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!".
Re:i guess their computers (Score:4, Interesting)
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those combinations of metaphors make it difficult for me to analyze the conversation effectively.
Guess those researchers have been watching Trek... (Score:5, Insightful)
Star Tropes (Score:2)
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Now who's watching who? Did Mr. Munroe know about this first, or did the IARPA get the idea from him?
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Sukat, his eyes uncovered !
Not as if English is any different (Score:2)
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OU! OU! First xkcd [xkcd.com] reference for the thread!
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Darmok and Jilad at Kalenda's.
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/me dances to the Picard Song [youtube.com]
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Kirk! punching... a! Lizard-guy!
Spock, fascinated.
Janeway, fine temporal mess in another.
Re:Guess those researchers have been watching Trek (Score:4, Funny)
Don't you mean.. cunning linguists? I'd lick to see them try.
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I bet you have a lot of experience on foreign tongues.
Not enough really. (Score:4, Funny)
What we need here is a database of really bad analogies. Keep it somewhere safe.
Imagine putting it in the locked glove compartment in a car.
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Now they need only databases of bad analogies, metonymies, parables, similes, synecdoches and catachresis to understand the world.
Re:Not enough really. (Score:5, Funny)
> What we need here is a database of really bad analogies.
Dude, what do you think slashdot is?
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They should also include puns in their database if their intention is to create an archive of language in order to study how people understand the world around them.
Remember, dead languages need to be encrypted.
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You can take my analogies away, but you'll have to pry hyperbole from my cold, dead hands.
Time is money (Score:3)
Time is money
Except that it's not. Money is a renewable resource: time isn't.
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The fact that it is not literally true is what makes it a metaphor. The world is, in fact, not a stage.
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...
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1- when you no longer have any money, what do you need to make more ? some time ...
2- money is time: taking the plane to somewhere is a lot faster (and more expensive) than hitch-hiking.
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"When the money stops flowing down to the man in the street
before smart people with no money and lots of free time
This can save US taxpayers from putting "particular groups" in the wrong security context or seeing a real color revolution form without embassy minders.
Say from keeping tabs on your blog via a gateway at a boring network operations centre to sneak and peek to
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If you were comparing the values to see if they are identical, you use the word "isis".
Osiris cries!
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Not renewable?!? Then how come my clock keeps rolling back to 00:00:00 every night?
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When you've got all the time in the world why would it matter that it's not renewable?
Or are we going to need to start buying chronoton offsets?
Time is renewable (Score:2)
Depends on what theory of the universe you believe in.
Why Spanish? (Score:2)
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You don't think that an intelligence agency would be interested in "how people in a culture define and understand the world around them" for pretty much every country in the world?
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It seems like Chinese would be a better language to focus on, given the worries that many people have about that country.
I'm afraid that Chinese is so foreign as to break the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects model.
I think Mexican Spanish is in focus because of physical proximity and the English-Spanish language barrier. The Canadian lingusitic border is a little more porous (until you reach Quebec...)
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Work harder on smearing the far left or right option as the blogs and web 2.0 fill with real local news.
Links with Communists, some dark military operation that was exposed years ago, a foreign cult giving out big cash gifts, extra homes and no taxes, strange bank accounts, extramarital issues ect. that would fit the "left" or "right".
Mix as needed to ensure nothing changes.
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I can understand the desire to have metaphors for Iranian Farsi and Russian, to help keep a better watch on the governments in those two countries, but why Mexican Spanish? The only thing that comes to mind is the massive amount of drug trafficking in that country. It seems like Chinese would be a better language to focus on, given the worries that many people have about that country.
You are looking at this as if the only and only focus of this is on risk mitigation. It isn't (not to say that it is not *one* of the primary motives behind the study.)
Metaphors are not just a function of language, but also culture and regional proximity. My take on this (and I could be wrong for all I know) is that these language variations (with the exception of Russian, all other three are variations), is that they are all Indo-European languages. They have shared structures, syntax and root words. All
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My take on this (and I could be wrong for all I know) is that these language variations (with the exception of Russian, all other three are variations), is that they are all Indo-European languages.
To quote myself and to clarify/correct a posting snafu - by "my take on this" I mean that these languages were chosen (out of a range of possible selections) because they are Indo-European languages that are not in extreme close proximity historically and culturally (among other factors.)
My grandfather (Score:1)
They should contact my grandfather, for he is himself the repository.
If the mountain ... (Score:2)
Muhammad must go to the mountain.
