Introduction: Metaphors We Die For
For those hoping to understand society from a soicolinguistic or intellectual-historical standpoint, the title of Lakoff and Johnson's 1980 Metaphors We Live By make it seem as if it should be shelved alongside Newton's Principia Mathematica, Darwin's Origin of Species, or Marx's Capital in a "Widely Cited, Rarely Read" section. However, unlike the religious-secular and political-revolutionary rifts engendered by these works (whether intended/desired by the author, as in Marx's case, or not, as in Newton's), the most striking fact about the content of Lakoff and Johnson's work is its blandness, its failure to connect the dots between the metaphors discussed and the exciting political or social contexts out of which they emerged.
In this sense, the blandness of the work contrasts sharply with Raymond Williams' Keywords, a work in more or less the same genre, published only four years earlier. Williams' short, etymological explorations of politically-charged terms immediately catalyzed further waves of linguistic-historical studies within the broader program of the Birmingham School of Cultural Studies. From its publication to the present, socially- and politically-minded authors and publishing houses have explicitly drawn on the tradition of Williams' book as a framework for understanding political-rhetorical concepts: Martin Jay's Cultural Semantics: Keywords of Our Time (1998), Bennett et al.'s New Keywords (2005), Andrew Levine's Political Keywords (2009), John Patrick Leary's Keywords: The New Language of Capitalism (2019), Keywords in Policing, Keywrods in Australian Politics, and so on, not to mention an entire book series, Keywords in Literature and Culture, published by Wiley-Blackwell with the following editorial summary:
Indebted to the work of Raymond Williams, the series identifies and documents keywords as cultural analysis, taking the reader beyond semantic definition to uncover the uncertainties, disagreements, and confrontations evident in differing usages and conflicting connotations.
Metaphors We Live By meanwhile, despite its comparable subject matter (a subject matter that, we argue, is in fact even more fertile for this kind of socio-political analysis) and sociolinguistic approach, did not give rise to a similar wave of context-aware cultural studies of metaphorical-linguistic meaning.
In this work, therefore, we aim to combine the political and cultural awareness of Williams' approach with the linguistic-analytic rigor of Lakoff and Johnson's, to shed light on how metaphor can be used to clarify but also to obfuscate meaning within political rhetoric.