The War of Words

A War of Words
in the
Discourse of Trade
A War of Words
in the
Discourse of Trade
The Rhetorical Constitution of Metaphor
Philip Eubanks
Southern Illinois University Press

Carbondale and Edwardsville
Copyright © 2000 by the Board of Trustees,
Southern Illinois University
All rights reserved
Printed in the United States of America
03 02 01 00 4 3 2 1
Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data
Eubanks, Philip, 1954–

A war of words in the discourse of trade : the rhetorical constitution of
metaphor / Philip Eubanks.
p. cm.
Includes bibliographical references and index.
1. Commerce. 2. Metaphor. I. Title.
HF1008 .E78 2000

380—dc21
ISBN 0-8093-2334-6 (cloth : alk. paper) 99-087592
The paper used in this publication meets the minimum requirements of Ameri-
can National Standard for Information Sciences—Permanence of Paper for Printed
Library Materials, ANSI Z39.48-1992. ∞
Here, Mom, some light reading.
Contents
Preface ix
Acknowledgments xiii
1. A Conversation among Metaphors 1

2. Beyond Aristotle’s Algebra 13
3. The Conversation at Large 30
4. Three (Doubtful) Premises of Metaphor Theory 62
5. The Story of Metaphor 103
6. Metaphor, Culture, and Community 134
7. Conclusion 161
Appendix 171
Notes 175
Works Cited 177
Index 187
Preface
Metaphor has been studied for a long time and from many perspectives.
But it is only in the last two decades that many of us have ceased to think
of metaphor as mainly fanciful decoration that adorns literary texts and
high-flown rhetorical speeches. Before that, even the most enlightened
commentators routinely treated metaphor as special language. In contrast,
most important theorists today have come to think of metaphor as fun-
damental to thought.
The best of the cognitive theories of metaphor is “conceptual meta-
phor theory,” first outlined by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson in Meta-
phors We Live By. Since then, the importance of conceptual metaphor
theory has been well established by subsequent work from Lakoff, John-
son, Mark Turner, and a growing number of researchers in linguistics,
philosophy, and literary study. As Lakoff and Johnson observe in their
recent book, Philosophy in the Flesh, converging evidence from numer-
ous perspectives makes it difficult to deny that conceptual metaphors are
real and can explain a good deal about the way we think and speak.
To summarize briefly, conceptual metaphor theory asserts these key
things: First, most metaphors are instances of larger cognitive structures
called conceptual metaphors. For example, if we say that our love rela-
tionship has hit a roadblock or that our marriage has been smooth sail-
ing, we cannot say so without recruiting the overarching metaphor Love
Is A Journey. Love Is A Journey structures specific locutions by provid-
ing them with a constraining image schema that includes a starting place,
a path, and an ending place. Love Is A Journey also encompasses many
aspects of journeying that can be applied to love, such as the possibility
of impediments, the hope for adventure, and the possibility of psycholog-
ical or spiritual change in the course of travel. Second, once we observe
that specific metaphors are supported and constrained by conceptual
metaphors, we are forced to observe that everyday and literary metaphors
work in much the same way. From a structural perspective, there is little
difference between someone’s speaking mundanely of the road to ruin and
Robert Frost’s speaking poetically of the road less traveled; both are in-
stances of Life Is A Journey. Third, conceptual metaphors have cultural
consequences. More specifically, conceptual metaphors do not just viv-
ix
x Preface
idly describe our experience of the world; they help to make our experi-
ence of the world what it is. In the English language and in the culture in
which I live, we routinely call upon the conceptual metaphor Life Is A
Journey to explain what it means to be alive. We can hardly think about
life without this journeying metaphor.
That basis for understanding metaphors is what first attracted me to
this area of study. In the course of this book, I do my best to rethink con-
ceptual metaphor theory where I see the need and to build upon it where
I see the opportunity. Throughout, however, it should not be forgotten
that conceptual metaphor theory has opened doors that were long closed.
I approach the topic of conceptual metaphor by offering a detailed
account of the discourse, or conversation, that constitutes the conceptual
metaphor Trade Is War. Indeed, the discourse of trade depends upon a
complex web of metaphors that interactively crystallize rhetorical posi-
tions. This conversation has yet to be fully described in scholarship on
metaphor or scholarship on the rhetoric of trade or economics. But de-
scribing this conversation is only part of my objective. I also offer a rhe-
torically informed analysis of the way metaphor works. The way Trade
Is War functions is the way all important metaphors function; we can-
not fully understand any single metaphor unless we understand its in-
terplay with related metaphors and literal concepts. At the same time,
metaphoric groupings cannot function separately from a concrete discur-
sive setting––a describable conversation that exerts a controlling force
over the way any instance of a conceptual metaphor is spoken or writ-
ten. Considering the influence of discourse at large permits us to see more
clearly the localized functions of metaphor that are all but invisible in tra-
ditional analyses.
While offering this account of metaphor, I challenge the standard
Aristotelian view of metaphor, the view that informs most conventional
thinking and experimentation on the subject. My claim is this: The con-
ceptual metaphor view, combined with an understanding of metaphor as
rhetorically constituted, makes obsolete almost all of the assumptions that
have previously guided metaphor study, from hackneyed handbook ad-
vice to much of the sophisticated experimentation of cognitive science.
In short, this study tells us something more than we have already
known about conceptual metaphors. So far, we have learned that when
we look at thought and language, we seem inevitably to discover meta-
phors. This study demonstrates that when we look at metaphors, we find
active rhetoric. To describe this rhetoric is to reveal what I call the rhe-
torical constitution of metaphor.
The chapters are arranged as follows:
In chapter 1, “A Conversation among Metaphors,” I illustrate the
responsive character of Trade Is War by analyzing excerpts from an edi-
Preface xi
tion of CNN’s Crossfire. The edition focuses on U.S. trade policy toward
Japan as the United States considers sanctions against Japan’s automo-
bile manufacturing industry. The Crossfire discussion is particularly re-
vealing because it (by design) represents a variety of influential viewpoints;
thus, the discussants express a variety of important trade metaphors. The
discussion permits us to see not just which metaphors are important but
the politically charged relationship between them.
In chapter 2, “Beyond Aristotle’s Algebra,” I challenge the standard
Aristotelian view of metaphor, which has been responsible for many or
most of the errors made in metaphor study from antiquity to the present.
Aristotle’s influence is felt not in the particulars of his theory but rather
in his initial identification of the two parts of metaphor––a concept that
has subsequently been reified by such terms as tenor and vehicle, focus
and frame, and target and source. Once metaphor is seen as fundamen-
tally constituted by two parts, its functioning is seen as both mainly in-
ternal and discoverable at the sentence level. Moreover, it is seen as un-
derstandable in abstract terms: the metaphor of A is B. It is this treatment
of metaphor that the book documents and challenges throughout.
In chapter 3, “The Conversation at Large,” I offer an extensive, yet
necessarily partial, view of the conversation among Trade Is War and re-
lated metaphors and concepts, presenting instances of Trade Is War from
the English Renaissance until the present. I analyze numerous variations
of Trade Is War, taken from the news media, popular and academic print
media, television, and focus groups that were conducted as part of this
study. (For the sake of readability, I have edited quotations from mem-
bers of these focus groups.) In presenting these wide-ranging instances, I
make two main arguments: First, although Trade Is War is commonplace,
it also encompasses significant variety. Second, for all of Trade Is War’s
variety, we can nonetheless identify recurring patterns in its use, especially
with respect to its intercourse with other trade metaphors. The way Trade
Is War is claimed, ascribed, attenuated, and intensified forms what I call
a rhetorical etiquette, a pattern of use that, while not inviolable, crucially
constrains the meaning and function of Trade Is War.
In chapter 4, “Three (Doubtful) Premises of Metaphor Theory,” I
argue that when we see Trade Is War (along with other commonly stud-
ied metaphors) as part of a dynamic and diverse conversation, we need
to reconsider three commonly accepted notions prevalent in twentieth-
century metaphor theory. First, I challenge the notion of metaphoric life
span. Metaphoric life span assumes that metaphors begin as living ex-
pressions, then over time lose their metaphoric quality. It is the notion
that underlies the everyday expression “dead metaphor,” which is both
an everyday and a theoretical construct. In fact, there is scant evidence
that metaphors live and die, as an examination of Trade Is War and other
xii Preface
metaphors demonstrates. Second, I challenge categorical violation. Cat-

egorical violation argues that metaphor amounts to a false assertion of
category. By challenging categorical violation, I demonstrate that much
theoretical and experimental exploration of metaphor is driven by an
erroneous idea of what a metaphor is. Third, I begin an examination of
mapping, an account of metaphor that offers important insights into
metaphor’s functioning. I argue that while mapping is important, it can-
not be considered without reference to such rhetorical functions as pref-
erence, minimum conditions, and rhetorical modulation.
In chapter 5, “The Story of Metaphor,” I demonstrate that metaphor
is closely linked to story-based constructions of the world. In particular,
I argue that the way we understand and produce metaphors depends upon
what I call licensing stories. Because metaphors are “licensed” by stories,
whether we find any given metaphor to be apt is not, as has been thought,
a matter of generating workable mappings. Instead, metaphors are evalu-
ated with respect to social, political, and philosophical import. My ar-
gument is based largely upon focus groups conducted for this study. But
the relation between metaphor and story is evident in trade discourse
more generally, as is shown at the close of the chapter. There, I present a
case study of the metaphors and stories used to characterize Bill Gates,
the chairman of Microsoft, Inc.
In chapter 6, “Metaphor, Culture, and Community,” I caution against
the too-pervasive conclusions about metaphor and culture that have be-
come popular in recent years. Because of current intense interest in meta-
phor, it is tempting to attribute sweeping cultural significance to it. But
a view of metaphor as rhetorically constituted works against this ten-
dency. When we consider metaphor’s rhetorical constitution, we are
forced to confront not a stealthy, omnipresent force but rather a patterned
fragmentation of considered thought. It is more productive, therefore, to
consider important metaphors in relation to discourse communities and
the rhetorical etiquettes they enact.
Finally, in chapter 7, “Conclusion,” I argue that the analysis I have
presented is something more than an academic exercise. The conversa-
tion of metaphors that constitutes Trade Is War, like other metaphoric
conversations, calls for both criticism and critique. It is good to under-
stand how metaphor works. It is better still to enter into metaphoric con-
versations, no matter how intimidatingly large and entrenched, in order
to affect the necessary political and social consequences of what we say.
One of the lessons of rhetoric, and thus one of the lessons of metaphor as
rhetorically constituted, is that writing and speech can never be accurately
characterized as “only rhetoric.” Trade Is War and the conversation of
which it is a part cannot justly be described as “only metaphors.”
Preface xiii
Acknowledgments
Most authors observe that their books have been a long time in the mak-
ing and could not have been completed without the help of others. I see
no call here for originality. This book was indeed a long time in the mak-
ing and could not have been completed without the help of others. I
wish here to thank the three people who were most helpful at its incep-
tion. I thank Gregory Colomb for giving me his lively conversation, pro-
ductive skepticism, and many good ideas. I thank Paul Prior for being
so generous with his time and insight. I thank Nina Baym for her good
judgment and good eye. I also thank the anonymous readers for their valu-
able comments. For her willingness to take an unpredictable life’s jour-
ney, my wife, Mary Lou, deserves more thanks than anyone.
I thank Lester Thurow for permission to use material from my inter-
view with him. I also thank the journals Written Communication and Po-
etics Today for allowing me to include material from previously published
articles. Portions of chapter 2 and chapter 3 were published in “Concep-
tual Metaphor as Rhetorical Response: A Reconsideration of Metaphor,”
Written Communication 16.2 (April 1999): 171–99, © 1999 Sage Pub-
lications, Inc. Portions of chapter 4 were published in “The Story of Con-
ceptual Metaphor: What Motivates Metaphoric Mappings?” Poetics
Today 20.3 (1999): 419–42.
1
A Conversation among Metaphors
Being neighbors, [trade partners] are necessarily enemies, and the
wealth and power of each becomes, upon that account, more for-
midable to the other; and what would increase the advantage of
national friendship, serves only to inflame the violence of national
animosity.
—Adam Smith, The Wealth of Nations, 1776
Foreign trade is a war in which each party seeks to extract wealth

from the other.
—Honda Rimei, Tokugawa philosopher, 1744–1821
The way to conquer the foreign artisan is not to kill him, but to beat
his work. . . . The American workman who strikes ten blows with
his hammer whilst the foreign workman only strikes one, is as really
vanquishing that foreigner as if the blows were aimed at and told
on his person.
—Ralph Waldo Emerson, The Conduct of Life, 1860
Metaphor is usually seen as a sentence-level phenomenon—a nonliteral

figure of speech governed by localized rules of operation, linguistic or
cognitive. When the larger import of metaphor is acknowledged, this ac-
knowledgment is all too often a matter of hastily attaching metaphor to
rhetoric. Metaphor, it is asserted, functions on the sentence level but can
be used as a rhetorical tool. But this is backwards. Most metaphors are
thoroughly caught up in the larger give-and-take of rhetoric. They are
fundamentally shaped by surrounding, subsuming conversations that are
informed by politics, philosophy, economics, social and professional con-
cerns—in short, by the whole of our cultural and conceptual repertoire.
The question, then, is how do we forge a sufficient theoretical connec-
tion between rhetoric at large and metaphors in particular?
One way to begin is to examine not individual metaphors but group-
ings of metaphors. George Lakoff and Mark Johnson took the first step
toward explaining how metaphors work in relation to one another in
1
2 A Conversation among Metaphors
Metaphors We Live By, identifying groupings of metaphors now com-

monly called “conceptual metaphors.” Lakoff and Johnson point out that
metaphors such as attacking, destroying, and defending arguments do not
stand in isolation but rather share cognitive structures with other instances
of the conceptual metaphor Argument Is War. They also point out that
Argument Is War is more than a phenomenon of the brain. It is a prod-
uct of our culture. In English, we rely upon numerous conceptual meta-
phors such as Happy Is Up, Life Is A Journey, Love Is A Physical Force,
The Mind Is A Machine, Understanding Is Seeing, Ideas Are Food, and
dozens more. The idea of conceptual metaphor is the fundamental tool
we need in order to understand the rhetorical constitution of metaphor.1
In this book, I will examine one conceptual metaphor and its rhetori-
cal milieu: Trade Is War. In doing so, I will focus on a different kind of
data than has so far been important in studies of conceptual metaphor.
Previous studies of conceptual metaphor have relied mainly upon single-
word idioms, single-sentence clichés, and very brief quotations, presented
with little or no context. This kind of data has been more than sufficient
to establish the presence and importance of conceptual metaphors. But
it brackets off the communicative setting needed to understand meta-
phor’s integral relation to rhetoric. When we take into account the many
concrete locutions that make up a conceptual metaphor, we find impor-
tant patterns of variation—rhetorically constituted patterns of use that
give us reason to reconsider how conceptual metaphors work. Further-
more, by examining the connection between metaphoric groupings and
rhetoric, we can explain the smaller—not to say unimportant—operations
of metaphor that traditional accounts have failed to explain. When we
view metaphor as rhetorically constituted, we can improve upon the best
accounts of metaphor offered under the rubric of conceptual metaphor,
and we can abandon traditional accounts of metaphor almost entirely.
Instances of Trade Is War are found wherever English speakers dis-
cuss trade and commerce. The metaphor has been with us at least since
the late Renaissance. Today, we re-envoice it most commonly in the stan-
dard locution trade war, but we also speak routinely of conquering mar-
kets, of having retaliatory tariffs in our arsenal, of battling for economic
supremacy, and so on. However, noting a few common locutions gives
us little insight into Trade Is War. It is important to examine the variety
of concrete expressions that constitute Trade Is War and to take into
account the communicative milieu that subsumes particular instances.
Thus, I will take up instances of Trade Is War in the print news media,
on television discussion shows, in academic works, in popular nonfiction
books, in novels, in economic commentary from the past, and in focus
group conversations.
The ways we see trade as war are many, some of them routine, others
surprising. For instance, in a secretly recorded FBI tape, a Fortune 500
A Conversation among Metaphors 3
executive uses a particularly striking trade-as-war metaphor. The FBI’s

mole, a corporate vice president, finds it reprehensible, writing:
Then [Terry Wilson] said something that was a common phrase

around ADM, a phrase that turns up lots of times on the tapes. It
was our philosophy. Terry used to say it, and Mick [the son of
Dwayne Andreas, ADM’s chairman] would say it: “The competitor
is our friend, and the customer is our enemy.” There are tapes of
Mick Andreas quoting his father as always saying this.2 (Whitacre
55, emphasis added)
Whether we are offended or amused by “the customer is the enemy,” most

of us would recognize that this metaphor is unusual. It is backwards. After
all, isn’t the customer supposed to be our friend, and the competitor our
enemy? In fact, the competitor, whether a corporation or a country, is al-
most always our enemy in Trade Is War. That is why we want to defeat
our competitors. That is why we battle for economic supremacy. That is
why we have trade wars.
Trade Is War is like other conceptual metaphors in that it encompasses
a broad range of similar metaphors. However, as we can see from this
single example, there is more to any instance of Trade Is War than just
membership in a metaphoric grouping. Not only do we recognize the pos-
sibility of metaphorizing trade as war, we also recognize that there are
appropriate and inappropriate ways of doing it. This would not be so if
each instance operated independently. That is, in order for the concep-
tual metaphor to be said the wrong way, there must be a right way, a way
that is culturally entrenched. ADM’s private war cry would not have its
surprise value if it were not contradicting what we all assume to be true.
In short, Trade Is War must have a standard rhetoric. And here, there is
much to say about Trade Is War in particular and about conceptual
metaphors in general.
Trade Is War takes part in a far-flung and complex conversation. This
conversation comprises a broad exchange of politically and philosophi-
cally inflected discourse—in the mainstream media, in academic publi-
cations, in public speeches and debate, in private conversations, in all of
the writing and speaking that makes up trade talk. In order to see the
workings of Trade Is War, we have to look at how the conversation is
constituted. Trade Is War takes part in a conversation among metaphors,
but that conversation is woven into the fabric of a larger conversation
we can call the discourse of trade.
The discourse of trade is real enough; we know it when we read it and
hear it. But it does not exist discretely any more than the discourse of
economics or the discourse of the law or the discourse of the experimen-
tal article. The discourse of trade is nested within, overlaps, subsumes,
and is subsumed by the discourses of economics, business, politics, gov-
ernment, and perhaps other discourses. Where these discourses converge

upon trade, we often find Trade Is War. My effort here is to describe not
the “internal” workings of Trade Is War but rather to describe Trade Is
War as a dynamic constituent of the discourse of trade. Ultimately, I will
argue that we cannot usefully analyze Trade Is War (or any other meta-
phor) without at the same time analyzing the discourses that catalyze and
shape each metaphoric utterance and the patterns these utterances form.
Trade Discourse: Strange Bedfellows and Standard Rhetorics