How Orwellian (Score:1)
http://wikilivres.info/wiki/Politics_and_the_English_Language
What they really mean is (Score:1)
'Metaphors have been known since Aristotle as poetic or rhetorical devices that are unique, creative instances of language artistry. Since they're unique, we can use them to fingerprint people using only text samples.'
simile, metaphor, analogy (Score:2)
Just in case i wasn't the only one in need of a basic grammar refresher [yahoo.com].
While these three terms are related, their meanings are subtly different. To help understand the distinction, we consulted a number of sources -- American Heritage Dictionary, the Yahoo! Grammar, Usage, and Style category, and web search results for the three terms.
The dictionary defines a "metaphor" as a figure of speech that uses one thing to mean another and makes a comparison between the two. For example, Shakespeare's line, "All th
You're looking in the wrong place (Score:1)
If you want to understand what the project in TFA is about, you're going about it the wrong way by just looking up words in the dictionary. (And as an aside, why do people think that dictionaries are somehow sophisticated tools that will tell you the true answer to any question? They're just vague rough references about what somebody might mean by using a given word.)
The right thing to look at here is Lakoff and Johnson's Conceptual Metaphor Theory [wikipedia.org], which (a) your dictionary doesn't cover, (b) is much m
Don't forget to include (Score:2)
16th century French metaphors so you can decode the prophecies of Nostradamus
Ridiculous! (Score:1)
Not really metaphors (Score:2)
Hm, the two examples are not really metaphors, except the word is used differnt in english than e.g. in german.
(for example: The world is a stage; Time is money) This are only "dictums". A metapher e.g. is: "fiery snakes are crawling down the sky".
As metaphores are invented on the fly it is pretty hard to make a meaningfull database of them.
angel'o'sphere
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As metaphores are invented on the fly it is pretty hard to make a meaningfull database of them.
Most speakers don't invent on the fly, most speakers parrot things they have heard before.
Metaphors. You mean like....? (Score:3)
Fiddling while Rome burns?
Rearranging the deckchairs on the boat-deck of the Titanic?
Alphabetizing your record collection?
The Devil making work for Idle hands?
Living in ivory towers?
The mice playing while the cat is away?
Counting the number of angels that can dance on a pinhead?
Context fail (Score:2)
Where is the comparison? What I was told in school is it is a comparison, similar to a similie that does not use "like" or "as"
All of those statements are intended to be used as part of a comparison along the lines of:
The US Intelligence Agency compiling a list of metaphors is like X
...thus representing an ironic conflation of concepts or "joke".
OB XKCD (Score:1)
I'm bit disappointed, it's the current one even ..
XKCD [xkcd.com]
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I meant "I'm [a] bit disappointed [nobody on slashdot posted it yet]". I'll just shutup now.
What is the greek word for Metaphor? (Score:2)
Seems nice. A very geeky interest in something ... humm... I am going to say interesting, but probably I am a nerd, and I like these things for different reasons. :D
I would love to have access to this data, once is collected
IARPA speaks with forked tongue (Score:4, Interesting)
The OA quotes IARPA (DARPA for intelligence gathering):
"For decision makers to be effective in a world of mass communication and global interaction, they must understand the shared concepts and worldviews of members of other cultures of interest."
Horse hockey.
No computer can help a human understand a simile, much less an abstraction that's often in the guise of a complex historical or literary reference (i.e. metaphor). So what is the *real* purpose for this 5 year spy program?
First, metaphors are a great identifier of individual writing styles. The trick though is to recognize *when* a word is being used as a metaphor. Tagging a word like 'lion' as trackworthy works only when you know when the word was not meant literally.
Second, and more likely, from snippets of some of Bin Laden's recently unearthed messages, it's clear that Al-Qaeda is using metaphorical code phrases to refer to plans and goals rather than explicit sentences. Part of this program is probably intended to recognize syntactic (and maybe semantic) variations on a given metaphor so it can be recognized and tracked across multiple messages from different people.
So despite IARPA's dumbass lie about 'encouraging greater cultural understanding', this is yet another signals intelligence target tracking program.
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IBM might dispute that, now that Watson's won at Jeopardy.
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
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Might not a better understanding of how a culture uses metaphors make it easier to create NEW metaphors to push a particular idea?
Absolutely. The term "framing" that is now so often used in discussions about political messaging actually comes from cognitive science.
SIGINT (Score:2)
This is most likelly meant to improve automated processing of intercepted messages.
People trying to communicate over a non-encrypted channel which have secrets they want to keep from well funded state agents KNOW that pretty much any and all conversations on an insecure channel are monitored and automatically processed (in fact, thanks to government mandated secret backdoors and weaknesses in cryptographic implementations, probably many "secure" channels are monitored).
I suspect that, outside the cases were
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I love the title (Score:2)
Leave it to the government . . . (Score:2)
30 years? (Score:1)
"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"
Shouldn't that read "Over the last 30,000 years"?
