The rise and fall of metaphor: A study in meaning and meaninglessness

1 The communal lexicon and acquisition through metaphor

We make sense of the world via language and in particular through the use of metaphors. This is a basic principle of human rational thought. As Huang et al. (2013: 106) state, “Metaphor understanding is an intricate task in language understanding.” The meaning of a metaphor is shaped in part by how we, a people of a certain age or community, impose our meaning on a given metaphor (A is like B). However, this structure of metaphor already exists as a fundamental axiomatic pattern for human analogical thinking and imposes its structure on us (Rupp 2015). We cannot help but use metaphors to build our understanding of the world.

Metaphor, in this sense, is an innate imaginative progression that uses the “metaphorical process [to] reflect analogical thinking par excellence; i. e., they reflect an innate psychological mechanism that relates seemingly unrelated things” (Danesi 1986: 46). Our understanding of meaning in this way creates distilled sensation or mental connection. I am not intending to say that we automatically use metaphors whenever we do anything, but rather that when we perform that unique human activity of trying to understand the world around us, we convey it though metaphor.

These mental connections are movements of thought from the CL to the social world. We communally create a world with these meanings and many actions we undertake are based on them. Our understanding of the world is based on the meanings we intersubjectively create, which is in turn structured by the communal analogical understanding and interaction of collective metaphors.

People use metaphor all the time without being aware of it. This idea was expertly developed by Lakoff and Johnson in their seminal text, The Metaphors We Live By (1980). An everyday example is the metaphor “TIME IS MONEY.” This metaphor has become so solidified in the CL that we now see it to be “literal.” Time has become money. This is evident in the myriad of other phrases based on this metaphor (“DO NOT WASTE MY TIME,” “ANOTHER DAY ANOTEHR DOLLAR,” “I SPENT MY TIME ON YOU,” “IS THIS WORTH MY TIME?”). These metaphors are not abstract mental linkages; they are conceptual guides.

The nature and growth of the lexicon is emblematic of the nature and growth of the community or even an individual’s way of thinking. The words we choose from the lexicon and the way our meanings are intended are, as Owen Barfield wrote in Poetic Diction and Legal Fiction, “not merely in the diction of poetry but in the nature and growth of language itself … language is clearly essential to the nature and growth of our thoughts, or rather of our consciousness as a whole” (1973: 84–85). What Barfield is saying is that language and actual human consciousness as a whole are bound up together. This connection I describe as the bilateral dynamic movement. It is bilateral since the two forces are distinct but inseparable. Language and community structure are dynamic in the sense that they have change as their primary nexus. An image for this bilateral dynamic movement would be the double helix of the DNA structure. The two polynucleotide chains stand separate, but are connected with thermodynamic forces. The connections are what defines and creates the wholeness of DNA. The polynucleotide chains are like language and human consciousness. They stand separate, but without the thermodynamic bond they would be useless. The bond is the linking force that makes these two unique entities meaningful and useful.

The growth of language happens by the creation and accretion of meaning-laden metaphors into the CL. The simple fact that our CL grows is proof for its non-static nature (Danesi 2013). The metaphor is the most fundamental building block of the human language and human consciousness (Huang et al. 2013). Giambattista Vico eloquently claims when axiomizing the properties of human knowledge in The New Science, “it is another property of the human mind that whenever men can form no idea of distant and unknown things, they judge them by what is familiar” (1948: 60). Vico is saying that when we do not know or understand something we liken it to something we do understand. In doing so, we create new meaning through the creation of a metaphor. When this happens we, the community in question, changes.

It may be thought that as social structures change language alters with the sole purpose of accommodating those changes. However, this simply demotes language to the role of a tool whose value arises only when implemented. Language is the means by which we interpret the world. Each CL provides a unique lens for a group to see through. This lens forces those who look through it to engage with and interpret the world in a particular way.

Every people has its own characteristic class in which individuals pigeonhole their experiences. The language says, as it were “notice this,” “always consider this separate from that,” “such and such things always belong together.” Since persons are trained from infancy to respond in these ways they take such discriminations for granted as part of the inescapable stuff of life.

(Pirsig 1991: 384)

The Communal Lexicon is a subconscious world that all the members of a certain group can access. Furthermore, it is access to this lexicon that defines a group. As words in the lexicon acquire new meaning or as new words or metaphors enter the lexicon, the essential quality of the accessers changes. As Danesi puts it, “[c]ultural orders give historical continuity and stability to meanings, but these are not static. This is why cultures are always in flux, always reacting to new ideas and new needs” (2013: 46). Like a computer with new software, the hardware is the same, but the way the information is processed and channeled has changed. The accessers now have new pathways by which to convey meaning and understanding of the world. As we learn more, our world changes to fit our new understandings.

