Loony Tunes no 55
1
Jezebel Dooming the
System HERE
“In
other words, The Invisible Hand
exists, but it can't come to the phone right now because it's on some powerful
pain killers after it got mad and smashed through a plate glass window and
needed like 50 stitches.”
2
PR Leap (press
release) HERE
"Medical
Education and Training: "Professionalism, the Invisible Hand, and a Necessary Reconfiguration of Medical
Education," by Frederic W. Hafferty, PhD, Michael Brennan, MD, and
Wojciech Pawlina, MD, published in Academic Medicine."
3
Connaught Telegraph
HERE
“The
next, the boat was bobbing up and down as if some invisible hand was rocking it.”
4
Waikato
Times Joshua Drummond HERE
“Like
Santa Claus, the invisible hand
steers the free market sleigh as it rampages around improving everyone's lives,
pulled by its Godzilla-dog corporations and governments.”
10 Comments:
Here is an excellent article on metaphors but surprisingly it didn't include the IH metaphor: http://arts.nationalpost.com/2012/06/12/robert-fulford-metaphorically-speaking/
airth
Many thanks for drawing this excellent article to my attention.
It really explains what a metaphor is. Metaphors use a resemblance between two things that are not the same thing because they are different, but they describe its object (the thing it resembles) in "a more striking and interesting manner" (see Adam Smith on metaphors in his "Lectures in Rhetoric and Belles Lettres" [1763] 1983, Oxford University Press), p. 29.
Metaphors are not real; they do not exist outside the metaphorical relationship.
There is no actual invisible hand; the metaphor describes from its resemblance to the the unseen motive that leads some merchants to avoid investing their capital in foreign trade out of their sight and direct supervision, and to place it nearby in businesses they can see and protect.
Hopefully, you can see now what I am banging on about (another metaphor!).
Gavin
Gavin, you write that metaphors are not real. But they are real in that they describe real things in a manner that can be better understood.
Its like saying theories are not real. However, without theories we couldn't get to 'first base'.
airth
Really? Take a simple metaphor sometimes used by tutors of a class paper submitted by a student that is full of spelling mistakes, a completely mixed-up presentation of unsubstantiated assertions, some of it in pencil, others using messy ink pens using different colours, some in prose, and other parts in unrelated colours, and short notes.
The tutor writes across it the words; "This is a dog's breakfast of an essay", and puts it in the student's pigeon hole for returned essays..
There is no actual "dog's breakfast" present, nor is the student's 'pigeon hole' an actual place for a pigeon. Two metaphors.
Metaphors are not real. They do not exist. The describe in a "more striking and interesting manner" whatever they are describing.
Gavin
airth
Forgot about theories.
They are not real. They depict something real. The idea of atoms circulating a nucleolus is a fictional idea when shown by a planetary system arrangement. We don't know what it might look like exactly.
The 'great wheel of circulation' is a metaphor for the movement of capital around the economic system. In maths we use symbols for various operations ('curly dees' or lamda for calculus). They do not exist outside of our imagination. They represent reality; they do not mirror it, like a mirror reflects an image. The image is not real as is the object reflected in the mirror.
Gavin
airth
Forgot about theories.
They are not real. They depict something real. The idea of atoms circulating a nucleolus is a fictional idea when shown by a planetary system arrangement. We don't know what it might look like exactly.
The 'great wheel of circulation' is a metaphor for the movement of capital around the economic system. In maths we use symbols for various operations ('curly dees' or lamda for calculus). They do not exist outside of our imagination. They represent reality; they do not mirror it, like a mirror reflects an image. The image is not real as is the object reflected in the mirror.
Gavin
Re: The tutor writes across it the words; "This is a dog's breakfast of an essay"
How about if the tutor called the essay 'garbage'? Garbage is a metaphor. But it is really in what it conjures. The essay may or may not look like garbage but its content and how it reads is in essence like garbage, messy and difficult to wade through.
When one says, You eat like a pig, that is very really in its symbolism. I mean, there is no real pig present, but the sight and sounds one sees is a person acting like a pig.
However, if one does know what a pig is, that is a different matter.
airth
Your 2nd paragraph is correct: it 'looks like" - hence the metaphoric power of the word - but it is not the physical shape and content of actual garbage. The power of the chosen metaphor is in the resemblance not the identity of the two. The object is the essay, its content's resemblance to garbage, in my opinion as the tutor, which is 'striking' in the reader's mind, but no reader thinks they are the same.
I say that a person has a 'golden smile' does not make the smile actual gold! (Otherwise, I could show you anything and claim it is gold because it looks like gold).
Same for any metaphor describing its object.
Gavin
What I am saying is that we wouldn't understand the world if it was for metaphors. They give abstractions a tangibility and a reality.
airth
But they do not make themselves real. They do not exist except in the literary imagination of the reader. If metaphors were real we could metaphorically make one into gold, or whatever.
Gavin
PS These exchanges are becoming boring, so, with regret, I shall not reply or publish any more on metaphors from your good self. But thanks for your interest.
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