I guess then... (Score:1)
What ? (Score:2)
I'm dubious. (Score:2)
I think they've bitten off more than they can chew. Practically anything can be a metaphor for something, and language is not static, so that these things ebb and flow like the tide. I do not think this project will be successful.
But, assuming it is successful (or at least those with the technology believe it is successful), what purpose does this really serve? My gut tells me that it will be used to sway public opinion on issues.
Perhaps I'm just paranoid.
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I have a US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity in my pants, if you know what I mean.
And I think you (and the US Intelligence Advanced Research Projects Activity) know what I mean.
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.
Automated weeding out of subversion (Score:2)
No human could make sense of so much chatter, but an AI that understood everything about slang could. ... artistry.
Because when I think of armies, I think of
Already exists... (Score:2)
They need to go look at their own existing DBs--most cover of them are organized by dialects, which typically include metaphors since it maybe a way to classify the language(s) for intel reasons.
*Ahem* I'm just going to leave this right here... (Score:1)
Easy to trick (Score:2)
Using the same formatting a human can get his message across anyways. To try to fix this would be like "trying to close the stable door after the critters have vamoosed". or "tossing the kid out with the tubwater". now those examples probably won't trigger the keyword search form barn door and horses. or baby and bathwater. Now apply that to something more nasty, like "that fella needs a be introduced to a bucket of hot road tar and what you pluck from a chicken"
Database of Cliches (Score:1)
Almost twenty years ago I published a large compilation of cliches.
I thought people would use this database to help quat their cliched writing.
It turned out that its principal use was to search for and to verify the spelling of cliches that writers wanted to add to their writing.
*face palm*
Obvious (Score:1)
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Better check the handbook again, genius.
Re:not metaphor examples (Score:5, Informative)
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Damn, a post that is Informative, Insightful and Funny all at once, with a dash of Flamebait and most definitely Underrated (and I am saying this while it is scored +5 Informative). Well done, sir!
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A horse's ass? An ass's horse?
No. That's commutativity, you ass.
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Error code IRONY101 - Comment does not compute.
"-1, Dumbass" moderation, not found.
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that is a load of bull SH*T
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Both simalies, genius.
That would be "simile" not "simalie", genius.
Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Score:1)
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Is this the same as what Stephen Pinker is talking about in The Stuff of Thought?
Link with examples of Conceptual Metaphor Theory (Score:1)
I haven't read Pinker. As an aside, I advice you to be extremely careful to believe anything he says. (And for the record, I have a similar opinion of Lakoff, one of the inventors of Conceptual Methaphor Theory...)
I just found this link which gives some brief, fundamental examples of Conceptual Metaphor Theory [bluejoh.com]. Excellent brief discussion.
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From your link it does seem like that's where he's starting from, especially with the whole "life is a journey" and other metaphors linking concepts to space; he then shows how this gives rise to various linguistic concepts that seem to be illogical or different across various languages, but when viewed in terms of the underlying metaphor can be linked. Or at least, that's my recall of it, it's been a while since I read it. Ta for the link :)
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That comment is like a dead horse, it wouldn't giddi-yup and go.
^^^THAT^^^ is a simile. THIS is a smile. :) NOTHING is a "simalies".
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Correct. But although 'time is money' isn't a metaphor, it's neither a simile, as it doesn't ascribe any likeness to the concepts. Time 'is' money because time should be spent making money. It's related by closeness, i.e. a metonymy.
They will spend a LIFETIME on Persian (Score:2)
and never scratch the surface. The entire language and culture are suffused with a multi-dimensional, poetic tradition. Metaphor, contextual reference and connotation are in everything.
And that's just what is implicit in the use of the language.
I doubt an outsider can really isolate individual rhetorical elements of the Persian idiom and understand them atomically. This also requires having a broad familiarity of the literary tradition: Mathnawi of Maulana (Rumi), Diwan-e Hafez, Shahnameh of Ferdowsi and
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That's not a metaphor.
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= the act of U.S. agencies using a one-sided extradition agreement to take British citizens without due process or proof
Sorry; we're just getting you back for impounding our citizens into your navy prior to 1812.
A little late, but we slipped in under the 200 year deadline.
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That is a proverb, not a metaphor.
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Simple dictionary options worked well when a city/country had a few newspapers, a few tv/radio stations and a sub set of phone numbers to always listen in on.
Web 2.0, massive advances in cheap cpu/storage and extra funding allows for more creativity to stop the locals from getting uppity.
Why let some web "person" build to updating 10,000 unique ip contacts everyday? They can be detected at 10,
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