"Cycling is a metaphor for life: performing under demanding conditions,
acquiring skills for managing specific situations, and enduring through the
rough spots" (from the introduction).
Be sure to click on the link to see the specific metaphors that fall
into each category. You would not report on "Anger is Heat," for instance.
You would discuss common metaphors like "He erupted"; "she felt her gorge
rising."
This site defines both metaphor and mixed
metaphor and provides links to sites that further discuss metaphor, including
a link to a list of political metaphors.
This is "an article by Rick Brenner about metaphors along with a large
list of commonly used metaphors."
This article defines metaphor, contains examples, and ends with a list of metaphor site links.
"The following A-to-Z rundown of business metaphors is by no means exhaustive: in the interest of limiting ourselves to 26 examples we've left out many items, from football to rocket science. But compiling any kind of alphabetical primer requires making trade-offs. In that sense, it's a lot like business" (from the introduction).
"When you think of your business as a game, as a war or as some other metaphor, you are shaping your whole approach to business, says Shelby Hunt, a marketing professor at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, Texas, who has studied business metaphors extensively" (from the introduction).
"I like to think
of myself as someone who sits on the curb of the info-highway, bemusedly watching
all the traffic whiz by--and also as someone who occasionally darts out into
the traffic to pick up interesting litter. I frame my paper in these terms
because I believe we can learn a lot by examining the linguistic litter thrown
off in the actual conversation about technology policy in the United States.
In this paper I will begin by offering some of the rich and complex examples
I have collected from the news media, then turn to some of the actual policy
statements by political figures such as U.S. Vice President Gore, paying
particular attention to how metaphors shape both science policy and the critiques
of science policy made by political rivals. The examples in this paper were
all originally drawn from the internet, but are available in both electronic
and print form" (from the Introduction).
"This paper examines some of the metaphors
that have evolved as we have incorporated computer technology into our lives.
The adaptation of existing language to the cyberspace domain reveals a great
deal about the function of computers in our lives and our attitudes towards
them."
"Metaphors are particularly important to
information technology because, as a new field, its functions and properties
are first talked of in a human perspective. For example, computers are said
to have memory, make mistakes, solve problems, and so on. Metaphor is examined
from its origins in Greek rhetoric to recent theories from its students." "Metaphors are useful because they are efficient: they transfer a
complex of meaning in a few words. Information systems are social constructs.
Therefore, metaphors seem to be especially useful for explaining the space
of possible meaning complexes or designs of information systems"(from the
abstract). This article begins with the statement: IT security needs a new metaphor
and then develops the idea that security can use airport processes as metaphors,
for instance, firewalls = immigration officers. This site discusses computing metaphors, especially a replacement
for the desktop metaphor, which it describes as dead."
"This research explores the use of metaphors
in interface design. Are user interface (UI) metaphors effective in facilitating
performance, and if so, how can they be designed to be most effective? The
World Wide Web serves as the application domain for this research. "
"As is widely recognized, the metaphor of automatic
data processing underlies and informs the goals and methodology of generative
grammar. And, whatever the validity of this image as an intellectual or ideological
basis for linguistic theory, it is unquestionably valid in representing the
actual experience of doing linguistics today, as anyone who has studied both
syntax and programming will attest."
This site describes the relationship between
icons and metaphors and discusses the problems of designing iconic interfaces
using metaphors.
"I'm here today to suggest that in fact there
is a human phenomenon (which I will call metaphor, though what name you give
it doesn't really matter much) that is much more important to everybody than
all this would imply."
This site is a study of the metaphors teachers use to describe themselves and their students.
"We have considered the task of constructing coherent understandings
of passages that include metaphorical sentences describing mental states
or processes. We have argued that there are several advantages to the strategy,
adopted by a number of researchers including ourselves, of conducting substantial
amounts of reasoning within the vehicle domain of a metaphor" (from the conclusion)
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