Steel porcupine: A metal metaphor for our times
March 7, 2025
When Covid spread I started to collect metaphors. Now the world has suddenly changed again. Metaphors of fighting a virus are replaced by talk about fighting literal wars. But metaphors are never far away. European leaders gathered in London on 2 March 2025 to talk about the Ukraine-Russia-US situation and make plans for a just …
Planes, ships and metaphors
February 21, 2025
We all know that meaning in language only happens in context. Words don’t mean in isolation; they acquire meaning in context. Metaphors even more so. The word ‘pig’ means different things in a farmyard, during a policy encounter or when a mother visits a teenager’s room. Mostly, meanings emerge in context because a speaker has …
Floods and fires: Reciprocal metaphorical mappings in crisis response
February 14, 2025
Psychologists, sociologists, linguists and many others have studied how people respond to extreme weather events, such as floods or wildfires. Some linguists have been interested in particular in analysing the use and impact of metaphors. When we studied the 2021 German floods, Rusi Jaspal and I found that floods were either metaphorically framed as human, …
Food for thought: AI and culinary metaphors
January 3, 2025
Just before Christmas 2024 I read an article in Nature about AI running out of data. It said that “The Internet is a vast ocean of human knowledge, but it isn’t infinite. And artificial intelligence (AI) researchers have nearly sucked it dry.” Then, on Christmas Eve Aparna Nair said on Bluesky: “I know academics who …
Learning the language of life, the universe and everything – LLMs go metaphorical
December 9, 2024
More than two years after the advent of ChatGPT, we all know a little bit about LLMs or ‘large language models’ (although we, that is ordinary people, don’t really know what that means, especially ‘model’). So, just to recap, and using a definition provided by Claude (as the phrase is not yet in the Oxford …
Gunfight at the O.K Corral; or how bacteria interact in popular science writing
November 1, 2024
For many years, I have been fascinated by war metaphors that people use to talk about bacteria, especially in the context of antimicrobial resistance, the microbiome and microbiology itself. I am not the only one, of course. There is a thriving literature on war metaphors relating to bacteria that started to expand after Joshua Lederberg …
AI, LLMs and an explosion of metaphors
August 30, 2024
I would love to write a blog post entitled “What is it like to be an LLM”, but I have to leave that to others who are really into large language models or to the LLMs themselves. Instead, I have to resign myself to thinking about the question: “What is an LLM like?” This means …
Talking with Claude about machine metaphors in biology
July 12, 2024
In my last blog post I said that I had writer’s block – and I still have. I said so to my son and whined a bit. He said: “Remember Christmas 2022? You were complaining about the same thing and I said, go and play with ChatGPT, which had just come out, and that got …
Blueprints, postmen and a bit of metaphor archaeology
July 4, 2024
At the end of June, the NHS announced a new gene therapy for haemophilia B. Gene therapy replaces a faulty gene or adds a new gene to correct a mutation (genetic fault). People with haemophilia B lack the blood clotting protein factor IX and can bleed severely from even a slight injury. Some therefore need frequent …
Metaphor identification: From manual to automatic
June 28, 2024
I have written about metaphors for AIs and LLMs (large language models) like ChatGPT, but I don’t know much about what one might call the mechanics of metaphor recognition, identification and interpretation inside LLMs. So, I wanted to find out and went down a rabbit hole – I never quite reached the bottom…. Metaphor and …
Find, follow, join us
