Telling use of language:
"Sorrow looks back, worry looks around, faith looks up"
from an inspirational poster on the wall at Park Ridge Hospital.
Here is interesting language using "directional metaphors" assigning directions to abstract concepts such as past, present, and God. I am increasingly distressed by the use of "up" for all things good and holy - the negative connotation being that all things "down" are bad - leading us into a very unhealthy relationship with the earth and our bodies. What if faith looked elsewhere? "In"? "Out"? "To Others"?
I missed you all last week and have not been able to "look up" from more pressing demands. As the above quote might suggest, I have been at the hospital often. Not due to my own health but due to my aging mother - suffering multiple "pulmonary embolisms." The language of hospital stays is filled with health and illness, death and dying, and evasive terms that shield doctors from direct communication.
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I'm sorry to hear about your mother, professor. The faith I have is in a God that is very heavily invested in the world He created and very interested in people connecting to other people and to Him. In the spirit of that faith and belief I offer my prayers for your mother and her health, if you will allow me.
ReplyDeleteHope that the hospital experience grows easier as the terminology familiarises and begins to hit less heavily, or that you can leave it behind sooner rather than later.
ReplyDeleteIn relation to directional concept metaphors - I became slightly obsessed with http://www.amazon.com/Metaphors-We-Live-George-Lakoff/dp/0226468011 last year (and had failed to realise that Lakoff was the author, running into Tannen and others citing him this year).
Fascinated by how most of those associations are culturally stacked, but some may have physiological roots at base. Up is good, because upright is "better" physiologically than upside down or horizontal, for example.
I agree to the reasoning behind "up" but also see how the metaphor influences world-view and becomes a kind of literalism that results in such goofy actions as heaven's Gate Cult committing suicide in order to rise to the comet.
ReplyDeleteBTW - before it was a web site, it was (and remains) quite a good book: Metaphors We Live By by Lakoff & Johnson.