Communities come to experience this new access through what Barfield calls it, a “felt change of consciousness” (1973: 48). It is the “eureka!” moment or the bodily tremble of wonder and fear. We build new mental pathways and in that moment we are jolted form our ordinary mental sedimentation into the wakeful mind of dynamic awe. We are held in juxtaposition to ourselves, what comes out is something new. When A is completely subsumed by the B we forget that B was ever foreign and thus the metaphor vanishes. As metaphors crystallize, A is forgotten; B is understood to stand alone and it is thought to “have” its meaning. This “having” is often referred to as its literal meaning. Actually, it is more like the meaning has found a hold on B. The new meaning has fixed itself on the B. One could say without too much poetic license that a language is not a language of a certain people, but rather that we are the people of a certain language. Metaphors are the only means by which to express this shift.

We are changed by the act of creation. Since the growth and nature of our lexicon is dynamically bound with our essential consciousness, when one changes so does the other. They are a micro and macrocosmic reflection of each other. Once the change happens it is impossible to re-experience the same thing. The change will always have been made; the feeling of the felt change is fleeting. We cannot feel the same change twice. Neither can one live in a constant state of this change. It is a momentary event that always passes, but the intuition of the change comes back in a lesser way when the impetus is reintroduced. However, the change may be different when reintroduced, like when reading a poem a different meaning is gained on each read. Such is the same for life and language (Barfield 1973). We remember the changes, which is why we do not revert back, or to use the computer metaphor – downgrade.

Metaphors enter our lexicon by providing new meanings. It is there that the meanings affect our social world. Thus we can see the progression from the metaphor to the actual social life. Metaphors penetrate into our CL so that all the accessers change in response.

The fact of the matter is that the “real world” is to a large extent unconsciously built up on the language habits [the Communal Lexicon] of the group … forms and significance which seem obvious to an outsider will be denied outright by those who carry out the patterns; outlines and implications that are perfectly clear to those may be absent to the eye of the on looker.

(Sapir 1949: 162)

As Sapir says, the world a community lives in has meaning and exists for them, and for those who are not members, may seem strange or meaningless. Each community’s lexicon is unique and the metaphors may only have meaning for those who have access. It is within the strangeness of others’ language that we see the fundamentals of the cultural consciousness. And when we no longer see the previously strange, but rather see an intelligible pattern we have entered that communal consciousness.

This notion of communal consciousness or as Danesi (2004) calls it “cultural groupthink” is crucial for the CL. The layering of metaphors and the dismissal of strangeness prompts us to ask what Enfield (2013) calls, the “cognitive and cultural questions.” Enfield’s separation of these questions, as I hope I have been showing, runs against both the CL and groupthink. We should not assume that we are separate subjects, but rather intersubjects, due to our basic experience as collectively phenomenological – particularly in social context (Heiskala 2014; Sokolowski 2000). This means that we human beings engage with the life-world and change its structures by objectifying our own inner experiences (this is done via the creation of metaform; Danesi 2004). Actions are selected from their conscious flow and we assign them meaning using the life-world as meaning-context. This life world is the place for groupthink and the structures are built by our metaphors.

When we separate the cognitive and cultural questions we dismiss the dynamic quality of language. While it is true that people make culture, it is also true that culture makes people. Thus a full cultural analysis must look at both paths to and from cultural meaning. We are both the shapers and the shaped, and so in order to properly interpret we must look at both the form and the content of meaning. This two-fold investigation and the network relationship will be illuminated upon later with examples.

Since the way we see the world is shaped by the language we use, the metaphors we use, it is no wonder that different communities use different words to convey different meanings. However, to assume that these meanings, lexicons, or each group are mutually exclusive is folly. No community can exist independently from the other, just as no CL can be completely unique. This is a particularly essential component in the globalizing world. Like an encyclopedia, each entry is separate, but all part of a larger collection. Each lexicon is a continually changing entry, always adding new entries from other lexicons. Thus, the blending of communities happens. It is not hard to see. Examples of this are common and we often call them “slang” or “pidgin.” Each year new slang words are added to the Oxford Dictionary and have “real” meaning (“Muggle,” a non-wizard in the world of Harry Potter is now a “real” meaning).

