "[target domain] is [source domain]".)
A good round-up of anger metaphors can be found in George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things in a chapter specifically talking about anger. I’m going to focus on a narrow set of examples here to keep things short.
It’s not uncommon for a rather specific metaphor like the “exploding boiler” to be motivated by other metaphors that contribute to the scenario. In this case, it also shows how metaphoric source domains can be motivated by correlations with the physical world.
Anger is (Body) Heat - This is motivated by a correlation with certain physical experiences that often accompany extreme anger, such as flushing and increased circulation. This can give the impression that the metaphoric language is simply describing a part of reality: “He’s such a hot-head.” But the metaphoric nature is clearer when the description of heat is applied to things other than the experiencer: “The argument heated up quickly.” And this basic concept of heat can generate more specific metaphors using specific manifestations of heat.
Anger is Boiling Liquid - “Simmer down, you’re getting too worked up about this.” “He makes my blood boil.” “She was seething with rage.” The last example shows its age, because we don’t normally use the word “seethe” to talk about the properties of liquids any more (although you find it all throughout medieval cookbooks). In fact, “seethe” has pretty much lingered in the language only to talk about anger. This is a great example of how metaphoric usage can result in a complete change in the meaning of a word over time, as it extends into new senses and loses old ones.
Anger is Fire - “Those comments were somewhat inflammatory.” “He’d been doing a slow burn for days.” “The comments on his blog just added fuel to the fire.” “He really got flamed after posting that.” Here we see fire representing not only the internal experience of anger, but as an anger-created tool that may be used for destructive purposes.
But getting back to the motivations for the exploding boiler scenario, there’s also a general metaphor that the body is a container for emotions: “She’s full of love”, “There was no room in her for pity”, “She was drained of all enthusiasm.” Anger, of course, can be one of the things that fills the body.
There are separate expressions for anger that represent it as pressure within the container of the body that don’t rely specifically on a “steam boiler” scenario. These are motivated by several accompanying physical experiences such as muscular tension, especially in the abdomen, or increased blood pressure. These three separate metaphors--Anger is Boiling Liquid, Anger is Contents of the Body, and Anger is Pressure--were almost certainly all in currency at the time steam technology became common. And because that technology combined the motifs of boiling liquid contents under pressure, it was a very natural “special case” of each of those pre-existing metaphors that became available for conventional expressions about anger.
Next week, maybe I’ll talk about “failure modes of metaphoric thinking” and how the choice of a source domain can lead us to expect specific outcomes that are, in fact, completely unrelated to the dynamics of the target domain.
A good round-up of anger metaphors can be found in George Lakoff’s Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things in a chapter specifically talking about anger. I’m going to focus on a narrow set of examples here to keep things short.
It’s not uncommon for a rather specific metaphor like the “exploding boiler” to be motivated by other metaphors that contribute to the scenario. In this case, it also shows how metaphoric source domains can be motivated by correlations with the physical world.
Anger is (Body) Heat - This is motivated by a correlation with certain physical experiences that often accompany extreme anger, such as flushing and increased circulation. This can give the impression that the metaphoric language is simply describing a part of reality: “He’s such a hot-head.” But the metaphoric nature is clearer when the description of heat is applied to things other than the experiencer: “The argument heated up quickly.” And this basic concept of heat can generate more specific metaphors using specific manifestations of heat.
Anger is Boiling Liquid - “Simmer down, you’re getting too worked up about this.” “He makes my blood boil.” “She was seething with rage.” The last example shows its age, because we don’t normally use the word “seethe” to talk about the properties of liquids any more (although you find it all throughout medieval cookbooks). In fact, “seethe” has pretty much lingered in the language only to talk about anger. This is a great example of how metaphoric usage can result in a complete change in the meaning of a word over time, as it extends into new senses and loses old ones.
Anger is Fire - “Those comments were somewhat inflammatory.” “He’d been doing a slow burn for days.” “The comments on his blog just added fuel to the fire.” “He really got flamed after posting that.” Here we see fire representing not only the internal experience of anger, but as an anger-created tool that may be used for destructive purposes.
But getting back to the motivations for the exploding boiler scenario, there’s also a general metaphor that the body is a container for emotions: “She’s full of love”, “There was no room in her for pity”, “She was drained of all enthusiasm.” Anger, of course, can be one of the things that fills the body.
There are separate expressions for anger that represent it as pressure within the container of the body that don’t rely specifically on a “steam boiler” scenario. These are motivated by several accompanying physical experiences such as muscular tension, especially in the abdomen, or increased blood pressure. These three separate metaphors--Anger is Boiling Liquid, Anger is Contents of the Body, and Anger is Pressure--were almost certainly all in currency at the time steam technology became common. And because that technology combined the motifs of boiling liquid contents under pressure, it was a very natural “special case” of each of those pre-existing metaphors that became available for conventional expressions about anger.
Next week, maybe I’ll talk about “failure modes of metaphoric thinking” and how the choice of a source domain can lead us to expect specific outcomes that are, in fact, completely unrelated to the dynamics of the target domain.
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