For all its complexity, the discourse of trade can be described in a general
way. We can identify standard rhetorical positions with respect to recur-
ring controversies, and we can identify stable thematic constituents, es-
pecially recurrent metaphors that function in patterned ways. It is tempt-
ing to use these recurrent metaphors as a toehold, hoping to work our way
from the particular expression to the general rhetoric. But a more fruit-
ful approach—because metaphors cannot be well understood apart from
their rhetorical milieu—is to consider the broad conversation first, exam-
ining recurrent metaphors in light of a guiding rhetoric. To begin, I offer
a microcosm of trade discourse: a single edition from CNN’s Crossfire.
Four Discussants, Eight Positions

The topic of the program (titled “Head-On Collision”) is a proposed U.S.
tariff on Japanese luxury cars. Crossfire features two hosts, one from the
political left, one from the political right, who typically interview (or more
accurately, argue with) two ideologically opposed guests, liberal grilling
conservative and conservative grilling liberal. In this edition of Crossfire,
indicative of the complexity of all trade discourse in the United States,
the alignments are more complex. Ordinarily ideological opponents, the
hosts are united in their opposition to the proposed tariff. Similarly, the
guests come from opposing camps, but both favor the tariff. The hosts
are Michael Kinsley, a liberal television commentator and a onetime editor
of the New Republic, and John Sununu, a former Bush administration
chief of staff and former Republican governor of New Hampshire. Their
guests are Sander Levin, a Democratic congressional representative from
Michigan, and Andrew Card, the current president of the American Auto-
mobile Manufacturers’ Association and a former secretary of transpor-
tation under President Bush.
It is by design that Crossfire presents opposing sides of an issue, but
it is inherent in the discourse of trade that there will be opposing sides,
even if those sides cannot be dichotomized easily. In recent years, when
faced with trade controversies, Republicans and Democrats often find
their houses divided and themselves aligned with habitual opponents.
New York Times columnist Thomas Friedman suggests that this frequent
realignment has created what might be called a four-party system (“New
American Politics”).
According to Friedman, in the past Democrats and Republicans have
been easy to pigeonhole. Democrats have favored a government-provided
social safety net; Republicans have opposed government as a social guar-
antor, aligning themselves with laissez-faire economics and, not coinci-
dentally, big business interests.3 With the coming of the global econ-
omy, which has been hastened by NAFTA (the North American Free
Trade Agreement), the political parties are divided internally by trade con-
troversies, making for a four-way split. Friedman configures the “four-
party system” as follows: those who favor both a social safety net and free
trade, those who favor a social safety net but oppose free trade, those
who oppose both a social safety net and free trade, and those who op-
pose a social safety net but favor free trade.
Although Friedman’s scheme does not account for every political
nuance in U.S. politics, it represents well the alignments on Crossfire.
Kinsley is a free-trade liberal, Sununu a free-trade conservative. Levin is
a protectionist liberal, Card a protectionist conservative. (I assign these
labels notwithstanding the pejorative connotation of “protectionist.”
Even hard-liners such as Patrick Buchanan prefer phrases such as “eco-
nomic nationalist.”)
These multiple alignments can help us make sense of the trade rheto-
ric displayed on Crossfire. Participants may agree on an immediate goal,
but their way of conversing is shaded by other commitments. In other
words, even when people share an immediate rhetorical purpose, such
as persuading the public that trade sanctions are a good idea, they bring
to that purpose individuated sets of political, economic, philosophical,
and social momentums. They enter the conversation with what I call a
discursive trajectory.
Here are a few brief, representative excerpts from Crossfire:
Sununu: Let’s talk about getting hurt. Aren’t you afraid that even
if you’re right that you get a resulting trade war that depresses
everybody’s economies, and your workers and your companies
end up getting hurt even worse?
Levin: No. No, no. You know, trade is—trade abroad is like trade
at home, you have to push for yourself, and that’s what
bothers me about the position of the opposition. They’ve got a
wall here. How the—how is the wall going to come down, I
ask you? We’ve been at this not for 20 months, but for 10
years on auto parts. The only way it’s going to come down is if
we push and the Japanese understand we’re serious. This time
we’re serious. . . .
Kinsley: The point is what President Clinton is going to propose

tomorrow is going to be a tax on American consumers.
Card: It’s out of frustration that we’re saying we have to take a
stick out and hit Japan with that stick, and we don’t want to
have to take that stick out. Japan could solve this problem
tomorrow by opening its market.
Kinsley: Well, I wonder. I wonder if you don’t want to take the
stick out. I mean, the fact is, if there is a tariff slapped on
Japanese cars, that will enable your client, the American
manufacturers, to raise their prices, won’t it?
Levin: Hey, Mike, can I break in here? Because I’ve heard this
song and dance before. . . .
Sununu: Andy Card, isn’t this just a game of chicken and we’re
going to see who blinks at the last minute?
Card: Well, the Japanese have refused to blink for the last 20
years. This time President Clinton, Ambassador Kantor are
dead serious. They’re saying, “Open your market. We want to
see progress. Change has got to come,” and the change has got
to come in the Japanese market. It’s not change in the U.S.
market. It’s change in the Japanese market.
Sununu: And you—you have no concern about a trade war
spreading around the world? Asian Pacific partners to the U.S.
are watching what’s happening here, and they’re saying, “If
you can do this to Japan, you can do it [to us].”
Card: John, I’m actually more afraid than that. I’m afraid that the
Japanese sanctuary market will become the copy around the
world. There should be no sanctuary markets. We want to see
free trade in Japan. We want to keep the Japanese manufactur-
ers honest—
Levin: Look, every time—I don’t understand this. Every time
America stands up for its workers and businesses in trade, you
yell trade war. (“Head-On Collision” 2–6)
The above excerpts are, of course, heavily laden with metaphors that
signal speakers’ political and philosophical bent. But all language, meta-
phoric or literal, can always bear a load of political, economic, and philo-
sophical associations. Both the speakers (whose agendas are known) and
their language choices (language carries the residue of previous agendas)
are inflected by a particular discursive trajectory.
Levin, the protectionist liberal, signals his discursive trajectory by call-
ing sanctions an instance when “America stands up for its workers and
businesses in trade”—in that order. His priority is to safeguard local in-
terests, workers first, businesses second. Moreover, his view is well known
to John Sununu, who preserves the ordering of workers and businesses
in his initial question: “Aren’t you afraid that . . . your workers and your
companies end up getting hurt even worse?” Representative Levin’s dis-
trict includes both the auto manufacturers and their employees, but as a
mainstream Democrat he re-envoices the words of the labor movement.
He is concerned about workers—not the workforce or employees or hu-
man resources. The word workers, no doubt, has other associations that
resonate beyond the conversation at hand, as far afield as Daily Worker.
Yet a competent listener knows that this inflection is almost certainly ab-
horrent to Levin.
Card, the protectionist conservative, is less interested in workers than
in the consequences of trade policy on American manufacturers, expressed
in his mistrust of “Japanese manufacturers.” American manufacturers are
global entities with global interests, and this perspective is embraced by
Card. Just as Levin’s local perspective is signaled by his use of workers,
Card’s global perspective is signaled by his emphasis upon the word
market. Card invents an administration message to the Japanese: “Open
your market. We want to see progress. Change has got to come.” He adds
to that, “And the change has got to come in the Japanese market. It’s
not change in the U.S. market. It’s change in the Japanese market.” And
since his concern is about markets as an international system, he expresses
global alarm: “I’m afraid that the Japanese sanctuary market will become
the copy around the world.”
We can see, then, that while Levin and Card are allies in this discus-
sion of trade, their discursive trajectories remain quite different. On the
other hand, the trajectories of opponents Card and Sununu, as well as
opponents Levin and Kinsley, show marked similarities. Note the global
perspective shared by Card and Sununu in this exchange:
Sununu: Asian Pacific partners to the U.S. are watching what’s
happening here, and they’re saying, “If you can do this to
Japan, you can do it [to us].”
Card: I’m actually more afraid than that. I’m afraid that the
Japanese sanctuary market will become the copy around
the world.
Card does not challenge Sununu’s perspective on the trade problem but
instead embraces and intensifies it. As fellow conservatives, they are not
concerned about protecting a social safety net at home, a net that would
protect workers, but rather they align themselves with global corpora-
tions, which can sometimes thrive when the social safety net, manifested
by unionism, is removed.
Fellow liberals Levin and Kinsley, though opponents with respect to
tariffs, treat trade as a local problem. However, even though they share
a local perspective, they exhibit nuanced differences between their dis-
cursive trajectories. To Levin, trade unfairness is a problem for workers
first, and businesses (important mainly because they employ workers)
second. But Kinsley decries sanctions as “a tax on American consumers.”

Kinsley’s local approach is distinct from Levin’s; it is the viewpoint not
of unionism but rather of a more recent vintage of liberalism, more anti–
big business than pro–blue collar, more in sympathy with consumers and
minorities than with workers per se.
The Inflection of Metaphors

We are accustomed to recognizing the inflections of words; thus, it is not
especially controversial to argue that words are informed by speakers’
rhetorical purposes and discursive trajectories (compare Bakhtin, “Dis-
course” 275–88). However, the study of metaphor has all but ignored the
communicative complex that surrounds and supports individual meta-
phors, ranges of metaphors that constitute conceptual metaphors, and
interactive groupings of conceptual metaphors. Yet just as we can see how
the inflections of such key words as worker, market, and consumer are
integral to the Crossfire discussion, we also need to see how key meta-
phors are inflected and how they interact with one another.
The most prominent metaphor in the Crossfire discussion is Trade Is
War. The possibility of a U.S.-Japan trade war is what draws speakers
into conversation. The phrase trade war is uttered not just at the begin-
ning and end of the Crossfire segment quoted but at the beginning and
the end of the program as broadcast. It also occurs at emphatic moments,
sparking pointed comments all around. Thus, trade war cannot be re-
garded as a disposable decoration but instead expresses a central con-
troversy in international relations. It carries philosophical and political
freight and is inflected by the explicitly expressed and already known dis-
cursive trajectories of those who give it voice. When Sununu, the globalist,
speaks of a trade war, it is only in order to denounce those who would
risk one. When Levin, the localist, utters trade war, it is only in order to
defuse alarmist inflections of it—to make Sununu’s trade war seem a
careless exaggeration.
As important as Trade Is War may be, both to Crossfire and to the
discourse of trade at large, it does not operate alone: it participates in a
conversation among metaphors. A range of expressions named by Trade
Is War perennially compete and converse with other trade metaphors—
metaphors usually of games, containers, friendships, and journeys. In
general, these metaphors function as either adjuncts or contradictions to
Trade Is War. But their specific way of functioning—in a specific so-
ciohistoric moment, uttered by a concrete speaker—depends upon the
speaker’s rhetorical purpose and discursive trajectory: trade metaphors
conform both to speakers’ immediate goals and to their general political
and philosophical orientations. On Crossfire, the discussants enact a com-
plex rhetorical etiquette: claiming, ascribing, substituting, attenuating,

and intensifying metaphors in order to meet rhetorical needs.
Consider first the interplay between Trade Is War and Markets Are
Containers. Sununu challenges Levin with the Trade Is War metaphor:
“Aren’t you afraid that even if you’re right that you get a resulting trade
war?” Levin rejects not only Sununu’s assertion but also his metaphor,
answering, “They’ve got a wall here. How the—how is the wall going
to come down, I ask you? We’ve been at this not for 20 months, but for
10 years on auto parts. The only way it’s going to come down is if we
push.” Levin counters Sununu’s war metaphor with a wall metaphor,
which is an instance of Markets Are Containers. But this is not a mere
duel of metaphor preferences.
Levin accomplishes much by substituting his metaphor for Sununu’s.
First, he resists Sununu’s ascription of Trade Is War to him. In order not
to allow Sununu to pin Trade Is War’s presumed political and philosophi-
cal commitments on him—commitments to unyielding nationalism and
to aggressive, risky action—Levin shifts from Trade Is War to Markets
Are Containers. Second, by shifting metaphors and avoiding talk of
war, Levin turns down the rhetorical temperature. This allows him to
maintain his position in favor of tariffs without emphasizing potential
hazards. Third, Levin ascribes his attenuated metaphor, Markets Are
Containers, to the Japanese. According to Levin, it is the Japanese who
have made their market into a container, one that we have every right to
open. And that is not starting a trade war at all. Levin’s maneuver is a
skilled one, executed in dangerous territory. Markets Are Containers is
a risky metaphor. It is often poised on the edge of Trade Is War because
Trade Is War entails Markets Are Containers. Conventionally, war in-
volves conquering and defending territory—something contained by
borders. At the conclusion of a war, the victor typically expands its bor-
ders to contain more territory. If trade is war, then the spoils of war,
markets, must be conquerable: they must be something contained. The
wall that Levin evokes might suggest the wall of a fortress as it is as-
saulted by a throng of warriors. Or it might suggest the Berlin Wall, the
concrete corollary to the Iron Curtain, perhaps the most conspicuous
symbol of the Cold War, which was as much an active trade war as it was
a potential nuclear holocaust.
However, Levin not only shifts to an alternative metaphor, he attenu-
ates his chosen metaphor. His “push” suggests a bare-handed push that
tumbles a freestanding wall—not a particularly militaristic image. He
might well have said that we must destroy, demolish, or obliterate the
wall—images that more strongly suggest war—but he avoids this rhetori-
cal pitfall. He is able to do this because while Trade Is War entails Mar-
kets Are Containers, Markets Are Containers does not entail Trade Is War.
That is, Markets Are Containers often has a military association, but it
can also be benign—as in the routine marketing term barrier to entry.
How the competition between metaphors plays out depends very much
upon the discursive trajectory of the speaker and upon the way in which
the standard rhetoric of the metaphor is followed.
In this instance, Levin’s discursive trajectory works to his advantage.
I have called Levin a “protectionist” for syntactic convenience, but the
term, with its bellicose connotation, is explicitly rejected by mainstream
Democrats such as Levin. Thus, an opponent may attempt to ascribe
Trade Is War to Levin, but the charge is unlikely to stick. In addition,
when Levin simultaneously ascribes and attenuates Markets Are Contain-
ers, his maneuver is part of a standard rhetorical etiquette. It is rhetori-
cally typical to use nonincendiary instantiations of Markets Are Contain-
ers such as the market as pie or the market surrounded by a surmountable
barrier. Moreover, whatever combative resonances remain are usually
ascribed to the Japanese, whom Western commentators regularly paint
as overaggressive traders.
Well-modulated as Levin’s wall metaphor may be, Sununu finds the
wall metaphor unpersuasive. Minutes later he confronts Levin’s ally,
Card, saying, “And you—you have no concern about a trade war spread-
ing around the world?” Card attempts to deflect the hot-button meta-
phor, but Levin breaks in out of turn to issue a challenge: “Every time—
I don’t understand this. Every time America stands up for its workers and
businesses in trade, you yell trade war.” Levin refuses to have Trade Is
War ascribed to him or his ally. Soon the tug between war and container
metaphors continues. After a commercial break, Levin elaborates, esca-
lating the container metaphor somewhat, while doggedly maintaining his
ascription of Markets Are Containers to the Japanese. He complains that
Japanese informal barriers are “this high,” that you can’t “get through.”
“You ought to be urging us to knock down those walls,” he says. In the
end, though, neither Sununu nor Kinsley accept Levin’s metaphor. Kinsley
claims that history shows one tariff always leads to another, and that
leads to a trade war. Sununu agrees that trade wars have been costly to
many economies.
Like Levin, Card deflects Trade Is War whenever it is ascribed to him.
And like Levin, he does so in ways that are rhetorically complex—ways
that permit him to reject Trade Is War without sacrificing his favoring
of tariffs. At one point, he accepts the Trade Is War orientation but at-
tenuates it, shifting to a less violent stick metaphor: “It’s out of frustra-
tion that we’re saying we have to take a stick out and hit Japan with that
stick, and we don’t want to have to take that stick out.” By speaking of
a stick, he softens likely images and associations. As with Levin’s wall
metaphor, stick images are less rhetorically heated than nuclear bombs
or artillery attacks, probably less heated than swords or muskets. A stick

is, generally speaking, not thought of as a weapon of war but rather as a
homemade weapon, as in sticks and stones. (We might recall the rhetorical
advantage the Palestinian intifada gained because the Palestinians threw
rocks rather than firing guns.) Where trade and business are concerned,
they also suggest a standard business metaphor involving a mule: the
carrot and the stick. For example, in describing the growth of the Ameri-
can Tobacco Company, one writer observes that the company succeeded
by “alternately employing the stick of price wars and the carrot of at-
tractive buyout offers” (Franzen 42, emphasis added).
To the extent that Card accepts Trade Is War by using a stick meta-
phor, he does so reluctantly, careful not to claim fully even an attenuated
form of the metaphor. Often, he rejects it altogether, as when he counters
Trade Is War with Markets Are Containers. “I’m afraid that the Japanese
sanctuary market will become the copy around the world. There should
be no sanctuary markets.” This is in keeping with Levin’s wall metaphor;
both wall and sanctuary metaphors treat markets as containers, spaces
cordoned off from the rest of the world. Like Levin’s wall metaphor, Card’s
sanctuary metaphor is poised on the edge of Trade Is War. Sanctuaries
are often places that keep out hostile soldiers; to grant sanctuary is of-
ten to protect against military aggression. Thus, when Card argues that
there should be no sanctuary markets, he may be suggesting that Japan
should not be protected against commercial warfare. But Card moves
quickly to ward off this aggressive implication, insisting he is only inter-
ested in what is best for everyone: “We want to see free trade in Japan.”
The exchange of metaphors in this discussion (and in the discourse of
trade generally) is no simple give and take, metaphor versus metaphor.
Levin and Card follow a similar rhetorical etiquette, resisting ascription
of Trade Is War to them, ascribing Markets Are Containers to the Japa-
nese, and attenuating metaphors in order to make their protariff position
less disturbing. But even as they follow a similar etiquette, their divergent
discursive trajectories remain. When Levin wants to push down the Japa-
nese trade wall, he is motivated by a desire to protect American work-
ers. Card reluctantly pummels the Japanese with a metaphorical stick and
opposes sanctuary markets in order to establish global free trade, which
may or may not help Levin’s workers. The conceptual metaphors are the
same. The rhetorical etiquette and attendant maneuvers are the same. But
the discursive trajectories that inflect the metaphors are different.
All of the metaphors that routinely animate the discourse of trade are
shaped and reshaped by this rhetorical complexity. Sununu, who persis-
tently ascribes Trade Is War to his opponents, also ascribes an intensified
version of Trade Is A Game to them: “Andy Card, isn’t this just a game
of chicken and we’re going to see who blinks at the last minute?” Sununu’s
intensified game metaphor does not undermine Trade Is War the way, say,
basketball or soccer metaphors might. Most game metaphors comport
with the metaphor Trade Is Friendship, since games are played among
friends. But Sununu selects a deadly, irrational game, often played by earn-
est rivals. At the same time, Sununu’s game metaphor is a metaphor of
travel, an instance of Trade Is A Journey, normally a peaceful trade meta-
phor. But trade-as-chicken suggests aberrant travel, where trading part-
ners who should be moving down the road of commerce together drive
toward each other, indicated by the show’s title, “Head-On Collision.”
This twenty minutes of Crossfire includes many more exchanges of
this sort. In fact, it includes nearly all of the major conceptual metaphors
that help to constitute the discourse of trade. This is not incidental. So
pervasive are these metaphors that any twenty-minute English-language
trade discussion is likely to call upon a full range of related metaphors.
Moreover, the rhetorical complexity of such discussion is likely to be
commensurate. The point is this: This edition of Crossfire is not extraor-
dinary. It is everyday. Because it is part of the large, entrenched discourse
of trade and because the discourse of trade encompasses a patterned con-
versation among metaphors, we can understand it in the light of rhetori-
cal regularities.
2
Beyond Aristotle’s Algebra
War belongs to the province of business competition, which is also
the conflict of human interests.
—Karl von Clausewitz, On War, 1832
Trade is warfare by other means, and the United States is losing.

