Meta-Meta-Metaphor

Our faculty posted this article today: http://www.chron.com/disp/story.mpl/editorial/outlook/7518944.html and asked us to briefly comment on one of the metaphors Brooks discusses.  But I got a little entertainingly distracted by Brooks' own use of metaphor in his article about metaphors, so I delved into one of his sentences - by this point, my prof likes me and knows that I understand these concepts, so hopefully she'll let me get away with the slight deviation from the assignment.  And I also tried to use as many metaphors as I could in my little commentary.  NERDY FUN!

There were so many great metaphors in this article about metaphors that it was hard to buckle down and pick just one. This sentence, though, contains three: “But in the normal rush of events, we often see straight through metaphors, unaware of how they refract perceptions.” Here, events are moments in time that are ambulatory – TIME IS A PHYSICALLY MOVING OBJECT; this metaphor obviously hides the idea that time is an abstract concept, but it also hides time actually does not have any agency of its own. Next up, METAPHORS ARE INVISIBLE OR TRANSPARENT OBJECTS that can be seen through – thus hiding the idea that metaphors are actually abstract conceptions. Building upon the idea of metaphor as object, lastly, metaphors are specifically refractive objects, perhaps METAPHORS ARE PRISMS.

There are a gajillion more metaphors in that article to think about, both the ones he discusses and the ones he uses.