Dynamic, meaning-making metaphors are not distinct from each other. Each metaphor can have subordinate metaphors that help shape it, hold it in existence, and connect it to other structural metaphors. Each of these metaphors is linked with other metaphors and so on, ad infinitum. So, when we come into contact with a new meaning or new metaphor we draw on all of the connected metaphors to understand it. Likewise, when we come in contact with old metaphors we are not thinking of just B; we are intuiting the A and all the other A’s and B’s that were used as subordinate metaphors. The subordinate metaphors help support the current one we are coming into contact with now. Thus again, we see the interconnection that is necessarily inherent in these mental gestures.

But if metaphors provide our grassroots meaning, how does a community express that? How do they interact with them and act accordingly? “Human beings engage with the life-world and change its structures by objectifying their own inner experiences. They can pick out actions from their conscious flow and assign it meaning using the life-world as meaning-context” (Wilks 2015). Marcel Danesi suggests this is through the use and creation of metaforms. These metaforms are “distributed throughout the network of meaning pathways that define a culture” (Danesi 2013: 42). A metaform is the experiential representation reified from a conceptual metaphor. These objectifications can take many shapes and manifestations. An example Danesi gives is derived from the conceptual metaphor “LOVE IS SWEET.” A metaform for this is the giving of chocolates to a lover. The sweetness of the chocolates is the physical expression of the conceptual metaphor.

I will not be as bold as to claim that the first person who gave chocolates to a lover was consciously reaching out to a metaform of love in order to express his affection. That being said, chocolate is an “aphrodisiac” – which is in an interesting idea. Chocolate is mysteriously endowed to stir one’s most carnal desires. The concept of aphrodisiacs makes a great deal of sense when we look at them as metaforms for love and sexual love more specifically. Meaning is generated by the metaphoric connection of love as sweet and chocolate as sweet. We see that sweetness acts as middle term in this imaginative syllogism. So we pass the love through the sweetness onto the chocolate. So by giving chocolates we are in effect giving love. This is of course a very simple example.

We come to know a metaform not through abstraction, but by examining the values and interactions of the intersubjects. Metaforms are made things and we are the makers. This value investigation grants the observer a glimpse into the makers’ or intersubjects’ interpretations and manifestations of their metaforms. These reifications are what we encounter in the form of ritual, custom, architecture, religion, etc. Many social interactions can find their frame in a metaform.

As Geertz discovered without realizing it, cockfighting in the Balinese villages is a metaform (Geertz 1973). By examining the metaphors that fall from a metaform, here being cockfighting, we learn more about the culture and about their relations of concepts that are used to create meaning. The more prevalent the metaform the more effective the concepts/metaphors are. For example the word for cock in Balinese is sabung. It is used to create metaphors for “hero,” “warrior, “champion,” “tough-guy” and “a political candidate” (Geertz 1973). Likewise numerous social interactions are likened to cockfighting. This metaform is obviously a potent one since it is the root and the objectification for all of the previous example. Interestingly enough as Geertz points out it linguistically has the same double-entendric meaning that the English word “cock” has (Geertz 1973), thus providing even more support for its productivity.

Along with everything else that the Balinese see in fighting cocks – themselves. Their social order, abstract hatred, masculinity, demonic power – they also see the archetype of status virtue, the arrogant, resolute, honor-mad player with real fire, the ksatria prince … An image, fiction, a model, a metaphor, the cockfight is a means to expression; its function is neither to assuage social passions nor to heighten them, but, in a medium of feather, blood, crowds, and money, to display them.

(Geertz 1973: 442–444)

Another support Geertz gives is his analysis of Benthems “deep play.” According to Bentham and as Geertz points out, the Balinese should be wary of cockfight since it is a means to create greater pain than pleasure. But since it is a productive metaform, the reverse happens. The deeper the play, in this case, the closer the participants get to the metaform. Additionally, the more they interact with the metaform the more productive and stronger it gets. Geertz points out that the more money that is at stake, the less the interaction is about the money. The material is a means to access the metaform and as material increases, the value of it shifts from itself to the metaform. Thus what they are gambling is not money, but access to the metaform its manifestation of social capital and masculinity.

One of the more exciting aspects of the investigation into metaform is its advantage at looking at causes for social action as well as its meaning. If we backtrack to the simpler example of chocolate giving, what we find is that the cause for this ritual is that we have made chocolate a manifestation of love. Chocolate is a reification of the metaphor. So, if one were to ask why you gave your lover chocolate you could say because you love him/her. This would be a fine answer, except what you really meant is that you gave the chocolate because chocolate is a manifestation of love in a physical, experiential form. I will concede that yes, there is a level of simple enjoyment too – who doesn’t like good chocolate?