—Michael R. Kerley, letter to the New York Times, 1996
The conversation that surrounds and subsumes metaphors is a sizable

thing to ignore. Yet metaphor theory has largely ignored it, from Aristotle
to the present. In fact, we can trace a direct line from Aristotle to current
metaphor theory that explains how we have been able to disregard meta-
phor’s involvement in rhetorical discourse. Twentieth-century theorists
purport to take a dim, or at least an ambivalent, view of Aristotle. While
they almost universally praise him as the best of the early commentators,
they argue simultaneously that Aristotle was mistaken in important ways.
The preeminent Max Black offers the “interaction” view as a corrective
to Aristotle (“Metaphor” 38–47, “More” 27–39). Paul Ricoeur tempers
his tribute to Aristotle with phrases such as, “Aristotle himself did not
exploit the idea of categorical transgression” (21). Eva Feder Kittay writes
generously that Aristotle “almost got it right” but offers a corrective
“perspectival” view (22–23, 138, 176, 301). But in the end, even though
theorists agree that Aristotle got the answers about metaphor wrong, they
leave it to him to define the questions. Thus, his influence is palpable even
in theories that claim to supersede him.
This dilemma has been noted by Umberto Eco, who laments that Aris-
totle is the source of an impasse:
Of the thousands and thousands of pages written about the meta-
phor, few add anything of substance to the first two or three fun-
damental concepts stated by Aristotle. In effect very little has been
said about a phenomenon concerning which, it seems, there is every-
thing to say. (88)
13
14 Beyond Aristotle’s Algebra
Eco is correct that metaphor theory, even as it struggles to go beyond Aris-

totle, finds itself affirming what Aristotle took only a few pages to ex-
plain. But we need not share Eco’s despair. It is more accurate to say that
recent work on metaphor, from I. A. Richards to the collective contribu-
tion of cognitive science, has provided a detailed account of metaphor that
is built upon a bedrock of Aristotle, limited not by the insightfulness of
metaphor theorists but by the Aristotelian way of looking.
Aristotle sees metaphor as a complex expression that is ultimately re-
ducible to two unproblematic parts. He begins by defining metaphor as
“the movement of an alien name” from one location to another (“Word
Choice” 295). This observation might have opened the door to a rich and
nuanced understanding of metaphor had Aristotle’s intellectual bent been
different or if he had not been otherwise occupied with laying ground-
work for Western thought in almost every imaginable area. In his brief
discussion of metaphor, he proffers numerous examples of “alien names”
that are complex indeed—examples that reveal basic ways of conceptu-
alizing human activity as life cycles, agriculture, economics, journeys, war,
and so on. In Poetics, he proffers: to speak of evening as the “old age of
the day”; to say of the sun it is “sowing divine fire” (“Word Choice” 296,
emphasis added). In On Rhetoric, he proffers: “The maidens, I note, are
in arrears in their marriages”; “My path of words is through the midst
of Chares’ actions” (224, 246–47, emphasis added). He himself meta-
phorizes that Gorgias speaks “without sparring or warm-up,” a sport-
inflected variant of the metaphor Lakoff and Johnson call Argument Is
War (On Rhetoric 265, emphasis added).
But rather than pursue large metaphoric patterns, Aristotle focuses
upon the dual structure buried within the alien name. That is, when an
alien name—a metaphor—emigrates from one place to another, two
semantic domains play a role. When Aristotle says that Gorgias speaks
“without sparring or warm-up,” these alien names move from the do-
main of boxing to the domain of oratory. Two places, two parts. Then,
having split the metaphor in two, Aristotle performs a bit of linguistic
algebra, asserting that all metaphors can be reduced to two-part expres-
sions: similes.
He explains: “A simile is also a metaphor; for there is little difference:
when the poet says, ‘He rushed as a lion,’ it is a simile, but ‘The lion
rushed’ would be a metaphor” (On Rhetoric 229). Citing numerous
graceful similes, he concludes: “Whichever are approved when spoken
as metaphors clearly will make similes too, and similes are metaphors
needing an explanatory word” (230). No doubt, Ricoeur is correct in
lauding Aristotle’s subordination of simile to metaphor and is not entirely
mistaken in pointing out its chief advantage:
Beyond Aristotle’s Algebra 15
Furthermore, the transfer [of meaning from one semantic domain to

another] rests on a perceived resemblance that simile makes explicit
by means of its characteristic terms of comparison. The closeness of
metaphor to simile brings to language the relationship that operates
in metaphor without being articulated, and confirms that the inspired
art of metaphor always consists in the apprehension of resemblances.
We shall say that simile explicitly displays the moment of resemblance
that operates implicitly in metaphor. (27)
Metaphor does involve, in part, the movement of meaning from one do-
main to another. And this movement is, in a sense, displayed in simile.
But the limitations that arise from saying that simile “explicitly displays”
the operations of metaphor are considerable.
To habitually restate metaphor as a simile, a this-equals-that formu-
lation, reflects an understandable desire to get metaphor under control.
Twentieth-century theorists usually restate metaphors in the form A is B.
Replacing knowns with unknowns is advantageous in algebra. It gives
us flexibility by providing variables that can later be replaced with spe-
cific numbers. But in metaphor theory, this kind of symbolic restatement
is not helpful at all. When we replace knowns—words—with abstract
symbols, we abandon all of the things that make metaphor work. We
ignore the fluid, multifarious associations that are part and parcel of
communication.
The move toward the metaphor of A is B begins with Aristotle, and
the difficulties with his methodology are evident. When Aristotle extracts
the simile “he rushed as a lion” from the metaphor “the lion rushed,”
he comments, rather offhandedly, that the essence of the lion metaphor,
whether in metaphor or simile form, is that “both [the lion and the man]
are brave” (On Rhetoric 229). Instead of seeing metaphor as a dynamic
alien name, he sees it as a static, two-part expression that can be ana-
lyzed by identifying equivalent features. He begins with a dynamic, mean-
ing-based notion of metaphor—open to all of the complexities attendant
to communicative situatedness—and almost immediately abandons messy
pursuit for pithy analysis. Worse, his analysis is wrong.
When we say he rushed like a lion (where he refers to Achilles), the
simile does not depend upon bravery as a preexistent feature of lion, even
if the expression makes sense as a description of bravery. Max Black first
exposed this Aristotelian weakness, dubbing it the “comparison” view,
the notion that metaphor compares features that are inherently similar
(“Metaphor” 35). According to Black’s influential “interaction theory,”
metaphor involves systems of associated commonplaces—features that
are projected from one term of a metaphor to the other, whether or not
these features are apparent before the metaphor is produced. Metaphor,
therefore, creates (Black uses “create” in a loose sense) similarity, rather

than reports it. In a Blackian analysis, bravery would be part of a “sys-
tem of associated commonplaces” or an “implicative complex” that is
activated by the metaphor. Bravery only becomes salient when a human
being—especially a brave human being—is likened to a lion. In this sense,
the two terms of metaphor “interact,” altering not just our idea of the
human being but also our idea of the lion.
As helpful as Black’s kind analysis is, it is nonetheless Aristotelian in
its scope. For that reason, it contains its own errors. Metaphor—for Black,
for his intellectual progenitor I. A. Richards, and for virtually all impor-
tant twentieth-century theorists—is a bifurcated expression consisting of
a tenor and a vehicle, or a focus and a frame, or target and source do-
mains. (The terms are roughly interchangeable.) Metaphor has become
not just reducible to an Aristotelian equation, it has become the equa-
tion. Increasingly, metaphor is seen as a differential equation of sorts, or
what Ricoeur has schematized as terms “a and a'” (206). In turn, the
central question of metaphor has become not how does metaphor work,
but how do the two parts of metaphor work in relation to each other?
In what sense do the two sides of the equation equate? What are the
structural rules that govern the equation of A and B? How can we pre-
dict which features will become salient in a metaphor?
In other words, metaphor theorists have performed what Thomas
Kuhn has called “normal science,” a kind of “research firmly based upon
one or more past scientific achievements, achievements that some partic-
ular scientific community acknowledges for a time as supplying the foun-
dation for its further practice” (10). In other words, metaphor theorists
have done fine brushwork on an Aristotelian canvas. And the Aristote-
lian paradigm has been detailed with extraordinary care and creativity,
giving us not only a lexicon with which to discuss metaphor but also a
workable, if incomplete, notion of metaphor’s way of meaning. To be
sure, normal science can be beneficial. Yet there is a great deal to be ex-
plained that cannot be explained by looking where Aristotle looked.
Metaphor cannot be observed well as an abstraction. To see metaphor
as an equation, even a differential equation, is to understand metaphor
and perhaps all language as removable from its communicative circum-
stances—apart from its relevant conversation. Black is explicit about this:
I propose to distinguish what is identified merely by a formula like
the “metaphor of A as B,” without further specification of its con-
textual use, as a metaphor theme, regarded as an abstraction from
the metaphorical statements in which it does or might occur. A meta-
phor-theme is available for repeated use, adaption, and modification
by a variety of speakers or thinkers on any number of occasions.
(“More” 24)
Black does not claim that communicative circumstances do not matter

at all; he merely finds them peripheral. His analyses culminate in abstrac-
tion: “G consists of certain statements, say Pa, Qb . . .” (“More” 29).
However, when we consider metaphor’s rhetorical constitution, we are
able to question the conclusions of abstract analyses in crucial ways.
The Status of Examples

The Aristotelian view is particularly evident when metaphor theorists and
researchers select and analyze examples. Typically, rhetoricians, linguists,
philosophers of language, and cognitive scientists have relied upon brief,
free-standing examples: metaphoric expressions that are presented sepa-
rately from the conversations, large and small, that give rise to them in
the first place. Max Black dismisses as trivial the ubiquitous example man
is a wolf but is content with a free-standing marriage is a zero sum game,
a metaphor richer by his lights but no less isolated from a discursive milieu
outside of Black’s commentary (“More” 20, 28). As a result, the change
in example is itself trivial. Black could have used either man is a wolf or
marriage is a zero sum game to explain his “implicative complex” and
to note interaction between what Black calls “focus” and “frame.” For
Black and others, this brief-example technique has important advantages.
The theorist avoids lengthy discussion of idiosyncratic context. And brief
examples are easy to adapt, as when Black recrafts man is a wolf into man
is not a wolf but an ostrich, where man is not a wolf is literally true yet
evidently metaphorical (“More” 34).
The use of fish-out-of-water examples implies that it does not matter
that we do not know who said them and why. They lack a discursive tra-
jectory other than the theorist’s meta-stance, which tacitly precedes each
example with if I were to say. But when both theorists and experimental
subjects express and comprehend metaphors, they are sensitive to discur-
sive trajectories. The meta-stance attached to examples must necessarily
influence understanding. When the theorist implicitly utters if I were to
say, the utterance blocks out a rich gamut of possible discursive trajec-
tories. This does not entirely disqualify free-standing examples, but it does
give them a distinct meta-status and limits their usefulness.
The problem with these approaches is simply this: we cannot know
what a metaphor means unless we know the circumstances in which the
metaphor is uttered—by whom and to whom. Donald Davidson makes
this observation in order to argue that metaphors do not “mean” any-
thing. He argues that metaphors belong strictly to the domain of use.
Although I reject Davidson’s narrow definition of meaning, his point
about use is valid. Use—metaphor’s participation in specific conversa-
tions, in more generalized conversations that I call “discourses,” and in
the conversation of language at large—is precisely what we must con-

sider in order to understand any metaphoric utterance. In short, no matter
how we may insist upon the fiction of an isolable metaphoric expression,
no metaphor can be separated from its discursive, rhetorical milieu. It is
impossible for a metaphor to be uttered except by a concrete, historically
situated speaker. Thus, every metaphor is inflected by a range of discur-
sive forces: politics, philosophy, economics, social class, professional align-
ments, individual perceptions, and so on. Beginning from this premise,
analyses of metaphoric exemplars must have very different results. Con-
sider the following kinds of examples.
Simple Predications
Many analyses depend upon single-clause “to be” sentences: my love is
a rose, he is a pig, man is a wolf. In these kinds of examples, a literal dis-
similarity between subject and complement is assumed to be enough to
provide all the information needed for analysis. This assumption is always
false. For example, in conventional analyses, man is a wolf is assumed
to depend upon a projection of wolf ’s predatory nature upon man. This
describes many utterances accurately enough, including some clichés that
do not take the A is B form. When we say the wolves are at the door, we
mean roughly that “predatory” creditors have come to take the money we
need to survive. The projection is similar for one of the oldest variations
of the metaphor: “Benjamin is a ravenous wolf, at the morning he devours
the prey, at the evening he divides the plunder” (Gen. 49:27, NIV). Here
both the predatory and social behavior of wolf are projected onto man,
characterizing Benjamin as one who kills, eats, and shares prey in the
manner of a wolf. Of course, this example is further complicated because
Benjamin synecdochically represents one of the twelve tribes of Israel;
thus, the projection from wolf to man might also be understood as wolf
to tribe—or wolf to man to tribe. Nonetheless, both wolves at the door
and Benjamin is a ravenous wolf tend to support conventional analyses.
But suppose, for instance, the president of the Sierra Club were to write
an editorial that favors the repopulation of timber wolves in the western
United States and that the editorial ends with the statement man is a wolf.
Suppose also that the metaphor is preceded by contextualizing discourse:
We as human beings struggle to survive in a world of danger and dan-
gerous misunderstanding. Man is a wolf. The editorial and the metaphor
are integral to a known discursive trajectory and a well-understood rhe-
torical purpose. The Sierra Club is an environmentalist group that views
man as part of nature, that views the unfettered operation of nature as
largely nonthreatening, and that regards with suspicion attempts to al-
ter the environment for commercial gain. All of its talk is informed by
these views, and its support for reintroducing timber wolves is part and
parcel of this rhetorical stance. Thus, knowing what we know about the
Sierra Club and cued by the contextualizing sentence, we would under-
stand that man is a wolf suggests something other than the standard man-
as-predator interpretation. Instead, it suggests parallel survival stories
between man and wolf.1
Man and wolf still interact, but not in the same way. In most instances,
wolf ’s instinctive nature is applied to man. In the hypothetical Sierra Club
editorial, instinct is beside the point because the discursive, rhetorical con-
text reverses the ordinary projection. That is, as George Lakoff and Mark
Turner point out in their analysis of the conceptual metaphor The Great
Chain Of Being, we typically have a hierarchical way of understanding
the world (166–81). Inanimate objects are subject to physical laws; ani-
mals to physical laws and instinct; human beings to physical laws, instinct,
and moral sentience. When we metaphorically compare members of dif-
ferent hierarchical domains, we project the highest ranking attributes from
the source domain to the target domain. Thus, for Benjamin is a hungry
wolf, it is the wolf’s instinctive behavior that is projected onto Benjamin,
not something lower down on the scale such as the wolf’s obedience to
the law of gravity. In the Sierra Club example, the projection is just the
opposite. When the Sierra Club president says Man is a wolf, we project
man onto wolf, and it is humankind’s moral worthiness that is projected,
not instinctive behavior or below. If the metaphor depends upon a pro-
jection of moral sentience, then the relation between the metaphor’s “two
parts” must have shifted: wolves do not have moral sentience for us to
project. Of course, I do not have to point out that anthropomorphizing
wild animals is a standard metaphorical technique, as much beloved by
Disney as it is by environmentalists, but it is no less metaphorical for its
conventional nature.
When we recast a metaphor by imagining a concrete, historically spe-
cific setting, it is no mere parlor trick: it is the key to redescribing what
a metaphor is and what it can do. The broad assumption in metaphor
theory is that we can examine a free-standing example and know what
acts mainly upon what. When we consider man is a wolf in isolation, we
may feel assured that man takes on the features of wolf more than wolf
takes on the features of man. The metaphor is preconditioned by stan-
dard discourse. However, when man is a wolf occurs in the hypothetical
Sierra Club speech, the concrete discursive context obtains, and the pro-
jection reverses. Tenor and vehicle, focus and frame, and target and source
may all survive as theoretical constructs, but with respect to even so lightly
contextualized an example, which is which?
Literary Examples
A second typical example is the literary metaphor. Ordinarily, literary ex-
amples are taken one by one and stripped of their broad context in the
manner of close reading. They have an advantage over brief, isolated me-
taphors. Usually, they have an identified speaker whose rhetorical pur-
pose and discursive trajectory can be speculated upon.
The difficulty with literary examples, as they are employed in meta-
phor theory, is not that their surrounding conversation is nonexistent but
rather that it is largely disregarded. The closest we have to a counter-
example would be the early twentieth-century rhetorician I. A. Richards.
Richards offers some impressive readings of literary examples and does
so within a theory of language that makes it possible to include a broad
landscape of speech and thought. Although Richards confines himself to
the internal logic of the literary example, he does take into account the
thinking of its speaker. In his adroit vivisection of Lord Kames, who
objects to Shakespeare’s “steep’d me in poverty to the very lips,” Richards
comments, “Let us look at Othello’s whole speech. We shall find that it
is not an easy matter to explain or justify that ‘steep’d.’ It comes, as you
will recall, when Othello first openly charges Desdemona with unfaith-
fulness” (104–5). Having established that the metaphor can better be
discussed in light of a speaker’s vantage point, Richards agrees with Ka-
mes’ objection to the lack of resemblance between poverty and liquid,
cites a host of confused liquid images in Othello’s speech, and concludes
that the confused metaphors can be justified because “Othello himself is
horribly disordered” (105). It is true that Richards’ reading suffers from
a want of social, political, and historical context, but he nonetheless con-
siders more surrounding conversation than do most theorists in the broad
spectrum of metaphor study.
Perhaps a larger problem with the use of literary examples has to do
with the distinction implied between literary and ordinary language.
Although metaphor frequently has been treated as literary ornament, it
is no respecter of the literary versus nonliterary distinction. Indeed, lan-
guage in general ignores this boundary. This phenomenon has been dis-
cussed persuasively by both Mary Louise Pratt and Wolfgang Iser, who
argue, in varying but compatible ways, that literariness should be seen
in light of speech act theory and that language becomes literary when a
specific reader or listener takes it to be literary. Therefore, language usu-
ally seen as expository, such as a newspaper article or a student essay, can
be both offered as and taken up as literary language. Thus, the metaphors
within this ordinary sort of literary language are not qualitatively differ-
ent from so-called literary metaphors.
When we do not attempt a formal distinction between literary and non-
literary language, our approach to literary language must change. We
must grant, as Turner points out, that literary language is subject to the
same enabling conditions as ordinary language (Reading 13). Likewise,
we have to recognize that everyday discourse depends upon a literary
approach to language. Note the bits of quasi-literary speech we use in
everyday business talk—more bang for the buck, a sale without profit is
charity, salespeople need a rabbit to chase. The fact is, we find a literary
approach to metaphor in the most mundane places. Soy Bean Digest
writes, “Will U.S. negotiators actually pull the trigger? Will European
Community (EC) officials launch a full scale counterattack? Or is a settle-
ment finally in the works between the two trading giants after nearly five
years of exchanging barbs across the Atlantic Ocean?” (Wyant). Litera-
ture for the ages? Probably not. But the passage is almost certainly mo-
tivated partly by a literary sensibility and by an expectation that readers
will appreciate more than its propositional content.
Common Expressions
Proponents of conceptual metaphor typically offer a third type of exam-
ple: the common expression such as the idiom, the cliché, and other ha-
bitual words and phrases. As I have already pointed out, a conceptual me-
taphor such as Argument Is War is induced from everyday expressions
such as attacking, destroying, and defending arguments. Likewise, we can
induce Happy Is Up from expressions such as I feel up today, I’m float-
ing on air or, conversely, from I’m feeling down, I’m in low spirits. In part,
I have induced the conceptual metaphor Trade Is War by noting standard
phrases in trade talk such as trade war. A conceptual metaphor is a shared
cognitive, cultural resource—something everybody already understands.
What better evidence of common understanding than the standard locu-
tions that make up everyday conversation?
At the same time, however, we must not make the error of believing
the expressions that provide evidence of a conceptual metaphor’s exist-
ence provide, by themselves, sufficient evidence of its operation. That we
can induce the existence of conceptual metaphors suggests pervasive pat-
terns of thought. But broadly shared patterns of thought do not preclude
important patterns of variation—patterns that can only be examined by
looking at standard locutions, novel locutions, and the nature of the con-
versations that prompt the utterance of metaphors. As with man is a wolf,
we cannot understand how the metaphor works unless we understand
the conversation that prompts the specific utterance. Metaphors are sub-
ject to the top-down forces of discourse.
Since I argue that the patterns of variation are evident among the con-
crete instantiation of conceptual metaphors, I urge caution in making in-
ferences from common expressions. We may be able to discover en-
trenched concepts by induction, but there is no reason to think that those
conceptual metaphors are singular, unvarying entities. Moreover, while

