Meta, Meto, Simil, Figurative

Sally and Ray --

I would have to go read _Speaker's Meaning_ or _Poetic Diction_ more
closely to be sure, but I believe that....

..when Owen Barfield denies that words held a 'metaphorical' meaning
to premoderns, he is using a very restrictive definition of
'metaphorical', one which you might use in the phrase "mere metaphor."
  In this sense, you use a metaphor when you speak of A as if it were
B, in order to attribute to it some quality C which is possessed by B,
and that's all.  You might as well have attributed quality C directly
to A.  On the contrary, Barfield would say that when you spoke of A as
if it were B (especially if A was an abstraction which did not have
any other name than B), it was because there was some deep conceptual
and/or real unity between A and B.  To some degree Lakoff captures
this in his work on metaphor, but he tends to come at it from a very
empiricist (and humanist?) perspective that puts a very different spin
on it than Barfield does.

Sally --

I'm really curious now; what bad press did George Lakoff get that
caused you not to read him?


Ed Heil -------------------------------- edheil@postmark.net