Metaphor

Linux Journal's least technical editor reports on the road to Laptopia with his new ThinkPad T-40.

Here's a fest of George Lakoff links

• Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf, Part 1. by George Lakoff (1991)
• Metaphor and War: The Metaphor System Used to Justify War in the Gulf, Part 2. by George Lakoff (1991)
• Metaphor, Morality, and Politics, Or, Why Conservatives Have Left Liberals In the Dust, by George Lakoff (1995)
• Conceptual Blending on the Information Highway: How Metaphorical Inferences Work, by Tom Rohrer
• Hedge Moulding's Notebook: You Know He's Right (1997)
• Philosophy in the Flesh — A Talk With George Lakoff (1999?)
• Metaphors of Terror (September 16, 2001)
• Christopher Lydon Interviews: Naming & Framing — George Lakoff's Moral Politics (two recorded sessions, October 2003)
• The Frame Around Arnold (October 2003)
• Metaphor and War, Again (March, 2003)
• UC Berkeley News interviews
  • Framing the issues: UC Berkeley professor George Lakoff tells how conservatives use language to dominate politics (October 2003)
  • The "free market" doesn't exist (October 2003)
  • Linguistics professor George Lakoff dissects the "war on terror" and other conservative catchphrases (August 2004)
• Meet George Lakoff (CBSNews, January 2004)
• How to talk like a Conservative (if you must) — The left's linguistics guru says liberals have to watch their language. (October 2004)
• Frame Wars (November 2004)
• Stories by George Lakoff on Alternet
• Rockridge Institute (current). Many links here.

Here's

• Listen Up: Why the Real Battle is between Humanity and the Wrong Business Metaphor (1999)
• Cluetrain, Chapter Four: Markets are Conversations (1999)
• Make Money, Not War: Time to move past the war metaphors of the Industrial Age
• Kill Fair (2000)
• Time for representation (June 2002)
• Losing the DRM story (August 2002)
• Illustrations of metaphor

Kill Fair highlights the difference between competitive and combative companies, and between the similar-sounding yet conceptually very different sports and war metaphors those different kinds of companies employ. (And can you guess which one Microsoft is?)

Frames are "building blocks of political communication" (From Frame Wars, by Michael Erard, Texas observer)