it is a syntactic necessity that we name conceptual metaphors, there is a
risk that these names imply a structure and function that is inaccurate.
Typically, conceptual metaphors are named in the A is B form: Argument
Is War, Happy Is Up, More Is Up, Time Is Money, People Are Plants. The
implication, intended or unintended, may be that each subject and each
predicate refers to an uncomplicated domain and that target and source
stand in fixed relation. The Aristotelian bifurcation appears to be perpet-
uated. But this appearance is erroneous. Conceptual metaphor provides
us precisely the tools we need to go beyond Aristotle’s algebra.
Conceptual Metaphor
The most serious challenge to Aristotle has been mounted by George
Lakoff, Mark Johnson, Mark Turner, and like-minded others. By explain-
ing that both everyday and literary metaphors depend upon cognitive
structures called conceptual metaphors, these theorists—cognitive scien-
tists situated in linguistics, philosophy, and literary study respectively—
have provided us numerous advantages that I will discuss in a moment.
However, I also want to make it clear that when we consider metaphor
in its rhetorical context, we need to rethink substantially the way con-
ceptual metaphors function.
The basic premise of conceptual metaphor theory is this: Metaphors
are based upon culturally pervasive, cognitively entrenched image schemas
and entailments. As Lakoff and Johnson point out, when we re-envoice
Argument Is War, no matter what the specific locution, we do not begin
anew with each utterance, calculating correspondences between target and
source each time we speak. Rather we recruit a well-understood cogni-
tive resource shared by most English speakers. Argument Is War is one
of the biologically reified concepts that we use to make sense of our
world—habitually, readily, unconsciously.
Like all conceptual metaphors, Argument Is War has specific image-
schematic entailments.2 In order to speak of argument as war, we must
be able to envision a similarity between the skeletal shapes of argument
and war. Typically, we see argument as having opposing sides represented
by contending speakers. Likewise, we see wars as having opposing sides
represented by contending soldiers, armies, or nations. For both argument
and war, each side is able to attack or defend, and the objective of each
side is to defeat the other. Now, it is possible for us to configure both
argument and war in other ways, but it is not ordinary for us to do so.
And precisely because we ordinarily configure argument and war in this
default manner, we can readily call upon Argument Is War to support a
range of concrete metaphoric locutions. The same is true for other con-
ceptual metaphors.
Because conceptual metaphors have little to do with correspondences

of attributes between an isolated term A and an isolated term B, they
have extraordinary explanatory power. They help to account for the ease
with which we “process” metaphors. For instance, when Time com-
ments, “Two impulses have often been at war within [President] Clinton”
(Church 22), we need not pause to consider the configuration of the meta-
phor, and we can perform a number of mental gymnastics with no par-
ticular difficulty. It is easy enough to schematize impulses as contending
forces, each intending to defeat the other. In addition, it is easy enough
to understand each impulse as arguing its point—carrying out an inter-
nal debate, the proverbial angel on one shoulder, the devil on the other.
Indeed, the idea of conceptual metaphor allows us to abandon Aris-
totle’s two-part model entirely, a point that is generally under-emphasized
in the current literature on conceptual metaphor.3 The ease with which
we process multiple metaphors—impulses as warring parties, impulses
as debating opponents, debating opponents as warring parties—suggests
not that we simply compare two terms or domains, mapping feature onto
feature, but instead that we recognize many domains as having compat-
ible image schemas. Moreover, conceptual metaphors operate even when
not explicitly stated. Nothing in Time’s explicit phrasing denotes Argu-
ment Is War, but because Argument Is War is already a part of our cul-
tural discourse, it is not only conceivable as a gloss on warring impulses,
it is necessarily implied. Clinton’s impulses are not so much compared spe-
cifically to war as they are compared to all domains that entail an image
schema of contention.
Let me offer another illustration. In Gorgias (trans. 1994), Plato need
not settle on a single metaphoric comparison to describe argumentative
rhetoric. His Gorgias metaphorizes:
All the same, [rhetoric] should be used just as one would any other
competitive skill. The fact that a person has trained as a boxer or
pancratiast4 or a soldier, and can consequently defeat friends and
enemies alike, doesn’t mean he has to use this skill of his against
everyone indiscriminately; it doesn’t give him reason to go around
beating his friends up or stabbing them to death! (20)
In Gorgias’s remark, particular actions (stabbing and striking) are less im-
portant than the image schema of contention suggested by boxing, wres-
tling, and fighting in armor. We might say, therefore, that Argument Is War
is inadequate to describe the conceptual metaphor that supports Gorgias’s
description of rhetoric. A better name, although not an especially pithy
one, might be Argument Is All Abstractly Similar Contending Activities.
Our quick understanding of Gorgias’s metaphor(s) cannot be accounted
for by a notion of shared features. We may be able to equate stabbing with
something like sharply spoken words, but this equation only makes sense
in the context of broadly comprehended scenes of contention. Stabbing

and argumentative words are not, by themselves, comparable.
Of course, the use of multiple metaphors has long been condemned
by teachers of composition, who have detested “the mixed metaphor,”
adhering to Strunk and White’s maxim, “Don’t start by calling something
a swordfish and end by calling it an hourglass” (81). But the truth is meta-
phors mix rather well. They mix in two ways. First, as noted above, some
groupings of metaphors are broadly compatible, such as the argument-
as-contention metaphors, which are compatible because of an abstract
similarity. It is important to realize that this compatibility is, in fact, a
mixing of specific metaphors, not merely an application of extreme ab-
straction. As Lakoff and Johnson argue, extreme abstraction—the no-
tion that disparate domains are precisely equivalent on an abstract level—
fails to account for the effect of metaphor (107–10). Metaphors structure
one domain in terms of another. When we say that argument is war, ar-
gument is structured both by the abstract shape of war and by the partic-
ularities of war. Argument acquires the quality of great destructiveness
only because we metaphorize it as war. Wrestling and games have par-
ticularities that are incompatible with war, and these particularities struc-
ture argument when it is metaphorized as wrestling or as a game. Conten-
tion metaphors are generally compatible but not specifically equivalent.
Another way we mix metaphors is to create conceptual systems: apt
groupings of conceptual metaphors that, taken together, construct a co-
herent world. For example, Lakoff describes the systematic relationship
between the conceptual metaphors The Nation As Family and Moral
Accounting, which combine to organize the political philosophies of both
conservatives and liberals in the United States. The two metaphors en-
compass an interrelated set of entailments that constitute and constrain
political philosophies. The Nation As Family entails that we think of our
political leaders as parents, who naturally have parental rights and du-
ties. In turn, parental rights and duties involve morality because parents
are traditionally the regulators of children’s moral lives. Thus, when we
metaphorize the nation as a family, casting political leaders as parents,
we recruit our standard cultural metaphors of morality.
One of our important morality metaphors is Moral Accounting, the
metaphor that tells us that we owe apologies and that criminals must pay
their debt to society. When The Nation As Family combines with Moral
Accounting, the two metaphors give structure to some predominant po-
litical philosophies. They tell us that political leaders are parents who can
guide us in what moral debts we owe and what moral debts are owed us.
The difference between liberals and conservatives, Lakoff explains, is not
which conceptual metaphors they recruit, but what moral debts they be-
lieve parents should enforce. Conservatives adhere to the “strict father”
model of the family, and liberals to a nurturing model of family. Of course,

my quick sketch simplifies Lakoff’s example somewhat, but the crucial
point is clear enough. Conceptual metaphors routinely operate in con-
cert with other conceptual metaphors. Conceptual metaphors entail each
other in a systematic fashion.
It is important to point out that conceptual metaphor theory does not
posit innate metaphors, a common misunderstanding. Rather, conceptual
metaphors are specific to cultures, arising both from cognitive, bodily
constraints and from shared experience. Thus, even when we identify even
so pervasive a metaphor as Argument Is War, a metaphor that spans con-
tinents and centuries, we cannot call it universal. Argument Is War is only
a conceptual metaphor for those cultures that ordinarily perceive argu-
ment, war, and other domains of contention as metaphorically similar.
This connection between the cognitive and the cultural is the greatest
strength of conceptual metaphor theory. But it is also an area that war-
rants much greater exploration.
Once we admit the connection between the way our minds make sense
of metaphors and the way we exist as social beings, it is impossible to
avoid confronting the complexities of concrete utterances and concrete
rhetorics. No instance of a conceptual metaphor can be uttered except by
an actual speaker. No actual speaker can utter anything without that utter-
ance’s being implicated in all of the things that constitute discourse, from
politics to professional life. To date, discussions of conceptual metaphor
have steered somewhat wide of these complications. But it is not neces-
sary to do so. In fact, it is when we see conceptual metaphor in situ, in-
flected by the vagaries of particular utterances, that we begin to have some
idea how metaphor works—how a conceptual metaphor’s rhetorical
constitution bears upon particular locutions uttered by particular people.
Conceptual Metaphor and Rhetoric

The most obvious way to go beyond Aristotle and the consequent limi-
tations of his view is to look elsewhere—to consider a far-ranging example
that is likely to reveal weaknesses in the standard formulations of meta-
phor theory. Trade Is War offers that opportunity because it encompasses
a particularly productive range of expressions.
Like other conceptual metaphors, Trade Is War is a cognitively en-
trenched resource, so pervasive in English that a speaker or writer who
cannot describe and comprehend trade as war can hardly discuss trade
at all. The entailments of Trade Is War are much like those of Argument
Is War, in that we typically envision trade as an activity in which partici-
pants are belligerently opposed and aim to conquer or destroy. In addi-
tion, Trade Is War functions integrally with other concepts, most promi-
nently the literal concept trade is peace and the conceptual metaphors
Trade Is Friendship, Trade Is A Journey, Trade Is A Game, and Markets
Are Containers. The relationship between these concepts does involve the
compatibility of image schemas, as with other conceptual systems. But sys-
tematicity is only a portion of what forms their relationship. What moti-
vates the relationship is the concrete composition of a particular discourse,
the discourse of trade. Within the discourse of trade, typified intercourse
and common understandings give rise to an identifiable rhetoric, a richly
patterned regularity of writing and talk that constrains the use of Trade
Is War and all of the metaphors with which it competes and converses.
It is necessary, therefore, to describe how this rhetorical relation works.
Ordinarily, when theorists concede that metaphors are contingent upon
communicative situations, the contingency is seen as a matter of face-to-
face conversation, as if metaphor is constrained only by the ad hoc co-
operation of one speaker with another. Consequently, it is assumed that
when a metaphor’s interpretation is influenced by something other than
form, the possibilities for interpretation are infinite. So long as a given
speaker provides sufficient interpretive cues, and so long as the hearer
willingly takes up the suggested interpretation, the metaphor can be re-
invented, within the limits of its form, ad infinitum. However, when we
take the influence of rhetoric into account, we cannot see even notably
inventive conversations as unconstrained by larger discursive conditions.
Even when people say unusual things, they respond to what is more usual;
regularities of use constrain the unusual utterance. Since conceptual meta-
phors are shared across cultures, inhere to particular cultures, and take
on specific regularities within communities of discourse, regularities of
use are fundamental to the composition of the metaphor. In other words,
it is not enough to note that a conceptual metaphor is often said. We also
have to understand how it is often said.
To understand this idea better, we will be concerned with the specific
functions and tools that drive conceptual metaphors as rhetorical enti-
ties. These functions and tools are not in addition to, or separate from,
the sociocognitive composition of conceptual metaphors but inseparable
from it. To date, theorists have described such things as image schemas,
entailments, metaphor systems, and conceptual blends without important
reference to rhetoric. But no instance of a conceptual metaphor has ever
been uttered in a rhetoric-free environment. Because of the shared nature
of conceptual metaphors, it cannot be done. Thus, the rhetorical func-
tions and tools that help to constrain conceptual metaphors are always
at work. I began identifying these items in chapter 1. Let me now briefly
forecast how they will figure into my analysis of Trade Is War.
Conceptual metaphors, and instances of conceptual metaphors, can
be said to participate in contrastive intercourse. Metaphors are always
in conversation with conforming and contrasting literal concepts and

metaphors. When we utter Trade Is War, we cannot comprehend its
meaning except in relation to other rhetorically entailed concepts. This
contrastive intercourse is not a logical function of metaphor in the same
sense as conceptual systematicity. In other words, as Lakoff and Johnson
understand conceptual systematicity, one metaphor may entail another
because of structural and logical relations. We cannot, for instance, un-
derstand Argument Is War, a metaphor that tells us we can destroy op-
posing arguments, without at the same time conceiving of arguments as
something destructible, often rendered as buildings. Thus, because Ar-
gument Is War entails the quality destructibility of arguments, Argument
Is War and Arguments Are Buildings can be related systematically. How-
ever, more than a systematic relation is always at work. As Lakoff and
Johnson point out, conceptual metaphors arise both from our bodily-
cognitive experience and from our sociocultural experience—which, I
argue, cannot be separated from rhetoric. Rhetoric has entailments that
are different in kind from systematic entailments. For instance, while
Trade Is War systematically relates to Markets Are Containers, the sys-
tematic relation never occurs—in the current, concrete discourse of
trade—without a simultaneous rhetorical entailment, an effect of the
concretely progressing rhetoric of trade. Trade Is War rhetorically entails
Markets Are Containers because the discourse of trade, with persistent
regularity, juxtaposes the two concepts, calling into contrast the rhetori-
cal contingencies of the two metaphors, the ideas and evaluations that
pit one debatable view against another.
Because Trade Is War and its complementary concepts operate within
this site of rhetorical contention, each is inflected by the political, eco-
nomic, philosophical, social, professional, and personal commitments of
its utterer. We cannot make sense of metaphors unless we understand
(however imperfectly) the discursive trajectory of the utterer. Likewise,
the utterer must take into account the conventional discourse associated
with standard conceptual metaphors. Trade Is War is inflected, therefore,
by all of the ethical valences attendant to trade, which can range from a
strongly globalist, pro-growth valence, to an economic nationalist valence,
to a unionist valence, to a consumerist valence, and so on. All of these va-
lences are stable enough to be observed but are nonetheless contingent
upon time, place, and community of interest. Neither Trade Is War nor
any other conceptual metaphor can be uttered without inflection because,
except in the most rudimentary instrumental utterances, rhetoricity is fun-
damental to the character of writing and speech.
The inflection of metaphors is observable in concrete ways. When we
utter a metaphor, we do not necessarily intend the metaphor, as it is typi-
cally inflected, to represent our view. Thus, we either claim the metaphor
and its understood commitments, or just as often, we utter it only in order

