Sublime

George Lakoff. He has a great seminal work from the 1980s called Women, Fire, and Dangerous Things.”

There may be no perfect frame waiting to be found but, argues the cognitive linguist George Lakoff, it is absolutely essential to have a compelling alternative frame if the old one is ever to be debunked. Simply rebutting the dominant frame will, ironically, only serve to reinforce it. And without an alternative to offer, there is little chance of

Cognitive linguist George Lakoff has proposed that competing metaphors of the family constitute a key divide in modern society. Morality is imagined through metaphor, and family metaphors reside at the core of contemporary political worldviews; whereas liberals favor a nurturing parent model, conservatives embrace a strict father metaphor.

in The Metaphors We Live By, George Lakoff and Mark Johnson argue that “New metaphors have the power to create a new reality.”1

Liberal TV commentators tend to practice the same pattern. First they will recite a quote or show a film clip from a conservative, repeat the conservative claim out loud, and only then cite the facts contradicting the claim. Activists do the same. An Occupy Wall Street sign read, “Obama is not a brown-skinned anti-war socialist who gives away free

Moral values are primary. They define what the issue areas are and place limits on possible policies. What about abstract ideals such as freedom, justice, fairness, equality, loyalty, accountability, authority, sanctity, and even caring? These are what linguists call contested concepts. They are ideas that appear to have a very simple, generally ag