George Lakoff and Mark Johnson open their landmark book Metaphors We Live By with an example of metaphor in everyday speech they label, in appropriately all-caps, “ARGUMENT IS WAR.” We are all familiar with this casual deployment of linguistic artillery—perhaps never more so than in our current political climate—in which we attack and defend, hit or miss targets, and see our strategic positions overrun and our arguments shot down. In this way, the authors observe, we don’t just talk about our debates in terms of combat, but we live them as battles…the metaphor not only describes but shapes our actions.
“Imagine a culture,” Lakoff and Johnson go on to urge readers, “where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aesthetically pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently, and talk about them differently.” I suspect that if we were to visit that world, we wouldn’t even recognize the activity of this alien dancing culture as argumentation at all and would probably find all kinds of objections if we were told otherwise, so deeply intertwined are our thought processes and those metaphors we live by.
One of the insights of this now 15-year-old classic book was that metaphor, which Lakoff and Johnson defined most elegantly as “understanding and experiencing one kind of thing in terms of another,” isn’t just a fanciful concern of poets and English teachers and the word-nerds who love them…but omnipresent, and usually unnoticed, in most human discussions.
And in many cases, these discussions are, or are proxies for, matters of life and death. Just consider the polarized political “debates” (to put it politely) whose results dictate the dynamics of life and death, from literal combat and policing to public policy and the social safety net. Perhaps it would be even more accurate to call Lakoff and Johnson’s contention “Metaphors We Live and Die By,” and consider the corollary that our dialogue would be more productive, and our humanity richer, if we explicitly considered those subtly pervasive metaphors.
The language of illness, particularly cancer, is likewise rife with militant metaphors, in part thanks to Nixon declaring “war on cancer” in 1971—a laudable initiative, of course, but also a convenient distraction from a very literal war—but also because it feels good to be part of a collective so emphatically in opposition to something we can all agree is evil. But there’s a potential cost to this kind of language and when the toll comes due it is exacted inordinately from those living with cancer, and their loved ones. Because the metaphor of fighting cancer as a battle can be seen as simultaneously personifying mutinous individual cells and de-humanizing the actual living, breathing person affected by them…a true double-whammy, creating 2-D “losers” and “victims” and, if the person dies, implying “weakness” when it’s no such thing. A minimal bit of searching will lead you to a multitude of stories by people who have lived with—and after—cancer describing how our careless deployment of conflict metaphor has burdened them and how being described as “courageous” or “heroic” was an added weight at a time they could least afford to carry more.
I’m not trying to don the uniform of the language police (another troubling metaphor!), nor am I maintaining that everyone living with cancer, or any other illness, feels the same way. But as I’ve gotten older and cancer has crept closer to me through the experience of family and close friends, I’ve become much more aware of my choice of words and how my assumptions, and even my carelessness, could be undermining my attempts at love and support. At the very least, as I do with opting for saying “died by” suicide rather than “committed” suicide and allowing space for those I am speaking with to choose their pronouns, it seems the least I can do to affirm what kinship I can in conversation and let those who are closest to the light and fire lead the way.
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