to represent someone else’s viewpoint: we ascribe it. Degrees of claiming
and ascribing are possible. For example, when a newspaper ascribes Trade
Is War to a government administration, the ascription can be merely
descriptive—a characterization of the administration, to be sure, but not
an emphatic one. In editorials, political speeches, television debates and
the like, ascriptions are likely to be emphatic. The ascription does not
merely characterize another’s views but often promotes a pointed evalu-
ation of that view. In these genres, ascriptions not only amount to a de-
scription of another’s view but pointedly contrast with the utterer’s view.
Indeed, ascriptions are most evident in moments of disagreement. None-
theless, it is possible to simultaneously claim and ascribe a metaphor—
for instance, when the utterer and target are in emphatic agreement.
Another way we can concretely observe the inflection of metaphor is
in the patterned ways they are attenuated and intensified. Conceptual
metaphors and instances of conceptual metaphors vary in their degree
of rhetorical provocation or controversy. In order to adjust a metaphor’s
likely rhetorical effect, writers and speakers select alternate metaphors
or variant renderings of a given metaphor, thus attenuating or intensify-
ing rhetorical impact. The relative intensity of a metaphor is, of course,
a matter of judgment, something best made by someone familiar with the
values and controversies of a specific rhetorical milieu. Nonetheless, we
can discern with some confidence when a metaphor is attenuated and
when it is intensified. For instance, it is an intensified instance of Trade
Is War to speak of storming the beaches of a competitor’s market. It is
an attenuated instance of Trade Is War to speak of outflanking a com-
petitor. One instance evokes blood and violence, the other maneuvering.
It is also possible to intensify or attenuate by shifting metaphors. By and
large, it is less intense to recruit Trade Is A Game than it is to recruit Trade
Is War.
However, language use is nothing if not complex. It is difficult to say
whether Japan put a finger in the eye of the United States by dumping
semiconductors is intensified or attenuated. My sense is that in spite of
its bloodless, nonlethal image, it is nonetheless an intensified instance of
Trade Is War (or Trade Is A Fight), because it further personalizes an al-
ready bitter dispute. That attenuating and intensifying are matters of judg-
ment is not disturbing, because judgment is precisely what makes them
important to a rhetorical explanation of metaphor. This is so for two rea-
sons. First, attenuations and intensifications account for variant render-
ings of metaphors that have heretofore been explained only in a formal-
ist paradigm. Second, observing these functions (or tools) requires us to
link integrally the specific renderings of particular metaphors, as well as
the recruiting of conceptual metaphors, to larger rhetorical issues.
The above functions and tools organize the use of conceptual meta-
phors into a describable, although not inviolable, rhetorical etiquette. As
metaphors come into contrastive intercourse with other metaphors and
concepts, we can observe regularities in the ways metaphors are claimed,
ascribed, attenuated, and intensified. Thus, only in an abstract, nonrhe-
torical sense are metaphoric choices unconstrained. In use, the recruit-
ing and rendering of conceptual metaphors is an integral function of rheto-
ric. For example, Trade Is War is almost never claimed and, even when
ascribed, the intensification of the particular rendering adheres to discern-
ible guidelines. That is, it may be possible to render Trade Is War quite
intensely, but it is no coincidence that extravagantly intense instances, even
in ascriptions, are uncommon. The rhetorical etiquette that governs Trade
Is War and related metaphors is a patterned, complex maneuvering within
and among metaphors.
But it is futile to describe these functions and tools apart from the far-
ranging example. Each utterance of Trade Is War is involved in an intri-
cate conversation, an interchange of entailed metaphors and literal con-
cepts, a variegated negotiation of rhetorical positioning and presentation,
a regular yet individually considered re-envoicement of ideas. Yet from
this complexity, we can glean the tools used to make the conversation
work, as I will show in the following chapter.
30 The Conversation at Large
3
The Conversation at Large
Airbus is going to attack the Americans, including Boeing, until they
bleed and scream.
—Richard Evans, British Aerospace, 1990
I am a trade hawk.
—Patrick J. Buchanan, presidential candidate, 1995
Let me describe in some detail the conversation that surrounds and sub-
sumes Trade Is War, a conversation that spans centuries and continents.
Of course, I am describing something of such breadth and variegation that
volumes could not describe it all. Nonetheless, I hope to present enough
to convey the size, the persistence, the dynamism, the regularity, and the
variety of the conversation.
In one sense, it is a literal conversation among all the writers and speak-
ers who enact the discourse of trade—the people who converse both face
to face in real time and through print and electronic media across space
and time. In another sense, it is the “conversation” of the metaphor Lan-
guage Is Conversation, the metaphor that tells us that words, phrases, and
texts are interconnected in much the same way as speakers’ and writers’
responsive talk. The literal conversation and the metaphoric one are in-
terconnected. All language users necessarily address someone else, even
if that someone else is the idealized internal respondent theorized by Karen
Burke LeFevre. At the same time, all language users are supplied with an
already conversing language. They enter an in-progress discursive parlor,
to use Kenneth Burke’s famous instance of Language Is Conversation.1
This manifold linguistic interconnectedness is perhaps best explained
by Mikhail Bakhtin, who argues that all language is fundamentally re-
sponsive; thus, we can never analyze any language without considering
“addressivity,” the fact that all discourse answers and anticipates other
discourse (“Problem” 95). In order to focus on addressivity, Bakhtin con-
tends that the basic unit of analysis should not be the word or the sen-
tence but rather the utterance, a unit of discourse bounded by a change
30
The Conversation at Large 31
of speaking subjects—which is to say, a unit characterized by its partici-

pation in the conversation of language.
It is a simple but powerful idea, the idea that all utterances, whatever
their length or formal structure, are always in dialogue with previous and
future utterances. As Bakhtin says in refutation of decontextualized sty-
listics:
When one analyzes an individual sentence apart from its context, the
traces of addressivity and the influence of the anticipated response,
dialogical echoes from others’ preceding utterances, faint traces of
changes of speech subjects that have furrowed the utterance from
within—all these are lost, because they are all foreign to the sentence
as a unit of language. All of these phenomena are connected with
the whole of the utterance, and when this whole escapes the field of
vision of the analyst they cease to exist for him. . . . A stylistic analysis
that embraces all aspects of style is possible only as an analysis of
the whole utterance, and only in that chain of speech communion
of which the utterance is an inseparable link. (99–100)
Bakhtin’s notion of language’s dynamic concatenation is profoundly dis-

turbing to formalist stylistics. Likewise, I argue that a recognition of lan-
guage’s fundamental interconnectedness should cause us to reconsider
nearly all that has traditionally been said about metaphor.
Simultaneously, let me emphasize that what has been said about con-
ceptual metaphor is crucial to a description of the metaphor’s rhetorical
constitution. Conceptual metaphors are more than convenient metaphoric
groupings; they embrace the cognitive and cultural regularities that un-
derpin most metaphor use. Trade Is War is a “conceptual metaphor” not
simply because our trade talk is peppered with thematically groupable
locutions such as trade war, conquering markets, and defeating the com-
petition but rather because these locutions rely upon the same concep-
tual system.
Conceptual metaphors participate in a systematic network of image
schemas, entailments, and metaphor systems. Trade Is War is based upon
an image schema of hostile action between entities—nation against na-
tion, army against army, business against business, and so on. While par-
ticular Trade Is War metaphors vary widely, all but the oddest of them
are abstractly structured by this hostile-action image schema. In turn,
Trade Is War entails another conceptual metaphor: Markets Are Contain-
ers. Since war typically involves conquering territory—contained space—
when we imagine trade as war, we must imagine traders vying for mar-
kets that are contained or containable. It is not surprising, then, that the
two conceptual metaphors are closely associated in trade talk. Further-
more, Trade Is War and Markets Are Containers are persistently contra-
dicted by interrelated metaphors and literal concepts—mainly Trade Is
Friendship, Trade Is A Journey, and trade is peace. These alternate con-

cepts have mutually entailed image schemas and thus form a metaphor sys-
tem that contrasts with Trade Is War and Markets Are Containers in stan-
dard trade talk. (I will discuss this opposing system later in this chapter.)
Because conceptual metaphors and metaphor systems are pervasively
entrenched, they structure a diffuse conversation among countless spe-
cific metaphors. However, to recognize a broad conceptual structure is
not the same as to explain how any specific locution works. While spe-
cific locutions do depend upon the image schemas and entailments pro-
vided by a guiding conceptual metaphor, the fine detail of actually ut-
tered metaphors cannot be accounted for by conceptual structure alone.
Indeed, the strength of conceptual metaphor as an idea is that it permits
us to explain metaphors without regard to the idiosyncrasies of particu-
lar locutions. Eventually, however, if we are to overcome Aristotle’s al-
gebra, we have to account for specific metaphors as they are specifically
used. That means we have to understand metaphors as rhetorically con-
stituted utterances. In particular, I argue that we need to understand the
way the rhetorical functions discussed in chapter 2—contrastive inter-
course, discursive trajectory, inflection, rhetorical etiquette, claiming/
ascribing, and attenuating/intensifying—shape metaphors.
What follows, then, is not just a description of Trade Is War and the
conversation in which it participates but rather a description of the con-
versation and the way it functions to shape specific metaphors. When we
see metaphor in the light of Language Is Conversation, we can begin to
account for phenomena that conventional notions cannot explain. Con-
sequently, we must either rethink some conventional ideas or put them
to rest.
Metaphor and the Literal: Trade Is Peace

and Other Common Ideas
There is a widespread notion that metaphors are identifiable as meta-
phoric because they are literally false. As the oft-quoted Monroe Beardsley
puts it, metaphors are “obviously false sentences with significant conno-
tations” (142). Of course, Max Black cleverly—perhaps too cleverly—
refutes Beardsley, pointing out that if we say he lives in a glass house of
a man who actually lives in a glass house, the statement can be both lit-
erally true and metaphoric (“More” 34). In addition, Raymond Gibbs
makes a strong argument that the notion of literalness is not as straight-
forward as has been thought; it is complicated by polysemy, by contex-
tual factors, and by the metaphoric foundation of much ostensibly literal
language (24–79). Nonetheless, what Beardsley says about metaphor’s
falseness is true enough, often enough, to be taken seriously by almost
all metaphor theorists. And for good reason. Negation has much to do
with the way metaphors work. The problem is that the standard under-
standing of negation is flawed.
Usually, the idea that metaphors are false statements assumes that
direct, logical negation—an “is not”—is key to making meaning. This is
arguable only in the most limited way because it ignores the way language
functions in concrete use. Since language is by its nature dialogic, every-
thing we say, metaphoric or literal, is subject to what Bakhtin calls the
listener’s “responsive attitude.” Bakhtin writes:
The fact is when the listener perceives and understands the meaning
(the language meaning) of speech, he simultaneously takes an active,
responsive attitude toward it. He either agrees or disagrees with it
(completely or partially), augments it, applies it, prepares for its
execution, and so on. (68)
Thus, all statements are measured against other possible statements, but
direct negation is only one possibility for measurement. If I say to you,
The sky is blue, you might respond, The sky is not blue. However, you
might also respond by amplifying or modifying: Yes, the sky is almost
robin-egg blue today or No, the sky is only blue in the places where there
are no white clouds. We can imagine roughly the kinds of responses to a
given statement that are logically possible, among them negation. That
would be all we need to know if writing and talk were merely logical.
But language is concretely responsive. Negations carry discursive
freight—sets of standard reasonings and judgments that only make sense
in specific rhetorical environments. Thus, when we consider negations,
we have to consider likely responses in light of a specific discourse. That
is to say, the sky is blue is not usually sufficiently interesting to warrant
anyone’s bothering to respond that the sky is not blue. However, many
statements necessarily imply other contradictory statements. The state-
ment abortion is murder of the unborn cannot be heard in our current
culture without echoes of the standard contradictory response a woman
has a right to control her own body. We cannot fully understand the first
assertion without considering its frequently re-envoiced rebuttal. In
short, my claim is that statements need to be considered with respect to
relevant statements already afoot. This is true for both literal expressions
and metaphors.
Now, Beardsley says (and many others agree) that metaphors are “ob-
viously false statements.” Sometimes this seems to be correct, but we need
not be so ingenious as Black in order to find counter-examples. Consider
this instance of Trade Is War: On a Sunday-morning news program, Newt
Gingrich defends farm subsidies, saying, “We cannot unilaterally disarm
American farmers” (This Week, 13 Nov. 1994). This statement might be
taken as true on many levels. For instance, it may actually be a bad idea
to eliminate farm subsidies. This makes Gingrich’s metaphor potentially
true. In another sense, Gingrich’s expression can be true as a literal state-
ment. Many who discuss economic warfare mean, quite earnestly, that
the conduct of international commerce is a tool of warfare no less than
the use of armies. What makes Gingrich’s statement primarily metaphoric
is not the impossibility of its being literally true, but rather that it im-
plies—comes into contrastive intercourse with—a significant contradic-
tory concept, a concept that is conventionally treated as relatively more
literal than Trade Is War: trade is peace.
A Brief History of “Trade Is Peace”

Why do we treat trade is peace as a literal concept? Perhaps because trade
is an integral component of peaceful life. When we go about our daily
activity in a peaceful atmosphere, that activity usually includes trade on
some scale. The two domains are related by metonymy. On the other hand,
association alone does not explain trade is peace’s literalness. Trade is also
integrally associated with war—witness the lend-lease agreement between
the United States and Britain in World War II; witness today’s global de-
fense industry. It may be because we do not trade with enemies during a
war that trade seems to bear a different relation to peace than it does to
war. In any event, trade, peace, and the relations between them are not
simple or static. Even a brief look at these concepts reveals important com-
plications that belie a direct opposition between Trade Is War and trade
is peace.
Trade is peace has long been a part of our own and others’ trade dis-
course. In Genesis, when Jacob agrees to a marriage between his daugh-
ter Dinah and Hamor’s son, Hamor declares: “These men are peaceable
with us; therefore, let them dwell in the land, and trade therein” (34:21,
KJV). In other words, peace and trade are conditioned upon each other.
At its most basic, this is the long-understood concept that enables the
concept Trade Is War to be seen as a metaphor. While Trade Is War may
be seen as literally true in some cases (such as economic warfare), it is
not seen as literally true as often as trade is peace: Trade Is War enters
an already progressing conversation that brings it into contrastive inter-
course with the long-literal contradiction trade is peace.
If trade is peace goes back at least as far as Genesis (and, in this in-
stance, we can probably agree that Genesis is not the very beginning), it
has at the same time operated in complex ways, as part of a set of related
literal concepts. For just as we have known that trade is peace, we also
have known that war is trade—at least in the sense that victory in war
brings economic gain. Consider what transpires in Genesis soon after
Hamor opens peaceful trade with Jacob. Jacob’s sons, harboring a grudge
about the premarital defilement of their sister, attack Shalem:
[I]t came to pass that on the third day . . . that two of the sons of
Jacob, Simeon and Levi, Dinah’s brethren, took each man his sword,
and came upon the city boldly, and slew all the males. . . . They took
their sheep, and their oxen, and their asses, and that which was in
the city, and that which was in the field. And all their wealth. (34:25–
28, KJV)
Jacob’s sons are by no means alone in associating war with economic gain.
Gathering spoils is standard operating procedure among Old Testament
warriors.
When Jehoshaphat is threatened by the enemies of Israel and the Lord
battles on Israel’s behalf, the children of Israel
came to take away the spoil . . . [and] they found among them in
abundance both riches with the dead bodies and precious jewels,
which they stripped off for themselves, more than they could carry
away; and they were three days in gathering the spoil, it was so much.
(2 Chron. 20:25, KJV)
Clearly, this is no ordinary trade transaction. However, to corrupt Clause-

witz’s famous maxim, war is sometimes trade by other means. Transfers
of goods, both peaceful and violent, abound and are bound together in
the conceptual system associated with trade is peace.
During the English Renaissance, as nations begin to act as trading part-
ners and adversaries, Raleigh is mindful that the point of war is economic,
writing in Secrets of Government, “A Commonwealth that consumes
more Treasure in the War, than it profits in Victory, seems to have rather
hindred than honoured or inriched the state” (206). Raleigh is not sug-
gesting something controversial. Secrets is a book of truisms, as conven-
tional as most books of advice to the prince. Neither is it controversial
for him to suggest that economic strength translates, literally, into mili-
tary strength: “Power and Strength is attained in these five ways, Mony,
Armes, Counsell, Friends and Fortune; but of these the first and most
forcible is mony: Nihil tam munitum quod non expurgnari pecunia possit.
Cic.” (53).2 So standard is Raleigh’s thinking that Francis Bacon calls this
kind of observation “trivial” (184). In Raleigh, then, we find a standard
pairing of literal concepts: war is for economic gain and money is mili-
tary power. (I classify money is military power as literal because it does
not assert a likeness between money and power but instead indexes a
literal process of financing war; money and power are related metonym-
ically. However, the metonymy can give rise to metaphors such as those
that liken money to fuel.)
A century after Raleigh, Defoe exploits the links between trade and
war in A Plan of the English Commerce, demonstrating not only that the
basic enabling concepts of Trade Is War are at work for him but also that,
regardless of the broad similarity of the conceptual system from age to
age, speakers refashion concepts to suit their contemporary and individual
concerns. Exhorting England to increase its international trade, Defoe ex-
presses money is military power this way:
But in our Times . . . the Art of War is so well study’d, and so equally
known in all places, that ’tis the longest Purse that conquers now,
not the longest sword . . . for Money is Power, and they that have
the Gelt . . . may have the Armies of the best troops in Europe. (41)
Defoe is concerned with a specific manner of warring, through mercenary

armies, and that concern leads him to the general conclusion that “Money
is Power,” a locution that has come to be used in nonmilitary contexts,
not the least in trade discourse.
If we recognize, along with Defoe, that a nation’s war chest is gener-
ated by international trade, we can infer a literal version of Trade Is War:
international trade finances war. At the same time, Defoe assumes, as
many before him have assumed, that trade is not war, it is peace. That is,
where nations are concerned, Defoe understands trade to be a basic tool
of war, but for individuals trade pacifies instead: “Trade is a friend to
Peace; and provides for the People a far better Way: Trade sets them to
work for their Bread, not to fight for it” (74). Thus, we have said since
the time of Defoe, and probably long before, that trade is peace, that war
is for economic gain, that money is military power, and that international
trade finances war. In sum, the literal concept trade is peace is implicated
in a set of interrelated notions that form a nuanced, even contradictory,
understanding of the relationship between peace, war, and trade.
With all its complication, trade is peace still remains a stable part of
Trade Is War’s constituting conversation in the nascent United States. As
the colonies revolt primarily over trade issues, Thomas Paine articulates
his vision of a peaceful, commercial future, where a military alliance be-
tween Britain and the colonies is unnecessary:
Besides what have we to do with setting the world at defiance? Our
plan is commerce, and that, well attended to, will secure us the peace
and friendship of all of Europe; because it is in the interest of all of
Europe to have America a free port. Her trade will always be a pro-
tection, and her barrenness of silver and gold secure her from invad-
ers. (40)
Paine’s observation may seem commonsensical, but it is not necessarily

empirically sound. While insisting that peace is a natural consequence of
trade, Paine acknowledges that the point of war is economic gain, hence
the importance of America’s “barrenness of silver and gold.” Thus, within
Paine’s own logic, trade does not by itself promote peace. In fact, whether
economic conditions will promote war or peace is unpredictable. When
silver and gold were discovered in the United States territories some sixty
years later, the discovery did not invite an invasion but rather led to an
explosion of free enterprise.
Yet the commonsense quality of trade is peace is nothing if not dura-
ble. In a focus group conducted for this study, a college senior majoring
in business at a major midwestern university expresses her version of trade
is peace, and it remains as viable as it was in Genesis:3
Trade is cooperative, I think. When I think of the Japanese and the

U.S., there’s total—I don’t know what it’s called, but—we import so
many more goods than the Japanese import of ours, and if you cre-
ate war between the two, it’s not going to help increase trade. So you
have to be cooperative, and you have to be the opposite of fighting—
you know what I mean—to trade with people. You’re not going to—
two warring tribes are not going to trade or barter with each other
if they’re fighting against each other.
The conceptual residue of antiquity is unconsciously re-envoiced by this

student, but it is not unusual for the literal and metaphoric linkage be-
tween trade and war to reach backwards in time, as it does with the young
woman’s reference to “warring tribes.”
“Trade Is Peace” Versus Trade Is War

