US Intelligence Agency to Compile Mountain of Metaphors 151
coondoggie writes "Researchers with the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity want to build a repository of metaphors. You read that right. Not just American/English metaphors mind you but those of Iranian Farsi, Mexican Spanish and Russian speakers. Why metaphors? 'Metaphors have been known since Aristotle as poetic or rhetorical devices that are unique, creative instances of language artistry (for example: The world is a stage; Time is money). Over the last 30 years, metaphors have been shown to be pervasive in everyday language and to reveal how people in a culture define and understand the world around them,' IARPA says."
i guess their computers (Score:2, Insightful)
can't differentiate "that shit is the bomb!" from "let's bomb that shit!".
Guess those researchers have been watching Trek... (Score:5, Insightful)
See, this is why we can't have nice things... (Score:4, Insightful)
Time is money
Except that it's not. Money is a renewable resource: time isn't.
People taking metaphors and treating them like synonyms or taking the metaphorical figure of speech as literal meaning.
And next thing you know, we're having holy wars, inquisition, genocide...
Also helpful in weeding out what's important (Score:4, Insightful)
I can't imagine the volume of data that the intelligence agencies must weed through, especially if they're monitoring text or voice-to-text.
Skipping over things like "beat some sense into him," or "bringing a knife to a gun fight," or the somewhat infamous "O'Keeffe & Company delivers a rifle shot at critical business, technology, and investment audiences," or even just flagging them as possible metaphors, would be incredibly helpful.
I can only imagine how difficult this would be when monitoring other cultures, languages, idioms, etc. I hope they make this database public, although it's a dim hope. It'd be a great trove of cultural information for the entire planet, not just intelligence agencies.
You might be misunderstanding the project (Score:3, Insightful)
Metaphors aren't just linguistic expressions or indicators of writing styles. Very often, linguistic metaphors are indicators of how people conceptualize the world. For example, people have spacial metaphors in their brains for concepts like "time" that are indicated by expressions like "going forward".
One interesting example of how cognitive metaphors shape or reflect worldviews is the current budget debate in the United States. Very often, proponents of austerity will use "family" metaphors to make their point. If the government is *not* like a family (for example, because a family doesn't have the same amount of control over its "means" as a government, or because parents don't typically fund themselves by taxing their children), then the points being made are quite possibly flawed.
Cognitive metaphors are so prevalent in the human brain that I don't think it's a huge overstatement to say that you can understand people by understanding their metaphors.