Let us turn back to the case of cockfighting. If their action is the fight (as before it was the giving of chocolate), then what is the cause? The cause would be the engagement into deep play. We don’t do it because we want to interact with metaform as much as metaform asks us to, or is the cause for the, fight. Since we saw that in the true fight money is not the goal (due to the inverse proportion explained above), we can rule it out as the primary cause. We create the metaphorical connection, as can be seen in the delta of linguistic metaphor that stem from the fight. We create the form and content for meaning of the fight, and in turn the fight shapes the form and content of our intersubjective communal meaning. Again, we see a sort of hermeneutic circle of regression forming. By allowing the intersubjective world to be the causes and the effect of the metaform – created about our metaphors – we find a ground on which to interpret.

Wilhelm Dilthey phrases this interconnection between the intersubjects and their metaforms (except he does not use this term) thus, “every individual is also a point where webs of relationships intersect; these relationships go through individuals, exist within them, but also reach beyond their life and possess an independent existence and development of their own through the content, value and purpose this they realize” (Dilthey 1996: 180–181). This dialogical interaction between the actors of discourse and the form of it is reciprocal. Much like Dilthey’s explanation, Indra’s Net, a Buddhist allegory tells that:

[There is] an endless net of threads throughout the universe, the horizontal threads running through space, the vertical ones through time. At every crossing of threads is an individual, and every individual is a crystal bead. The great light of “Absolute Being” illuminates and penetrates every crystal bead; moreover, every crystal bead reflects not only the light from every other crystal in the net-but also every reflection of every reflection throughout the universe.

(Hofstadter 1999: 226)

We humans can be isomorphized with the crystal beads, we hold the network together and yet on us we can see the mass of complex strings expanding from and though us. The way the light reflects back and forth between the beads, or the way light bounces between two mirrors, the human world and the metaforms we are in dialog with act mutually on each other. To put it into the context that we are working with, the individual is constantly confirming and being confirmed by the metaforms that objectify meaning.

There is no single metaform that is the master key to any social life, but it does expose a glimpse, like a brief parting of the clouds, of the essential nature of a culture – its value (here being used as a noun). With the help of metaform the social investigator can interpret the intersubjective experience by exploring its objective reifications. Each interpretation exists in the cultural flux and is dependent on its historical context and genealogy. This retrospective look is how we come to know the present.

2 Acquisition through the blending of concepts

Barfield (2013: 70) calls the act of saying-one-thing-and-meaning-another “tarning,” taken from the German Tarnung, and I will use it in turn. This is another way words enter our Communal Lexicon. The essential quality of tarning is the fact that it says one thing but intends something else. The power of tarning comes from the fact that the words are not the meanings themselves, but rather point at meanings. This is precisely what a strong metaphor does. When T. S. Eliot wrote

The yellow fog that rubs its back upon the window-panes,

The yellow smoke that rubs its muzzle on the window-panes,

Licked its tongue into the corners of the evening,

Lingered upon the pools that stand in drains,

Let fall upon its back the soot that falls from chimneys,

Slipped by the terrace, made a sudden leap,

And seeing that it was a soft October night,

Curled once about the house, and fell asleep.

(Eliot 1936: 11)

he did not have to say that it was a “foggy night,” his tarning, was able to say so much more. By saying one thing and meaning another, the poet is able to transform images and words into a cosmos of meaning. Simple images become symbols for weighty meanings. Eliot could have easily said, “the fog was similar in its mannerisms to a cat,” but this would have not conveyed nearly what he wanted. By tarning, Eliot was able to show us a different world by using words that meant more than the conventional meaning. He invited us into his lexicon to see the words anew in his blended way.

It is common to tarn, say one thing but refer to something completely different, in regular speech but particularly in slang. The millennials often tarn when referring to sex. The tarnings, “hit,” “slam” and “bang” are often used. These tarnings enter our lexicon as conceptual metaphor e. g. “HITTING IS LIKE SEX,” “SLAMMING IS LIKE SEX,” “BANGING IS LIKE SEX.” These words have a clear destructive meaning. When we used destructive things as tarnings for non-destructive things we impose some of the violence on the non-violent secondary metaphor. Since metaphor is a means of equating meaning, we are equating sex with violent action. The damage this does to language and those who use it and/or it is directed towards is evident. The negative meaning rises up and shines through the new meaning. We see rampant sexism due to such linguistic carelessness. Words, as has been made clear by now, are the connections between people and when we use rotten words the community decays. If these words are part of our lexicon, then we are part of a certain community – that of sexists. This misuse is emblematic of the modern age; we do not see the phrases as tarning, but rather as simple one-sided terms with simple one-sided meanings.