It may seem, as a logical matter, that trade is peace can hardly avoid con-
trastive intercourse with Trade Is War; they appear to be direct opposites,
unavoidable contradictions. However, the complexity of trade is peace
as a literal concept makes it all but impossible for actually uttered in-
stances of trade is peace to directly repudiate Trade Is War. When we as-
sert literally that trade is peace, we simultaneously understand the com-
plex relationship between peace, trade, and war and the fluid way these
relationships are typically applied to nations, corporations, and individ-
uals. Likewise, when we metaphorically assert that trade is war, we un-
derstand that money, trade, and war are interconnected in literal, com-
plex ways. Trade Is War and trade is peace refute one another, but the
rebuttal is always as many-sided as the prompting assertion.
In a general way, however, Trade Is War persistently elicits a respon-
sive trade is peace and vice versa. Responding to the college student quoted
above, a male student also majoring in business answers trade is peace
with Trade Is War:
I put that trade is like war. First thing I thought of was the stock
market, you know, trading stocks. And, you know, in the pits—
you’re, you’re fighting over people and whatever and it’s competi-
tive, because companies are competing to trade with other compa-
nies. And you’re fighting against those companies to offer a better
price, offer better options, whatever, you know, to, to actually get
that company to trade with you, to get a company to trade with you.
So I thought of it as more an aggressive thing, rather than a coop-
erative thing.
His view of Trade Is War is associated with a particular setting, the stock
exchange, which brings with it a set of standard implications that may not
apply to trade in all its variety. Yet the general relationship holds. Trade
can be seen as aggressive, consistent with a hostile-action image schema,
or it can be seen as cooperative, consistent with a peaceful-exchange im-
age schema. Indeed, like all of us, this student can see trade variously, as
he acknowledges: “I can see it both ways.”
In fact, the contrastive intercourse between Trade Is War and trade is
peace depends upon our seeing it both ways. To come into contrastive
intercourse with a falsifying literal concept is not the same as to be falsi-
fied by a logical negation. Logical negation assumes that truth is constant
and easily discovered. But in a rhetorical milieu, truth value is debatable.
For example, MIT economist Lester Thurow explains that while trade is
peace is a widespread truism, it is not necessarily true:
I think there’s no empirical evidence [that trade is peace] at all. The
Germans and the French have fought war after war, and nobody’s
traded with each other more than the Germans and the French. But
somehow there is the view some economists like to sell that if you’re
having good economic relations in the sense of doing a lot of trade,
you won’t end up fighting a war with each other. But factually, I just
think it isn’t true. . . . It’s also very American, too. You see it at the
moment with China because what the Clinton administration is
basically saying is that if we have a lot of economic relationships with
China, China will, in some sense, be reasonable in other dimen-
sions—selling fewer nuclear weapons to the Pakistanis or aiming
fewer missiles at Taiwan or whatever. But I don’t know of any evi-
dence that it is true. (Personal interview)
Thurow’s evaluation of trade is peace underscores just how complex the

truth value of literal statements can be. He recognizes how frequently trade
is peace is considered to be true, believes the statement to be empirically
false, and thus sees trade is peace with a sort of double vision—true for
others, false for him.
Robert E. Lighthizer, a former trade official in the Reagan administra-
tion, goes even further, arguing that trade can disrupt peace:
History teaches us that strong trading ties are no guarantee of peace-

ful relations. The American colonies had powerful economic links
to Britain when they declared their independence. The North and the
South traded extensively with each other before the Civil War. The
German and British economies were tightly intertwined at the be-
ginning of both world wars. Countless other examples could be given,
but the point is the same: trade alone cannot douse the flames of
international rivalry. In fact, prosperity often contributes to conflict.
The enormous growth enjoyed by Germany in the late 1800’s encour-
aged it to seek a greater role in world affairs, thus contributing to
the aggressiveness and nationalism that helped start World War I.
Japan’s economic success in the early decades of this century fed a
desire for conquest that led to Pearl Harbor.
The factual case for trade is peace is, in fact, fairly weak. The relation be-
tween trade and peace is tenuous, changeable, and complex because in-
ternational relations involve matters other than trade, such as military
and geographical alignments, ethnic and religious loyalties, and politi-
cal ideals.
However, this complexity does nothing to change the general contras-
tive relationship between the metaphor Trade Is War and the literal con-
cept trade is peace. In Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle
among Japan, Europe, and America, Thurow, who doubts the accuracy
of trade is peace, explicitly counterposes Trade Is War and trade is peace:
On one level the prediction that economic warfare will replace mili-
tary warfare is good news. . . . There is nothing wrong with an ag-
gressive invasion of well-made, superbly marketed German or Japa-
nese products. Being bought is not the same thing as being occupied.
At the same time, the military metaphor is fundamentally incorrect.
The economic game that will be played in the twenty-first century
will have cooperative as well as competitive elements.4 (31, empha-
sis added)
The contrastive relation between Trade Is War and trade is peace is inte-
gral in Thurow’s comment. That is, he recognizes the tension between
Trade Is War and trade is peace by saying that “the twenty-first century
will have cooperative as well as competitive elements.” “Competitive”
entails Trade Is War’s image schema of contention; “cooperative” entails
the image schema of peace, in which two sides exchange not only goods
but goodwill.
When Trade Is War and trade is peace converse within Thurow’s re-
marks, it is not a matter of an obviously false metaphor’s being contra-
dicted by an obviously true literal concept. For Thurow, both the literal
concept and the metaphor are complex. On the other hand, he clearly
treats the metaphor as metaphorical and the literal concept as literal. He
refers to the “military metaphor,” and he discusses trade is peace as a mat-

ter of “empirical evidence,” something that is not “factually” true. It is
not the ultimate truth values that help him classify the two notions; it is
the conventional treatment of Trade Is War and trade is peace, along with
a standard discourse that brings them into frequent contrastive intercourse.
Trade Is War and Its Many Inflections

So far, I have said little about Trade Is War and its complexity, except to
note that the literal concepts money is military power and international
trade finances war can combine to suggest a literal version of Trade Is War.
However, Trade Is War encompasses much variation as a metaphor. While
the metaphor largely relies upon a standard hostile-action image schema,
an abstraction that envisions entities seeking to harm or conquer each other,
when we examine numerous historically, socially situated instances, we
find complex patterns of variation that cannot be accounted for by sim-
ply referring to the underlying image schema. These variations have to
do with the inflection that attends the particular locution—the shaping
influence exerted by the discursive trajectory of the writer or speaker.
A Brief History of Trade Is War

Perhaps the Phoenicians uttered versions of Trade Is War as they launched
goods-laden ships into the ancient world. Obviously, most of human dis-
course cannot be retrieved. In English, however, it seems Trade Is War
begins to take hold when it reflects the story of trade between nations—
in late medieval and Renaissance Europe, as governments increasingly see
trade as a tool of foreign policy.
An anonymous trade writer of 1436 offers a geopolitical analysis of
the English wool trade in “The Libel of English Policy.” “The Libel” ar-
gues that if England controls the sea between Dover and Calais, it also
controls the Dutch trade by impeding shipments from Spain. It frequently
emphasizes the peace that will result, but it is a coerced peace with a war-
like economic payoff:
Thane yf Englonde wolde hys wolle restreyne
Ffrome Fflaundres, thys followeth certayne,
Fflaundres of nede must wyth us have pease,
Or ellis he is distroyde, wythowght lees.5
Also yef Fflaundres thus distroyed bee,
Some merchaundy of Spayne wolle nevere ithe;6
Ffor distroyed hit is, and, as in chesse,
The wolle of Spayne wolle cometh not to press.
(161)
Strictly speaking, it is difficult to say whether or not this amounts to an

early locution of Trade Is War. Yet the language of destruction is abun-
dant. And trade is conceived of as chess, itself a war metaphor. At the same
time, if Trade Is War motivates this passage, it does so tacitly.
More direct is John Wheeler’s bit of 1601 invective toward King Philip,
after the king forbids trade with England’s merchant adventurers: “[W]hat
could be more injurious or enemy-like in time of open warres? But herein
the said King not only shot at the State of England, but withall hee dam-
aged other nations, as though no merchant ought to trade anywhere but
in his Countries” (40, emphasis added). Equally direct and developed fur-
ther is Andrew Yarranton’s 1681 version of Trade Is War in England’s Im-
provement by Sea and Land to Out-do the Dutch Without Fighting. He
proposes that rather than attack the Dutch, who have insurmountable
strategic advantages, England would do better to emulate and surpass
Dutch trade policies. He metaphorizes, “[F]or as an Army, though never
so numerous and strong, yet want of Discipline and good Government,
will make them of no Use” (14). Mixing his metaphor and reinforcing
the idea of trade as a surrogate for military action, he continues: “[S]o
Trade must and will rule; she is a Mistress that must be courted the right
way, neither neglected, nor impos’d upon; and because sure Fond7 will
answer all our just ends, both as to present defence against a powerful
Enemy, and to improve Trade and Commerce” (14). The passage blends
the war metaphor with a sexual metaphor, a blend that occurs often to-
day, although usually in a locker-room register, as when former Prime
Minister of France Edith Cresson remarks, “The Japanese sit up all night
thinking of ways to screw the Americans and the Europeans” (Eigen and
Siegel 237). But what is more striking is the energy of Yarronton’s meta-
phor, which sounds, to my postmodern ear, as if he feels he has latched
onto something new, both in policy and in language.
I suspect that when Trade Is War begins its activity, there is no dis-
tinct first twitch, no discrete original expression that marks its inception.
More likely it begins in fits and starts, here with a well-developed locu-
tion, there with a single word whose metaphoric quality passes by barely
noticed. For instance, as the early nations of Europe take turns raising
tariffs, Trade Is War may be buried in the word retaliate. A 1564 dispute
involving duties, shipping prohibitions, and monopoly—not to mention
robbery—prompts this message to Queen Elizabeth: “We have therefore
. . . drawn up two proclamations, one respecting the Flemish manufactur-
ers and raw material for them, prohibiting their exportation to England,
and the importation of English goods into this country, in retaliation”
(Tawney and Power 44). Similarly, more than a century later, Charles King
writes in The British Merchant, “If the Bill of Commerce should pass . . .
should we imagine that these countries will not abate of their Consump-
tion of our Manufactures? or that they will not retaliate upon us by Prohi-
bitions and high Duties[?]” (3). Again, it is difficult to determine whether
retaliate amounts to Trade Is War in any profoundly metaphorical sense;
it may be a case of Aristotle’s catachresis, where a metaphoric word fills
a semantic gap but is not especially suggestive. Nonetheless, in 1888 the
tax historian Stephen Dowell has little difficulty seeing Trade Is War in
the tit for tat of Tudor trade policy, referring to retaliatory duties as the
“international war of tariffs” later to become the mercantile system (178).
However the movement of Trade Is War begins, it begins. And it
spreads. And as it spreads, Trade Is War reshapes itself in each new lo-
cution, inflected by the political, philosophical, and social views of its
speaker. Strident nationalist Daniel Defoe describes Henry VII’s strategy
to gain the wool trade in words of war:
The King acted like a wise and warlike prince, besieging a City, who
tho’ he attacks the Garrison, and batters the Out-works with the
utmost Fury, yet spares the inhabitants, and forebears as much as
he can ruining the City, which he expects to make his own: So the
King seem’d willing to let the Flemings keep up the Trade, till his
Subjects were thoro’ly enabled to take it into their own hands. (97)
The literal act to which Defoe refers is Henry VII’s not imposing duties
on the English export of wool, while allowing foreigners to teach the En-
glish the art of manufacturing woolen articles. Interestingly, Defoe’s war
metaphor draws upon the stealth and restraint of Henry VII’s strategy,
not upon overtly aggressive acts such as imposing duties that might be
considered acts of trade war today. Moreover, Defoe—like others of his
time and before—claims Trade Is War, saying that Henry VII is “wise and
warlike.” It would be unusual indeed for a trade discourser of the late
twentieth century to risk the rhetorical cost of even so attenuated a lo-
cution as Defoe’s, which after all speaks of sparing lives, not taking them.
It may be, though, that the moral view of war in earlier centuries, a view
that sees little wrong with war is for economic gain, permits Defoe and
others to claim Trade Is War without risking a loss in credibility or ethos.
More than a hundred years later, Karl Marx and Friedrich Engels could
hardly be more contemptuous of stealthy economic deceptions. But their
organizing metaphor is still war, inflected by denunciation. Excoriating
the industrial “machine” that reduces all relations to money relations,
they complain:
The weapons with which the bourgeoisie felled feudalism to the
ground are now turned against the bourgeoisie itself. But not only
has the bourgeoisie forged the weapons that bring death to itself; it
has also called into existence those men who are to wield those weap-
ons, the modern working class, the proletarians. . . . Masses of la-
borers, crowded into the factory, are organized like soldiers. As pri-
vates of the industrial army they are placed under the command of
a perfect hierarchy of officers and sergeants. (13–14)
Marx and Engels do with Trade Is War what many others do. They as-
cribe it—which is to say they use it to point the finger at those who be-
tray a literal notion: that trade is peace. Or perhaps their literal notion
is trade should be peace. Note, though, that the insistence of the ascribed
war metaphor—so strident, so truculent—smothers its own untruth. The
stable, complementary literalness of trade is peace is thus challenged with
a loud assertion that we may once have traded in peace, but no more. The
only remnant of literalness left is that, in fact, crowded factories are not
equipped with guns and cannons. But ask Marx and Engels whether peo-
ple die in an economic war, and they will undoubtedly answer with an
emphatic affirmative. Their Trade Is War both insists upon and denies
its metaphoricity.
Once Trade Is War finds its voice, it seems to be heard perpetually. The
discourse of trade could hardly function without it. Can we imagine a dis-
cussion of international economics that does not, sooner or later, include
a comment such as that of Neville Chamberlain, as he announces that the
aim of British protectionism is “to negotiate with foreign countries and
to arm Britain” (Abel 97)? Or that of U.S. Assistant Secretary of State
Francis Bowes Sayre in 1936: “[Economic nationalism] means . . . nation
striking against nation with injurious economic weapons” (31)? Or that
of an obscure cold warrior in 1959, who warns that the agents of the
Third World War will not be “soldiers,” but “salesmen” (Welton 5)?
Trade Is War in Recent Years

Trade Is War is not only a part of the current discourse of trade; it is a dom-
inant component of that discourse. The most common locution is the nom-
inal phrase trade war. In general, trade war is a preferred locution of those
who oppose aggressive trade policies. It is an epithet to be hurled at those
who would draw us into international trade conflict. Trade war, accord-
ing to this view, amounts to an aberration that interrupts ordinary com-
merce. There are those, however, who see trade war as a normal state of
affairs. “We are not in danger of having a trade war. We have already
been fighting one. Only the Japanese realize it, and we don’t,” writes Steve
Schlossstein in a book entitled Trade War (13).
So we find two main inflections: First, the be-careful-you’ll-start-one
inflection, preferred by free-trade proponents (see chapter 1 for a discus-
sion of standard alignments with respect to trade policy). This inflection
is almost always uttered as an ascription—a statement that characterizes
a rhetorical opponent’s beliefs and commitments. Second, the someone-
else-has-already-started-one inflection, preferred only by an alarmist fac-

tion of protectionists. This inflection is sometimes uttered as a direct claim,
a representation of the speaker’s commitments. However, even alarmists
are sensitive to the rhetorical cost associated with the phrase trade war
and thus ascribe its attendant commitments to an enemy, such as the peren-
nially harangued Japanese. As the Japan-bashing mouthpiece in Michael
Crichton’s Rising Sun remarks, “The Japanese can be tough. They say
‘business is war,’ and they mean it” (152). In either inflection, trade war
incites both heated discussion and a good deal of metaphoric response.
In recent years, speculation about a U.S.-Japan trade war arises when-
ever the U.S. invokes its Super 301 clause, a provision of the 1988 Om-
nibus Trade Act that leads to punitive tariffs on foreign goods. Various
clichéd locutions of Trade Is War find their way into this discussion, as
might be expected in quickly produced newspaper prose. When the Su-
per 301 clause is first invoked in 1989, the Los Angeles Times reports,
“The United States is about to launch a new weapon in its trade arsenal”
(Pine). The Washington Times describes Super 301 as “a potent new trade
weapon against Japan” (Riley, “Hills Has”). In the Super 301 scare of
1994, the Washington Post calls Super 301 “America’s ultimate weapon”
(Behr, “Administration”). The Chicago Tribune writes of “the most feared
weapon in the U.S. trade arsenal” (“Clinton Reimposes”). The Econo-
mist observes routinely, “America’s ‘Super 301’ trade weapon has been
primed again” (“Gunboat” 71). It would seem that all agree that, at least
when international commerce is not going well, trade is war and that the
legal provisions used in a trade war may be metaphorically rendered as
weapons. Even when trade disputes seem avoidable, the language of war
often appears, and in conventional ways. After a recent successful round
of trade negotiations, a New York Times headline declares that there is
“a truce in U.S.-Japanese trade wars” (WuDunn).
However, this broad agreement masks a perpetual shift from mapping
to mapping within Trade Is War.8 Depending on the writer’s discursive
trajectory, the Super 301 as a weapon can be rendered many ways. The
Economist, probusiness and pro–free trade, sees the weapon as “a loose
cannon at best” that “threatens America’s trade policy, the world trade
system emerging from the Uruguay round—and Japan’s long awaited
deregulation” (“Gunboat” 71). The Economist’s cannon, since it is de-
scribed below the headline “Gunboat Diplomacy,” can be pictured on the
deck of an antique warship, raining cannonballs helter skelter. This map-
ping illustrates a broad tendency for Trade Is War to hark backward in
time, to invoke not just well-established ideas of trade conflict but deeply
entrenched notions of war. The Economist, though, is especially insistent
on making antique connections and offers a literal historical analogy,
saying the Clinton administration has “all the diplomatic poise of its nine-
teenth-century predecessors.” This, of course, links the Super 301 loose

cannon to Commodore Perry’s quite literal cannons, so instrumental in
“opening trade” with Japan more than a century ago.
USA Today, appealing to a broader readership not as intently focused
upon international trade issues, agrees with the Economist’s general posi-
tion on Super 301 but maps Super 301-as-weapon differently. Its head-
line, “Make Money, Not War,” invokes Trade Is War indirectly by re-
envoicing the literal trade is peace. At the same time, it calls to mind a
distinctly un-Economist image of peaceniks and hippies. Beneath the head-
line, the paper is more measured than the Economist in the rhetorical in-
tensity of its metaphorical mapping. It merely disagrees with the admin-
istration’s choice of “tools”: “The tools the administration uses to open
Japan’s trade doors for foreign goods should be precise not destructive—
like a lockpick, not a case of dynamite” (“Make Money”). While the as-
cribed “case of dynamite” mapping is unmistakably critical of Super 301,
by shifting the metaphoric ground from weapons to tools, USA Today
leaves room to acknowledge that the administration’s goals are not mis-
guided. Nonetheless, admonishing the Clinton administration, it invokes
and ascribes a weapon as old as Perry’s cannons. It advises Clinton, “To
begin, drop the blunderbuss” (“Make Money”).
On the other side of the Super 301 debate, Washington Post colum-
nist Hobart Rowan remaps the blunderbuss metaphor as he supports the
administration with left-handed praise. He is relieved that Super 301 is
not the “blunderbuss approach” that might have been taken by Congress.
The blunderbuss is thus projected onto actions that have not been taken—
an odd mapping of something onto nothing. Indeed, qualified agreement
seems to spawn an odd quality of metaphor. A few weeks before Rowan’s
blunderbuss comment, the Post’s Peter Behr writes that the invoking of
Super 301 was “clearly meant as a warning shot toward Japan, but in
keeping with the zen-like quality of the quarrel, it was carefully aimed
to avoid coming near its target” (“Clinton Aims”). Here it is not so much
the choice of weapon that is striking but the projected mental state of
the one who fires the weapon. In a single metaphoric phrase, Behr en-
capsulates the story of Super 301: The Clinton administration invokes
Super 301, bringing the U.S. and Japan to the brink of a trade war, but
only because the administration knows that the most feared consequences
will never come to pass. In other words, it aims to miss.
As Trade Is War maps from weapon to weapon, it simultaneously
moves toward personal narrative. That is, just as shooting wars tend to
be personalized (the World War II allies did not fight Germany so much
as they fought Hitler), Trade Is War moves toward a mano a mano vi-
sion of trade war. The cannon is associated with Commodore Perry; the
blunderbuss can only be fired by one person at a single target, although
in a scattershot fashion; the warning shot suggests a shot fired by an in-

