Metaphors of desire - BA essay

METAPHORS OF DESIRE IN CONTEMPORARY ENGLISH


The word ‘metaphor’ was originally Greek and meant ‘a transfer’. According to Lakoff a metaphor is a figure of speech in which an expression is used to refer to something that it does not literally denote in order to suggest a similarity (1980: 2). The first writers to discuss metaphor were Greek philosophers. Aristotle says:
“Metaphor is the application of the name of a thing
to something else working either from genus to species,
or from species to genus, or from species to species or by proportion.”
(University of Michigan Press,“Aristotle Poetics”, 1967).
We use many language metaphors for love, desire, sadness, happiness and all of the emotions we know. Language metaphors help us to say something more gently, sometimes more clearly or wisely as well. We also have conceptual metaphors which are ideas in our minds when we compare one thing with others. For instance, we compare life with a journey, or a fight. There are a few metaphors of desire which exist in our language as “language metaphors” and in our minds as “conceptual metaphors”.
According to George Lakoff and Mark Johnson (1980) when talking about metaphors we need to know what a target domain and a source domain are. The authors maintain that source domain is the idea from which we draw metaphorical expressions to understand another (3-13). That is why we say “The crime rate keeps rising”. We treat the rate as something which rises. Target domain is the idea that is understood in the way of source domain so in our sentence marked before “The crime rate keeps rising” in which the crime is a target domain. Target domain and source domain create a conceptual metaphor which is coherent organization of human experience (Lakoff and Johnson, 1980: 56). Then, there are mappings between source domain and target domain. More precisely, according to Lakoff (1989: 63-64) mappings are systematic sets of correspondences that exist between constituent elements of the source and the target domain. Moreover, Gilles Fauconnier defines mapping in his “Mappings in thought and language” (1997: 2-3): “A mapping, in the most general sense, is a correspondence between two sets that assign to each element in the first counterpart in the second”.
As I have provided above metaphors are used in everyday language to describe a lot of feelings, emotions and phenomena. As we can read in Oxford Dictionary of the English Language desire a strong feeling of wanting to have something or wishing for something to happen (Oxford English Dictionary). The word “desire” has usually sexual meaning (British National Corpus).
First and probably the most common metaphor is “Desire is a hunger” in which sexual desire is represented as hunger for food, and correspondingly, the object of desire is represented as food. Therefore, we have such conceptual metaphor as “She's quite a dish” or “Hi, sugar”. Desire is shown as hunger, people are toothsome dish or sweets which are associated with something pleasurable.
Another example of conceptual metaphor of desire is “Desire is mental illness”. Then we have language metaphor “I'm crazy about her” in which expression ‘desire’ is some illness caused by someone we have crush on. The same example of language metaphor is “I am madly in love with him” or “She has got me delirious”.
Desire can also be presented as war metaphor. There are few common language metaphors used in everyday language like “He's known for his conquests” in which the man is presented as raider or “He has to fend off all the women who want him” when the man is again said to be attacking women. In this case there is conceptual metaphor “Desire is war”.
The next conceptual metaphor is “Desire is heat” . We can say “Don't be cold to me” when the coolness represents lack of desire or metaphor “She's an old flame”. These are two commonly used language metaphors. In the last metaphor the woman is very attractive and in contemporary spoken English she can be called “hot stuff”. This is the conceptual metaphor when sexual desire is heat, such that the level of heat represents the level of desire.
Another conceptual metaphor for desire is “Desire is natural force”. We sometimes use language metaphor: “We could feel electricity between us” so desire is an electricity or metaphor “She is devastating” when the woman is like a wind which devastates us. This is the case of metaphor when sexual attraction is represented as an explosive, electrical, or magnetic force.
Many language metaphors do exist in contemporary English in order to make our language easier and to make us well-understood. We usually use metaphors for expressing the most common emotions and feelings like love, happiness, desire and others because we do not want to speak about these literally. There are a few metaphors of desire that we use almost every day. The most popular conceptual metaphors are “Desire is natural force”, “Desire is hunger”, or “Desire is heat”. The examples of conceptual metaphors presented above illustrate sexual desire and show how people influence language to make their speaking easier and clearer. Metaphors are some things which originate in speaker’s mind and come to listener’s mind. In order to understand these metaphors we must think logically and notice the most popular similes between emotions and things around us.

REFERENCES

Lakoff, George and Johnson, Mark. [1980] 2003. “Metaphors We Live By”. University of Chicago Press: 2-13, 56.

Lakoff, George and Turner, Mark. 1989. “More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor”. University of Chicago Press: 63-64.

Arbor, Ann. 1970. “Aristotle Poetics”. University of Michigan Press: 57.

Fauconnier, Gilles. 1997. “Mappings in Thought and Language”. Cambridge University Press: 2-3.

“Oxford English Dictionary”. 2010. Oxford University Press: ‘desire’. Retrieved: 2009-10-16

British National Corpus. (from http://www.natcorp.ox.ac.uk/).
Date of access: 2011-01-01