Wind and Sand

I grew up near the Indiana Dunes. I spent many wonderful hours and days in the park--climbing dunes and running down at breakneck speed, playing on the beach, tobogganing down the hills in winter, making out with my high school boyfriend. Something about the sand, the wind, and the water made them a special place. I spent the last few days on Cape Cod. Not quite the dunes, but sand and wind for sure. The hills are smaller, the water bigger, but the feel is very similar. Walking along the beach looking for shells and stones, walking through dune grasses, sand in your shoes, wind in your face--LOTS of wind in your face! It has been a nice refreshing break from work, especially after the last few weeks.

Metaphors, Part II

So, it turns out that today my lecture in Population Issues was about world population growth and some of the concerns about overpopulation. Over the years I've collected quotes about population and shared a few with my class. I asked them to think about what kind of metaphors we use to talk about population. Most are "animal based." We talk about breeding like rabbits, for instance. One quote talks about the population resembling a writhing mass of maggots...very colorful.

But, if we use that language to talk about population growth, what are we saying. By comparing overpopulation (really, unchecked fertility) to animals we are comparing the people who have "too many" kids to animals. They can't control their animal instincts; they breed or mate, rather than bear children; sex is not a romantic encounter, but an uncontrolled mating act. Of course, if we take away the human dimension, it makes it easier to see the problem as an animal control problem--sterilization, planned culls of the herd, etc.

How does the language we use change the way we view the problem and the solution?

Metaphors

I've always been a big fan of metaphors, although I never paid much attention to them. I have to admit that it wasn't until a graduate course in the sociology of medicine that I really understood how the language we use to discuss an issue conveys multiple meanings. I was a late bloomer....We were reading Susan Sontag's "Illness as Metaphor." Obviously, it was about metaphors. It was the first time I had thought about terms like "war against cancer" "magic bullets" "battling disease"...like I said, a late bloomer in the language department. But, since then, I've been fascinated with the way we talk about life. In todays NYTimes, David Brooks wrote about just this topic in a column "Poetry for Everyday Life." Research shows that we use a metaphor every 10 to 25 words...Wow, that is a lot of metaphorical speaking.

These are some of his examples...

"George Lakoff and Mark Johnson, two of the leading researchers in this field, have pointed out that we often use food metaphors to describe the world of ideas. We devour a book, try to digest raw facts and attempt to regurgitate other people’s ideas, even though they might be half-baked."

"But when talking about money, we rely on liquid metaphors. We dip into savings, sponge off friends or skim funds off the top."

I know I've talked about my life as a walk in the woods, with sunny clearings and steep hills. I've also tried to out the sand dune metaphor, with shifting landscapes and changing shorelines. Brooks points out that we are not very good at spiritual or abstract thinking, so we need metaphors to provide concrete anchors for our thoughts. We need to compare new things to things we already know, we need to create those connections to make sense in our world. Metaphors are a way of doing that, a way of creating sense. What I really like about this though, is that metaphors are the cornerstone of poetry. It makes us all poets.