When looking at how subordinate metaphors enter our CL, using Fauconnier and Turner’s Conceptual Blending Theory (2002) ^[1] (CBT) can shed more light on the new meaning and our interaction with it. CBT uses the notion of mental space to blend and create a “new mental space (the blend) where conceptual integration (a) selectively projects and compresses elements and relations from the input spaces and then (b) develops the emergent structure of the blend through composition, completion, and elaboration” (Wassell and Llewelyn 2014: 639). When we blend concepts we put them into the form of the X to be Y of Z. Fauconnier and Turner give the example “Newton is the father of physics” (Fauconnier and Turner 2002). This form allows concepts to relate to each other in a predicated way. It is similar to the logic structure of Zxy (read as x is in z relationship to y).

Using the combination of mental spaces (CBT), it is worth looking back at the violent sexual lexicon of modern youth (Fernández 2008). As Fernández points out, “metaphorization stands out as the most prolific linguistic device of lexical creativity, it is hardly surprising that speakers turn to figurative language as means of coping with the realm of sex” (2008: 96). What she is saying is that we turn to figurative language, here being blending, to express a subject that can be taboo and emotional to talk about. The phrases “pussy slayer” and “pussy sledge” are common blending. When we put them in the above format we have the phrases “X person is a slayer of pussy” and “X person is a sledge hammer to pussy.” Without much thought we have entered both a disturbingly graphic and violent lexicon. The input spaces or concepts that are being blended are: murder and the act of sex for the first and demolition and the act of sex for the second. This blending forces us to conceptualize a relationship of x (the person) and y (the act of sex) in terms of z (murder and demolition respectively). Thus, when we either refer to or are referred as one of these we are inserting ourselves into this relational format, which transfers us into the community (Hutchins 2005), as again, of sexists and a violent one at that.

It is now worth taking a closer look at the word “literal” – commonly used to refer to the “real” world of facts and empirically verifiable things. When one says, “I literally mean X,” or often less obviously just “X is Y,” what the speaker is trying to denote is that she wishes to speak of X and only X. When we use literals we choose our words “to show simply that the speaker does not wish to speak in metaphors” (Barfield 2013: 54). Ironically, most often when someone says, “I will literally Y,” they don’t mean it literally. An issue that arises with the use of so called literal words is that a literal meaning can be nothing more than stale metaphor or blending so old that all subordinate metaphors have been forgotten or neglected (as shown above in the case of sexist language).

3 Literalness and meaninglessness

A literal meaning is one that has become seen as pointing at only the one thing the word denotes. As Barfield states, “as to the meaning of the word ‘literal,’ there is no difficulty about it, and everyone knows what it means as a technical term in the art of rhetoric. In any wider sense, bearing on general relation between material and immaterial language, what we call literalness is a late stage in a long-drawn-out historical possess” (2013: 61). The process is the evolution of language into an absent minded literalness. This process is the layering of metaphor upon metaphor or the neglectful blending until literal meaning is given (Coulson and Oakley 2005), in which case the supporting metaphors are neglected or forgotten and a “literal” meaning is left, helping us build a world out of imaginary bricks.

As was exemplified earlier, “time” is being equivocated with “money” – the two terms are held together as two logically bilateral meanings and are fused together (time=money). Even worse, when meanings like “love” or “justice” become stale our metaphysical foundations weaken. When these foundations become untenably shaky, due to the subordinate metaphor’s fragility, we are left with meaningless and dangerous words.

But how can a metaphor change? To use the previous example of “TIME IS MONEY” we find that time has become essentially changed to incorporate a commoditized quality. This is a stale metaphor. It has lost is meaning. When this metaphor goes beyond simply showing the similarity between two things or using one thing to enlighten us about another, it becomes a detriment. When we start to think of time as a commodity we start living our lives accordingly. We lose sight of the metaphoric quality of the comparison inherent in the common phrase or cliché. The issue is that all the subordinate meanings are still lying underneath and imposing themselves on the now cliché “time.” And as we all know, clichés are powerless.

