Metaphor

Book review: When language grows larger than reality

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Lingoblog forsider 1

Review of Mikkel Toxvig. 2025. Magt og overmod – Om sprogets storhedsvanvid i ledelse og arbejdsliv [Power and Hubris – On the Megalomania of Language in Leadership and Working Life.] Copenhagen: Samfundslitteratur.

The inflation in grocery prices in 2025 has probably caused more than a few of us to place the minced beef back in the freezer section. Perhaps sometimes with the thought lingering in the back of our minds: whether the growing gap between those who have more than enough and those who don’t have much at all might sow the seeds of aggression; whether we are growing too far apart. Inflation – and the consequences of inflation – is also the subject of Mikkel Toxvig’s book Magt og … ↪

The eagle: a metaphor for power – or rather a symbol?

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gary

In modern, mainstream linguistics, metaphors and symbols do not have anything to do with each other. Metaphors are by definition motivated, no matter which theoretical approach to them one might have. One can, as Aristoteles did, treat a metaphor as the rhetoric trope comparatio in absentia (an “absent” or implicit comparison), allowing to refer to for example ‘government’ by ‘yoke’, based on a common quality (the tertium comparationis, third element of the comparison, e.g. ‘suppression/power over’). One can follow Black and lay emphasis on the interplay between focus and frame. Or one can be interested, as Lakoff and Johnson, in the so-called  conceptual metaphor as a cognitive tool helping to understand one conceptual domain in terms of … ↪