Walls, wars and waves: Some more thoughts on covid metaphors
May 21, 2021
The vaccination of the UK population has gone extremely well. There is still a race though between vaccinating against the covid virus and the emergence or introduction of new virus variants. However, fears of hospitals being overwhelmed by covid patients are dwindling. While this is going on, I noticed a metaphor that I had not …
The coronavirus: A global metaphor
May 14, 2021
In cognitive linguistics there is a long-running debate about whether some metaphors are universal or near-universal or whether metaphors are more culture specific. I don’t really want to get into that controversy here, but recent work by Ahmed Abdel-Raheem made me think about it again. In this post I argue that it might be good for …
Genetically modified mosquitoes and creatively unmodified metaphors
May 7, 2021
Last week genetically modified (GM) mosquitoes were released in Florida. One news item reported the event as follows: “The British company Oxitec released a cloud of hundreds of millions of genetically modified mosquitoes to study how to control their reproduction and thus stop the spread of dengue, Zika, malaria, etc.” (Entrepreneur, 4 May, 2021). What type of genetic …
How the pandemic is shaping worldviews
April 23, 2021
This is a guest post by Ahmed Abdel-Raheem. Ahmed is a postdoc in linguistics at the University of Bremen, Germany, and former Assistant Professor at the Department of English Studies at Maria Curie-Skłodowska University in Lublin, Poland. He is the author of Pictorial Framing in Moral Politics: A Corpus-Based Experimental Study (Routledge, 2019). *** It is …
A new variant in covid speak
April 9, 2021
A couple of weeks ago, Andrew Reynolds alerted me to an interesting new variant in covid speak, a metaphor used by the Canadian Chief Public Health Officer Dr. Theresa Tam in the context of talking about vaccines and variants (a variant is a virus with one or two mutations). As reported by CBC on March …
Metaphors, metaphors, metaphors
April 2, 2021
Recently somebody asked me something about metaphor and I thought to myself, what the heck do you know about metaphor? Actually, not an awful lot, given all the stuff I have written about it, or rather the stuff that I have written which involves some sort of reference to metaphor. So, I started to make …
Naming without shaming: A virus communication conundrum
February 19, 2021
We have all heard about the Kent strain of the coronavirus, or the UK or English strain for that matter, or the South African strain, or the Brazilian strain, not to forget the despicable references to the China or Wuhan virus by a former president of the United States. It’s good that we know about …
Loaded language
February 13, 2021
A lot has been written about the dangers of war metaphors used by politicians during the pandemic. But war metaphors are of course everywhere in political speech, where people fight elections, defeat opponents, battle against the odds. It is almost impossible to think about politics without thinking of it as a battle to be won. …
Science, Technology & Culture: In memory of Christopher Johnson (1958-2017)
January 8, 2021
Almost 20 years ago, I was working at the Institute for Science and Society located in the Law and Social Sciences Building (then called the Institute for the Study of Genetics, Biorisks and Society). I don’t know how it happened, but somehow I must have come across somebody telling me that people were establishing a …
Genetics and genomics – when metaphors begin to matter
December 28, 2020
I remember in the not so distant past standing in the Wellcome Sanger Institute in Cambridge admiring the huge sequencing machines and chatting about public engagement with colleagues before giving a talk about genomics and metaphors. I also remember writing some things about gene editing and metaphor. In my mind all this related to basic …
MSP bookmarks
- Twitter May 8, 2017
- Social innovations in Europe #RRI November 3, 2015
- Harvey Graff, the undisciplinarian September 20, 2015
- Replacing Pesticides With Genetics August 31, 2015
- Addressing hazardous chemicals in the circular economy August 25, 2015
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