dividual. In keeping with personalizing the metaphor, the Washington Post
drops the weapon mapping altogether and comments that Super 301 “will
leave no deep bruises” (“Super 301”). And Carla Hills, trade negotiator
for the Bush administration, promises not to use Super 301 “in any bul-
lying way” (Pine).
Of course, it is one thing to point out that Trade Is War is malleable,
another to make sense of this malleability. The above examples exhibit
both a regularity of use—what I call a rhetorical etiquette—and a flex-
ibility within that etiquette. They are predictably regular in that they are
all ascriptions: they characterize the beliefs, motives, and commitments
of the administration that proposes invoking Super 301. Because the
metaphors are ascribed, newspaper writers are free to render Super 301
as weapons from the cannon to the blunderbuss and the trade disagree-
ment as fights from gun battles to wrestling matches. Why not? The meta-
phor does not represent the writer’s view. Not surprisingly, administra-
tion spokespeople—all internationalist free-traders in the last half of the
twentieth century—consistently resist the ascription of Trade Is War to
them, as we shall see.
This ascriptive regularity is dominant in the discourse of trade. Meta-
phors have costs associated with them. Thus, they entail a rhetorical eti-
quette for managing those costs. Most participants in the discourse of
trade, even when they see trade as a contentious activity, do not want to
pay the cost of claiming Trade Is War, a cost that would be paid in loss
of credibility or what Aristotle calls ethos. Of course, there are an intrepid
few who claim Trade Is War, either disregarding the cost or attempting
to make rhetorical recklessness a virtue. In his 1996 run for the Repub-
lican presidential nomination, Patrick Buchanan touted economic nation-
alism and unashamedly called himself a trade hawk. The rhetorical eti-
quette associated with Trade Is War is not mechanistic; it can be violated.
So can all etiquettes. But violation carries a price.
Within this ascriptive regularity, however, we see significant variety in
the invention of specific metaphors. This inventiveness might be thought
to result from the pursuit of vividness. No doubt, vividness is a virtue in
newspaper writing. But inventions are not entirely accidental. (And where
they may be accidental, they nonetheless come with consequences.) Each
rendering of Trade Is War either heats or cools—intensifies or attenu-
ates—the general rhetorical effect of the metaphor. The above examples,
though various, all are relatively attenuated renderings of Trade Is War.
Note what images are avoided: blood, death, dismemberment. All of these
are images of war no less than loose cannons, blunderbusses, and warn-
ing shots.
These relatively cooler images of war are taken from commentaries

that are either descriptive (e.g., weapons from news articles) or mildly
critical (e.g., the cannon, the blunderbuss, and deep bruises come from
editorials). Not only do they attenuate Trade Is War, they do it in ways
that are, if not calculated, at least calculable. Weapons is an attenuated
rendering because it is nonspecific and thus relatively nonevocative of the
negative consequences of war. The specifically invoked weapons—the
cannon and the blunderbuss—are antiquated weapons and thus associ-
ated with distant times, not immediately threatening. Images of hand-to-
hand combat attenuate Trade Is War as much as it can be attenuated,
removing weapons altogether.
What we see in the variety of renderings—the range of specific locu-
tions—that make up Trade Is War is a managed variegation of images, a
conversation of various colors from brilliant to muted, more art than
accident. Whether through conscious effort or through intuitive compe-
tence, writers and speakers typically take care to ascribe Trade Is War to
someone such as an administration or an adversary. But the ascription is
measured, the specific images conveying calibrated intensity, high or low.
Contrasting Metaphors: Trade Is Friendship

and Trade Is A Journey
We have seen that Trade Is War and trade is peace converse and that each
concept embraces internal variation that must affect their contrastive re-
lation. This conversation is further complicated by other metaphors that
complement Trade Is War and trade is peace. Let me turn first to those
that typically complement trade is peace: Trade Is Friendship and Trade
Is A Journey.
Trade Is Friendship is itself a product of a conceptual system compris-
ing Nations Are People and National Allies Are Friends (compare Kitis
and Milapides). By now, it should not be surprising to hear that this con-
ceptual system has a part-metaphoric, part-literal quality. We could say
that Great Britain is literally a friend to the United States because literal
peace and metaphoric friendship are more or less synonymous. Yet we
would have to concede that a nation, which is a political entity, cannot
be a friend in and of itself but rather stands metonymically for its citi-
zens or is anthropomorphized as a human friend (Nations Are People plus
National Allies Are Friends). Trade Is Friendship depends upon concep-
tualizing nations as friends, at least with respect to international trade;
therefore, it sits somewhere between the literal and the metaphoric.
Trade Is A Journey is associated with the more general metaphor Life
Is A Journey, a metaphor that supports many literary and ordinary meta-
phors. For example, Life Is A Journey must be recruited in order to com-

prehend Robert Frost’s poems “The Road Not Taken” and “Stopping by
Woods on a Snowy Evening” or to comprehend the last paragraphs of
The Great Gatsby. In a less lofty register, Life Is A Journey supports the
Nissan tag line, “Life is a journey. Enjoy the ride”; the similar Volkswagen
tag line, “On the road of life, there are passengers, and there are drivers.
Drivers wanted”; and many common locutions such as taking wrong turns
in life, walking the straight and narrow, and reaching the end of the road.
In turn, the journey image schema applies not just to life but to many of
life’s activities or episodes—education, marriage, careers. Trade is one of
these activities.
Taken together, trade is peace, Trade Is Friendship, and Trade Is A Jour-
ney form a cluster of mutually entailed concepts. In part, they contrast
with Trade Is War because they each entail the cooperative image schema,
an image schema that has important incompatibilities with Trade Is War’s
contention image schema. That is, while both contention and coopera-
tion entail multiple parties, typically two parties or sides, and while they
entail mutual intentions and actions toward the other party, one entails
hostile action, the other a mutual exchange of goodwill. Thus, while the
contention image schema supports metaphors of war, the cooperative
image schema supports the literal concept trade is peace and the meta-
phor Trade Is Friendship. By extension, because the contention image
schema entails blocking action, and the cooperative image schema non-
blocking action, the cooperative image schema supports Trade Is A Jour-
ney. Friends journey together; enemies, except on forced marches, do not.
However, it is not just the interplay of image-schematic compatibility
that constitutes the relationship between Trade Is War and its opposing
concepts. It is the concepts’ persistent copresence in the discourse of trade.
Indeed, these metaphors come into frequent contrastive intercourse with
each other. For example, during a 1990 debate over proposed trade sanc-
tions on Japanese goods, Senator John Heinz and trade negotiator Carla
Hills exchange jabs in side-by-side USA Today columns, re-envoicing the
standard rhetorical give-and-take of the metaphors that constitute Trade
Is War. Heinz favors new sanctions and, in his choice of metaphors, ac-
cuses Japan of treating trade as war. Decrying Japan’s “industrial target-
ing,” he writes,
Our real problem is not access to Japan’s markets but Japan’s de-
struction of ours. We’re erecting tombstones over U.S. industries—
semiconductors, machine tools, robotics, computers—targeted for
extinction by Japanese government-business collaboration. Our high-
tech economy is looking more like an industrial graveyard.
For Heinz, Japan has made international trade into a war—a war the
United States is losing.
But for Hills, who favors a new round of negotiations, and whose
rebuttal is headlined “Work with Japan for Trade Cooperation,” the
situation calls for a different set of metaphors. She points out that Japan
has progressed farther than any other of the U.S.’s “trading partners”
(Trade Is A Journey, Trade Is Friendship), urges “cooperation not con-
frontation” (incompatible image schemas), and says the U.S. needs to
“build upon the goodwill of the Japanese people” (trade is peace).9 In
her closing paragraph, she emphatically endorses Trade Is A Journey:
Down one path lie closed markets and gravely diminished prosper-
ity. Down the other lie open markets, expanded trade and economic
growth. Through our policy of global and individual negotiations,
and use of our new trade laws, we are determined to walk the path
of prosperity.
Of course, one could never “walk the path of prosperity” in a contend-

ing situation—the way is obstructed.
It is true that some configure the journey metaphor negatively, as does
the Los Angeles Times in reporting, “Clinton . . . is pondering a totally
new path in U.S.-Japan relations—one that would punish the entire Japa-
nese market” (Jameson). When on rare occasions journeying metaphors
are associated with Trade Is War, the journeys are aberrant. For example,
“Head-On Collision” is the title of a CNN program about a potential
trade war over Japanese luxury cars. Almost always, however, Trade Is
A Journey connotes a positive journey that trading partners take together.
President Bush’s chief economic advisor, Michael Boskin, insists, “I think
President Bush has made it quite clear . . . he supports policies where the
United States leads the world to freer and fairer trade” (Brookes). Simi-
larly, the Los Angeles Times renders the journey in navigational terms. It
worries that Super 301 could lead to more “scraps with Tokyo just as the
two sides try to navigate their way around a head-on trade clash and find
calmer commercial waters” (“As Japan”). Economists Patrick Low and
John Nash, free traders and multilateralists, title an article on open trade
policies, “The Long and Winding Road: Toward Freer World Trade.”
The contrastive intercourse between Trade Is War and its conceptual
opponents is an emphatic one. The opposing metaphors do not pop up
in the course of middle paragraphs as throwaway phrases or elegant
decoration. They muscle their way into the emphatic spots of trade dis-
course—titles, opening paragraphs, closing paragraphs, and the small,
emphatic summing-ups that populate essays and conversations. Carla
Hills’ claiming of Trade Is A Journey is the final thrust of her essay. Like-
wise, when trade essays end with Trade Is Friendship or Trade Is A Jour-
ney, they counter innumerable essays that end with castigating war meta-
phors. Typical of these closing lunges is this one from a publisher’s letter
in Electronics. Having warned against the use of Super 301, Jonah
McLeod closes pointedly: “Stop the war before it gets started.” The con-
trastive intercourse is a persistent competition between a metaphor that
emphatically sounds the alarm for trading disaster and opposing meta-
phors that urge us to view trade as stable, manageable, beneficial.
That trade is peace, Trade Is Friendship, and Trade Is A Journey are
thought of positively is important to their rhetorical constitution. Not
only does this conceptual system contrast with Trade Is War as an os-
tensible representation of external circumstances, it attenuates the rhe-
torical intensity asserted by Trade Is War. A writer or speaker may say
emphatically that we need to walk the path of peace and prosperity with
our friends, but that emphasized point is less disturbing politically and
emotionally than invocations of war. Moreover, because the conceptual
blend tends to attenuate controversy, to utter it carries little rhetorical
cost. That is, unless the description is patently incorrect, what loss of cre-
dibility or ethos is likely to result from advocating a noncalamitous, pros-
perous future? This low cost is evidenced in the nonascriptive ways trade
is peace, Trade Is Friendship, and Trade Is A Journey are uttered. For
example, unlike John Heinz, who accuses the Japanese of “industrial
targeting,” thus ascribing Trade Is War to a foreign competitor, Carla Hills
fully claims Trade Is A Journey, closing her essay: “We are determined
to walk the path of prosperity.” Others may point the accusing finger,
but Hills (in this case) indicates unequivocally which metaphor represents
her view.
Partially Compatible Metaphors: Markets Are

Containers and Trade Is A Game
When Trade Is War converses with trade is peace, Trade Is Friendship,
and Trade Is A Journey, the conversation is argumentative in a fairly di-
rect way. Trade Is War’s hostile-action image schema and all of its entailed
political, economic, social, professional, and personal commitments oppose
the peaceful-exchange image schema and all the commitments it entails.
But not all metaphors operate in direct opposition to other metaphors.
Trade Is War entails the container image schema, and thus it is asso-
ciated with the conceptual metaphor Markets Are Containers. In the war
image schema, contending sides attempt to conquer each other. Conquer-
ing involves ownership of territory. So when we treat trade as war, we
have to understand markets as owned or contained—often contained by
walls or barriers. Trade Is War is also closely related to the metaphor Trade
Is A Game, a metaphor that on the one hand entails the contention im-
age schema but on the other is very different.
Trade Is War’s rhetorical etiquette leads most writers and speakers to
ascribe war metaphors to someone else—to an enemy or a competitor.
As they ascribe Trade Is War, it is not uncommon for them simultaneously
to claim an alternative metaphor. However, the alternative metaphor need

not be a direct opposite. It can be a partially compatible metaphor such
as Markets Are Containers or Trade Is A Game, metaphors that concede
some elements of the hostile-action image schema but are not necessarily
inflected in the same way. This simultaneous ascription of Trade Is War
and claiming of an alternate metaphor has the advantage of complexly
managing rhetorical costs, because it allows the utterer to ascribe an in-
tensified metaphor while claiming an attenuated, partially compatible me-
taphor. The utterer gets to have it both ways.
Trade Is A Game
Incensed at the administration’s use of Super 301 during a Japanese re-
cession, the Boston Globe’s David Warsh denounces the “trade-war-in-
the-making” as “hitting an ally when it is down.” This is wrong, Warsh
insists, because we should be “committed to play by the international rules
of the game.” This shift from Trade Is War to Trade Is A Game has two
components. First, Warsh denounces the administration, ascribing the
relatively intense Trade Is War to them: “Hitting an ally when it is down”
personalizes and therefore magnifies the conflict. Simultaneously, he rec-
ommends what he sees as a correct policy, claiming the attenuating Trade
Is A Game (“international rules of the game”) for himself. In the discourse
of trade, this maneuver can be observed again and again.
Consider Senator Heinz’s editorial warning that Japan’s “industrial
targeting” will lead to the “destruction” of U.S. markets. Heinz uses the
war metaphor, but like most trade discoursers, he ascribes it—as a po-
litical, philosophical commitment—to Japan. At the same time, he claims
Trade Is A Game for himself. In the opening of his editorial, Heinz de-
scribes the U.S.’s trade policy as “Charlie Brown warning Lucy not to pull
the football away again.” “In industry after industry,” he says, “we end
up flat on our backs while Japan ends up with the ball.” Here Japan is
portrayed as one who undermines the standard scheme (or image schema)
of games, turning the game into war by acting out of actual hostility in-
stead of feigning hostility in a context of goodwill. As the editorial pro-
ceeds, this negative portrayal escalates into Heinz’s explicit ascription of
Trade Is War to the Japanese, while the U.S. remains associated with
Charlie Brown, the unfairly deceived game player. Even after urging trade
sanctions, which are often seen as warlike, Heinz returns to the meta-
phor of games, saying, “Even Charlie Brown could tell you [sanctions are
needed].” Thus, while Heinz recommends a kind of militant self-defense,
he does not endorse the bellicose trade philosophy he ascribes to Japan.
Lester Thurow makes the same shift in metaphors. He explicitly at-
tempts to rehabilitate some aspects of Trade Is War, denounces it in gen-
eral terms, and subsequently claims Trade Is A Game. Thurow’s use of
the military metaphor is metaphor by denial. The main title of his book
Head to Head invokes the hostile-action image schema, and its subtitle,
The Coming Economic Battle among Japan, Europe, and the United
States, invokes Trade Is War. But Thurow—having it both ways—persis-
tently challenges his own metaphor in the body of the book, remarking
most explicitly, “The military metaphor is fundamentally incorrect” (31).
In rejecting Trade Is War, Thurow does not unreservedly reject the
hostile-action image schema and its entailments, nor does he unreserv-
edly endorse the cooperative image schema and its entailments. Instead,
he carefully manages the rhetorical costs associated with his metaphors:
“The economic game that will be played in the twenty-first century will
have cooperative as well as competitive elements” (31). He argues, in a
sense, that we will have war and peace at the same time. Thus, it works
well for him to claim Trade Is A Game, which often means feigned war
in the context of peace. He gains the attention that comes with the in-
tensified metaphor Trade Is War but lessens its rhetorical cost by shift-
ing to the attenuated Trade Is A Game. Of course, having it both ways is
not easy. Thurow sometimes is seduced by the easy reverse move from
Trade Is A Game back to Trade Is War, perhaps by the pointedness of the
intensified metaphor. While he declares on one page, “Let me suggest the
military metaphors so widely used should be replaced by the language of
football” (39), a page later, he says that education will soon be the domi-
nant “competitive weapon” (40).
The interface between Trade Is War and Trade Is A Game can be com-
plex indeed. In a student focus-group discussion not centered on imminent
trade war, the easy move from war to game is used to justify Trade Is War
as a metaphor. One student makes an argument that trade is a bombing
mission is not true. She believes it mischaracterizes business, that “bomb-
ing mission” is too “severe.” Another student counters that businesses do,
in fact, target and destroy competitors. She argues:
And, you know, and you’re saying that it’s so—it is such a—what
did you use? The term is so drastic? I don’t really think so. I was look-
ing at it from more of an abstract point—that a bombing mission is
like football is like a business, where you have a common goal, and
there is a team working together, and sometimes you have to sacri-
fice yourself for the end result or for the purpose.
This exchange comprises many sorts of metaphorical motion. It taps into

the literal notion that trade is peace but reconfigures it as peace among
teammates; it alters the metaphorical connotations of trade is a bombing
mission that offend one member of the focus group, turning it into a meta-
phorical hyperbole—that is, layering the metaphor so that it doesn’t re-
ally mean bombing, it means football, a game in which the long bomb
never explodes.
These back-and-forth shifts between attenuating game metaphors and

intensifying war metaphors demonstrate well the hologramic quality of
Trade Is A Game. Seen from one perspective, Trade Is A Game is feigned
war; seen from another it is actual peace. This makes the maneuver from
war to games appealingly easy. But it does not guarantee that the move
will be persuasive. For example, Thurow’s critics insist that he cannot es-
cape the implications of Trade Is War, no matter how well he argues that
game metaphors are more accurate. Economist Paul Krugman objects to
Thurow’s metaphors of competitiveness in general. He disparages Thu-
row’s seeing countries as corporations, corporations as armies or teams,
and thus the world economy as a large theater of war or playing field.
He derides:
The subtitle of Lester Thurow’s huge best-seller, Head to Head, is
“The Coming Economic Battle among Japan, Europe, and America.”
. . . Suppose that the subtitle had described the real situation: The
coming struggle in which each big economy will succeed or fail based
on its own efforts, pretty much independently of how well the oth-
ers do. Would he have sold so many books? (39)
But Krugman counters with his own metaphors, primarily the metaphor
of numbers discussed by economist and rhetorician Donald (now Deidre)
McCloskey (Rhetoric 79–83). Objecting to estimates of hourly wage loss
by Thurow and his intellectual allies, Krugman says, “All one needs to
do, then, is spend a few minutes in the library with a calculator to come
up with a table that ranks U.S. industries by value-added per worker”
(37). In other words, it only takes a few minutes to re-envoice the per-
vasive economic metaphor Time Is Money. Both ironically and typically,
Krugman’s closing salvo at Thurow is to hurl an intensified instance of
Trade Is War at him: “A much more serious risk is that obsession with
competitiveness will lead to trade conflict, perhaps even to a world trade
war” (41, emphasis added). Krugman will not allow Thurow to slip easily
between Trade Is War and Trade Is A Game. If Thurow is to raise the
specter of war, let it be world war.
As with Trade Is War, the widespread use of Trade Is A Game should
not be seen as an undifferentiated gestalt. There is considerable variation
within Trade Is A Game, including most prominently metaphors of cards,
chess, and football. Each concrete instance of Trade Is A Game is keyed
to writers’ and speakers’ individuated discursive trajectory—in most cases
a free-trade globalist trajectory of some variety. And, in each instance,
the metaphor is ascribed or claimed, intensified or attenuated. The main
maneuver that I have described—ascribing an intensified Trade Is War
while claiming an attenuated Trade Is A Game—is typical. But other ma-
neuvers are to be found.
Because Trade Is A Game is malleable, it can sensibly be claimed in a
positive way, and it can be ascribed in a negative way. William Neikirk

of the Chicago Tribune, for example, ascribes and ridicules Trade Is A
Game by representing the mindset of Super 301 proponents in the phrase,
“If you don’t play with me, I’m going to take my toys away.” That is,
Neikirk depicts Super 301 proponents as small children who accuse Ja-
pan of undermining the standard game image schema while falsely assum-
ing that the game-image should apply to trade in the first place. Perhaps
more than most trade metaphors, Trade Is A Game requires interpreta-
tion in light of finely detailed cultural knowledge. How could we begin
to understand Trade Is A Game without the intuitive knowledge that to
undermine the rules of football (Senator Heinz’s metaphor) is reprehen-
sible and that to expect the rules of young childhood games (Neikirk’s
metaphor) always to be obeyed is foolish?
Markets Are Containers