As Konings (2011) explores in the essay “Money as Icon” this process from metaphor to literal requires a level of forgetfulness. In order to cumulate the new meaning we must forget the subordinate metaphor(s) that support it. Panagia (2001) describes this process as “[t]hrough use and circulation within discourse, this new and original meaning becomes static – it loses its force of originality and acquires the status of a common meaning … We forget not so much the meaning of the metaphor, as the process that produces the metaphorical meaning (i. e., the metaphoricity of the metaphor)” (Panagia 2001: 58). To account for this forgetting we can invoke CBT again. Since, we are not forgetting how this process occurs but rather the content or, “its relocation from the sphere of active conscious cognition to the autonomous regions of the brain, connected to corporeal functions: chains of metaphorical connections are committed to the procedural, implicit segments of our memory, to the background of our conduct” (Konings 2011). If we look at this process of sublimating metaphors not as forgetting, but as blending we come to a much richer understanding of our communal lexicon and thus ourselves.

We inherit these petrified inputs as literals from our intellectual and communal forbearers, completely lacking the knowledge of the blending or subordinate metaphors that comprise it. This infers we don’t fully understand what they mean. Thus we speak without being fully aware of what we are saying. We have accepted the metaphors of the past without question, and these metaphors shape us. Time is money, it does not just having qualities akin to money which are useful when trying to make a connection between two abstract ideas. The ghost of the past lives in our language and we do not understand it. We do not know how certain words we used got their meaning, which translates to we do not understand them. This lack of meaning dredges up nihilism and the isolation that comes with it. For when our words to express the world are empty and meaningless then the correspondent reality reflects that meaninglessness.

Rudolf Steiner expresses, in his lecture “The Alphabet: An Expression of the Mystery of Man,” this loss of meaning thus:

Man’s original word of truth, his word of wisdom, was lost … In speaking today, Man is no longer conscious that the original primordial sentence has been forgotten … He is no longer aware that the single words, the single sentences uttered today, represent the mere shreds of that primordial sentence.

(Steiner 1921)

Steiner in this one quotation sums up the movement form the metaphor based cultural meaning to the literalness and disconnectedness that come with it. It is important to note here that Steiner’s use of the “primordial sentence” is the same as the idea of culturally shared metaphors.

Modernity is characterized by the adoption of stale metaphors and neglected blendings, which has in part led to our sense of mindlessness and alienation. Literalness is pervasive. By accepting the new discursive literals of modernity, we have let it take a prominent role in the way we think now and thus, the way we live. Shelley’s description of the great kingdom of Ozymandias is a great likeness to the remnants of the kingdom of modernity.

‘My name is Ozymandias, King of Kings: (10)

Look on my works, ye mighty, and despair!’

Nothing beside remains. Round the decay

Of that colossal wreck, bondless and bare,

The lone and level sands stretch far away.

(Shelley,1818)

All the while, this literalness undercuts the foundations of our language and our Communal Lexicon. We enter an age of meaninglessness emblemized by the ruins of Ozymandias, the neuroses of Prufrock, the indecisions of Dostoyevsky’s Underground Man, and nihilism of Camus’ Stranger.

As long as we live in a literal age, we live in a world where we are lost. Language is the bridge that connects the cognitive and cultural. It is the loss of this bond that has driven the communal mind mad forcing meaningless speech to become the norm. As was exemplified, sexist language is only one example of the decay. If we pull the frame back just a bit we can see how this issue represents itself in the broader schema. The problem of modernity is then two-fold for how can we begin to address the crisis of meaninglessness if the words we use are just that.

To understand the metaphors, or even words we use, we must understand where they came from, whether blended or from conceptual reification. This matters because we cannot understand the present if we do not understand how we got here. As Newton said, he stood on the shoulders of giants (Newton, personal communication, with Hooke, 1676). ^[2] Newton knew that his knowledge came from those before him; it was that which connected him and gave him knowledge and meaning. Without the shoulders of our forebears we are lost to the street of Prufrock.

The careless use of metaphor and the neglect of blendings only adds confusion to the Communal Lexicon. We accrue meaning into our CL via the interaction with conceptual metaphor and the blending of concepts. The repository for our communal understanding of the world is constantly in flux. This fluctuation is the byproduct of the accessers’ creation or sublimation of new or old meaning. The items in the CL dictate the quality of it. Thus, when we consciously add works of beauty we become more beautiful, and when conversely we create items of violence and sexism we embody that. We make our CL, but it colors us.