It is far from unusual for markets to be seen as metaphorical containers.
The word market in its most literal sense refers to a defined space in which
merchants conduct business—the ancient Greek agora, the farmers mar-
ket, the flea market, the supermarket, and so on. By metonymy, the activ-
ities that take place in markets are also referred to as markets. The mar-
ket for new cars, consumer electronics, commodities, and the like can be
called lively, slow, hot, dead—all adjectives that describe the rate of ac-
tivity within a defined, although not always contiguous, space. Like-
wise, the stock market is contained. It has a trading volume that can be
numerically expressed by various indices such as the Dow Jones. In short,
the finiteness of markets—their containability—is one of our most fun-
damental image schemas, so fundamental that we could not understand
scarcity, saturation, or supply and demand without it.
This container image schema is recruited for many metaphoric varia-
tions. As we saw the discussion of trade sanctions on Crossfire (see chap-
ter 1), Representative Levin counters Trade Is War with Markets Are
Containers, using a wall metaphor, the wall surrounding the Japanese
closed market—a container. In the same discussion, Andrew Card ren-
ders Markets Are Containers as “sanctuary markets,” also contained
spaces separate from other markets. The “sanctuary market” is the Japa-
nese market, a space contained within Japan’s national borders. But Mar-
kets Are Containers also applies abstractly to scattered markets. Through-
out business and trade talk, we speak of getting into the business, plenty
of room for everyone in this market, and market share—phrases which
treat markets as contained wholes.
Like Trade Is A Game, Markets Are Containers can attenuate and re-
main compatible with Trade Is War. That is, it can concede some of Trade
Is War’s entailments, repudiate others, and thereby lower the rhetorical
temperature. However, let me describe this attenuation somewhat differ-

ently from the way I described that of Trade Is A Game. So far I have fo-
cused upon the ways rhetorical costs are managed in order to avoid or
mitigate the costs associated with hot metaphors, particularly Trade Is
War. But adhering to the standard etiquette can also help a writer or
speaker to build credibility or ethos.
We have seen in the previous section an example in which Carla Hills
deflects John Heinz’s metaphors of contention with alternate metaphors
of friendship and journeys. At other times, Hills makes a virtue of the
metaphor Markets Are Containers. In her exchange with Heinz, Hills op-
poses trade sanctions, but in other situations, she supports use of Super
301. Super 301 is frequently called by the nickname “the crowbar stat-
ute,” a metaphor that depicts Super 301 as a tool for prying open Japan’s
markets (Markets Are Containers). When supporting the use of the crow-
bar statute, Hills makes the most of this metaphor by keeping an actual,
symbolic crowbar in her office (Tran). That is, she literalizes the meta-
phor Markets Are Containers but ascribes its commitments to Japan. Im-
portantly, because Markets Are Containers is associated with Trade Is
War, to ascribe Markets Are Containers to Japan, particularly in connec-
tion with a hot trade dispute, is to imply that Trade Is War may repre-
sent the Japanese view, also. By wielding the crowbar, Hills is trying to
open Japan’s war-threatening container so that in the future the U.S. and
Japan can be cooperative, friendly traders on a journey to prosperity. What
could be wrong with that?
The press—no doubt, to Hills’ great approval—seems to take the hint.
The Washington Times, while calling Super 301 a weapon in the body
of its article, writes in its headline, “Hills has wedge to open closed for-
eign markets” (Riley); the Washington Post, five years later, describes
Super 301 as both a weapon and as the “crowbar statute” (Behr, “Ad-
ministration”).
Trade Is War in Summary

Any description of the conversation that constitutes Trade Is War will be
too brief to encompass all of its complexity. Each instance of Trade Is War
is shaped by individual commitments, relative willingness to adhere to
the standard rhetorical etiquette, and immediate rhetorical goals. I do ar-
gue, however, that the kind of general functioning I have described is per-
vasive, and it happens all at once. For example, even in a somewhat hu-
morous metaphor, we can see the standard rhetorical etiquette at play. The
Detroit Free Press criticizes President Clinton, writing, “Invoking Super
301 is like rolling out The Bomb where the rapier will do, and the fall-
out is likely to be far-reaching, here and abroad” (“Pressuring”). Seen
in the Aristotelian way, this might seem a trivial metaphor, based on the
shared feature “destructiveness” among “The Bomb,” “the rapier,” and

“Super 301.” However, what is important is that the Detroit Free Press
ascribes the political, philosophical commitments of Trade Is War to
President Clinton—ascribes them in an equivocal way that does not en-
tirely reject the image schema of contention but prefers the antiquated
domain of sword-fighting, where destruction is one-on-one. This shift of
domains is only effective if there is a broad cultural knowledge that the
The Bomb has been the defining terror of recent generations and that the
rapier is today associated more with Hollywood swashbuckling than
with bloody combat.
This all-at-onceness is common indeed. It has been a necessary evil
for me to present elements of Trade Is War’s constituting conversation
one at a time. In analyses, we pause and consider. But in conversation,
we speak, understand, consider, maneuver, and respond very quickly. In
a sense, even though the metaphor Language Is Conversation may im-
ply sequenced responses, the conversation surrounding Trade Is War tran-
scends sequential time, operating with a quickness that looks like simul-
taneity. It is rather stunning that we can take in so much metaphor so
fast, but it is something we do routinely.
This single passage about Super 301 from columnist Warren Brookes
encompasses all of the conversation described so far—and, of course,
more:
Unfortunately . . . Mr. Mosbacher, emboldened by his success in

substantially modifying the FSX agreement (to build a fighter plane
with Japan), seems as eager to escalate the trade arms race as does
Congress—and South Korea’s and Taiwan’s capitulations to “301”
threats . . . have only reinforced and ratified protectionist appetites.
To begin with, we are faced with two discursive trajectories embedded

within each other. Brookes’ first word (“unfortunately”) signals a com-
peting viewpoint from the one ascribed to Mosbacher, who would “esca-
late the trade arms race.” In order to oppose Trade Is War, Brookes must
champion the literal notion that trade is peace. And although Brookes
does not specify an alternate metaphor, the interconnected discourse of
trade has already specified alternatives for him. Thus, Brookes’ opposi-
tion to Trade Is War entails at least metaphors of friendship, journeys,
games, and containers.
Moreover, the primary metaphor, “trade arms race,” does not, in this
instance, operate in absolute opposition to these competing metaphors.
By associating Trade Is A Journey with Trade Is War, Brookes reinflects
them and at the same time reconfigures Trade Is War. When Brookes says
Mosbacher relishes a “trade arms race,” he accuses Mosbacher of trade
war mongering. Trade Is War is the central orientation. Trade war, as we
have seen, continually maps and remaps into various, politically-freighted

weapon mappings. The locution “trade arms race,” a corollary of the nu-
clear arms race, resists the attenuating tendency of weapon mappings to
regress into cannons, blunderbusses, sabers, and so on, pulling the time
orientation of weapons forward into the late twentieth century.
Simultaneously and ironically, “trade arms race” attenuates Trade Is
War from war to games, a race. The phrase arms race had its measure of
irony during the U.S.-Soviet Cold War. Of course, the Cold War irony
was terrifying; the race was one we could not afford to lose. Some of that
irony is retained in “trade arms race.” And Brookes, perhaps, is using the
irony to chastise Mosbacher. In Brookes’ account, Mosbacher is “embold-
ened” and “eager” for a “trade arms race,” as if he does not understand
that this is a game with grave consequences. “Trade arms race” suggests
that Mosbacher’s aggressive maneuvering is gamelike and, in the same
breath, insists that it is no such thing. A few words later in a remarkable
but perfectly comprehensible mixed metaphor, the irony is driven home
as Brookes says, “South Korea’s and Taiwan’s capitulations to ‘301’
threats . . . have only reinforced and ratified protectionist appetites.”
Here, the game becomes a war again, reduced to a cannibal versus can-
nibal—or perhaps animal versus animal—struggle, where one eats the
other’s wealth like food or where one eats the other entirely. Korea and
Taiwan are signatories to their own demise, ratifying their opponent’s ap-
petite as if it were a treaty.
In addition, war and game metaphors do not operate without simul-
taneous container and journey metaphors. Just as trade discourse encom-
passes Markets Are Containers (usually invoked in order to side-step
Trade Is War), the discourse of war refers to both literal and metaphori-
cal barriers: from China’s literal Great Wall to the Soviet Union’s meta-
phorical iron curtain. Thus, when Mosbacher seeks a “trade arms race”—
that is, treats trade as war—he necessarily orients trade as a conflict
between containerlike entities, which develop competing weaponry within
their own borders. At the same time, a second spatial metaphor is at work,
mapped as a race. It is not the cooperative trade journey that animates
much of trade discourse but rather an inversion that trumps its opposite.
The persistent inversion of Trade Is A Game, Trade Is A Journey, and Mar-
kets Are Containers amounts to a web of irony that moves Brookes’ pas-
sage into a spiraling tension with standard metaphors of the discourse
of trade. Brookes is saying, Doesn’t Mosbacher realize that trade is not
war, but only a game, that we should journey peacefully together, that
all we really desire is to be allowed through the market’s gates?
In addition, the simultaneous movement of this passage involves more
than the metaphors already discussed. It also interacts with the orienta-
tional metaphors that are part and parcel of the discourse of trade: uni-
lateral, bilateral, and multilateral. These orientational signals do not

fit a bifurcated model easily, as with the orientational metaphor Happy
Is Up, where happy is always up and sad is always down (Lakoff and
Johnson 14–21). Instead they overlap and bend to the point the speaker
is making.
Controversy about unilateral and bilateral action is prominent in the
press discussion of Super 301 and generally in the discourse of trade. A
few days prior to Brookes’ article, the Washington Times reports, “Sou-
suke Uno, Japan’s newly elected prime minister, said last week his nation
had no intention of taking part in talks regarding what he termed as . . .
unilateral trade threats” (Riley, “Japanese Will”). Mosbacher’s colleague,
Carla Hills, is quoted as reassuring Uno, “Anything that follows there-
after is a bilateral negotiation.” But the contrast between unilateralism
and bilateralism is not a simple one. Bilateralism is often condemned by
free traders, as in the Boston Globe’s “aggressive bilateralism symbol-
ized by President Clinton’s renewing of Super 301” (Warsh). Bilateral-
ism, in the eyes of staunch free traders, amounts to making a separate
peace, betraying multilateral action. A New York Times editorial de-
nounces Super 301, saying, “The key word is unilateral; under Super 301,
the U.S. belittles its commitment to resolve disputes in multilateral set-
tings” (“Risking”). When Brookes, then, accuses Mosbacher of escalat-
ing a trade arms race, he calls into play all of these orientational meta-
phors because “trade arms race”—in war, game, container, and journey
mappings alike—suggests either a unilateral or bilateral relation between
trading partners.
Is this all that constitutes the conversation? Surely not. I have presented
what seem to me the most salient elements. But the discourse of trade is
filled with metaphors that this study has not and will not consider close-
ly—and which may or may not bear upon Brookes’ passage. Trade Is Sex.
Trade Is Litigation. The Economy Is A Machine. The Economy Is A Per-
son. Goods Are Water. (Compare Boers; Boers and Demecheleer; David
and Graham; Ezrahi; Lakoff, Moral; McCloskey, “Metaphors”; Mio;
O’Connor; Rohrer; Sherman.) However, I cannot leave Brookes’ passage
without noting in the next section its final maneuver. As in the discourse
of trade overall, Brookes’ Trade Is War moves back to the literal.
Trade Is War as Harbinger of War

The final move back to the literal is not the same as Trade Is War’s first
link with the literal. It is not that Trade Is War entails a literal trade is
peace, but that Trade Is War pushes the discourse of trade from a dis-
cussion of aggressive trade practices into a discussion of literal war.
Brookes nudges the discussion in this direction by mentioning that “Mr.
Mosbacher [is] emboldened by his success in substantially modifying the

FSX agreement (to build a fighter plane with Japan).” Inevitably, it seems,
the topic widens to include World War II, with images of Japanese Ze-
ros easily called to mind, and reviving the lingering U.S. fear that Japan
cannot be trusted with military power. The discussion of trade war thinly
conceals a discussion of actual war—one of the main reasons that Trade
Is War is so often ascribed to others, and one of the reasons its mappings
are so often attenuated.
Trade Is War’s push toward the literal is especially evident when the
discussion involves Japan. For example, when trade writers describe a
dispute involving Canadian and American beers as “a longstanding trade
war,” the contiguity of literal war does not show itself (French). Instead
the metaphor remaps into a dispute among families: “the heart of the
feud” (French). But literal war with Japan remains easily evoked. In Cross-
fire’s discussion of Super 301 (see chapter 1), John Sununu jabs, “You
keep asking why we don’t put the focus on the Japanese. We are putting
the focus on Japan. But we also read history. And what happened in the
world before World War II is a trade war that cost everybody.” Similarly,
Mitsubishi chairman Akio Morita, during an earlier time of trade fric-
tion, is quoted, “Things appear to have gotten as bad as they were on
the eve of World War II” (Jameson).
Sometimes the literalizing maneuver is reversed, going from literal to
metaphoric—underscoring the irony of current war metaphors. Sean
O’Leary, tongue-in-cheek columnist for Visual Merchandising and Store
Design, makes deft use of the Trade Is War metaphor with such locutions
as, “The Japanese citizenry, foot soldiers of the economic miracle, is get-
ting the imperial shaft at the retail level.” This comes, however, on the
heels of a textual progress from literal to metaphoric. The article begins
with a discussion of the Japanese Shogunate and moves to a burlesque
of Perry’s opening of relations: “‘Listen,’ said Commodore Perry. ‘We’d
like you to do business with us.’ He came back a year later with a larger
fleet, to hear the decision.” Next, O’Leary specifies the link between war
and trade: “The rapid growth of Japan’s world economic empire rivals
the flowering of our own military machine.” Only then does he move to
the metaphoric realm of Japanese economic foot soldiers and an Ameri-
can counterinvasion of McDonald’s and shopping malls.
Finally, Trade Is War comes into intercourse with the literal as the
metaphor itself becomes literalized. That is, the metaphor Trade Is War
stands side-by-side with the literal notion that trade is war (really). This
literalization occurs when people believe that economic warfare is part
and parcel of military war. Economic warriors extend the category of war
to include acts of economic aggression ranging from predatory pricing
to industrial espionage—or sabotage. More typically, the literalization of
the metaphor occurs in ascriptions of Trade Is War to others, usually the

Japanese. In Rising Sun, Michael Crichton ascribes Trade Is War/trade
is peace to the Japanese in order to accuse them of out-of-bounds trade
practices. Likewise, and yet more dramatically, Tom Clancy’s Debt of
Honor casts the Japanese as aggressors who use both military and eco-
nomic techniques to attack the United States. In Clancy’s novel, Japan
militarily occupies the American-owned Mariana Islands, while simul-
taneously sabotaging computer records on Wall Street. Both acts culmi-
nate a nefarious investment scheme through which the Japanese under-
mine the value of American currency. It is perhaps a testimony to the
attractiveness of Japan-bashing that Clancy’s novel has enjoyed consid-
erable success. But it is also testimony to the deep entrenchment of Trade
Is War that it can be literalized as the plot of popular fiction.
Trade Is War out of the Ordinary

What I have described in this chapter is the conversation that makes up
ordinary trade talk. This ordinariness is based upon common assump-
tions, common knowledge, common culture and is evidenced in cognitive
ways. That is to say, war is a category that includes many varieties of
war—from small turf wars to nuclear wars. Like all categories, it has a
graded structure: some prototypical category members are seen as more
central than others. Just as robins and sparrows are seen as more typical
of birds than penguins and ostriches, war that pits armies in direct con-
frontation is seen as more typical of war than, say, diffuse guerrilla wars.
When most English speakers metaphorize trade as war, they rely upon
this culturally pervasive prototype of war. (I discuss categories more ex-
tensively in chapter 4.) But it is imperative to remember that I am describ-
ing a cognitive model that is specific to a time and a place: the last por-
tion of the twentieth century in the American and British language. The
current cognitive prototype of war—not to mention trade, friendship,
games, journeys, and containment—is a product not of a disembodied
mind but instead of an experiential collectivity. Thus, the concomitant
regularity of rhetoric is by no means a set of rules that cannot be trans-
gressed. Indeed, all of what I have described can be and is transgressed.
Some odd examples of Trade Is War, especially when inflected by other
cultures, are to be found. For example, in some Asian countries, Trade
Is War (and its near relation Business Is War) guides a part of business
school curriculums. Chinese and Japanese business schools regularly in-
clude Sun Wu’s 500 B.C. treatise, The Art of War, in required reading lists,
encouraging students to apply war strategies to trade. But it’s not neces-
sarily the war most Westerners know. And thus, it’s not necessarily the
trade Westerners know.
Chinese consultant Chin-Ning Chu capitalizes on the use of Sun Wu’s

text by teaching an Asian permutation of Trade Is War to Western busi-
ness people. Her Trade Is War does not closely resemble Defoe’s notion
of a warlike king placing a town under siege, nor does it recall Commo-
dore Perry’s cannons, nor the nuclear age “trade arms race.” She illustrates
Trade Is War with the story of one of her clients, an American grass seed
company who wants to sell seed to the Chinese. In her story, Chin-Ning
acts as a go-between for the American company and the government of
China. But since the Chinese perception of beauty, according to Chin-
Ning, is to eradicate grass rather than to grow it, she tells the Chinese
that her American client wishes to buy grass seed. This results in a series
of communications, over a period of years, between American and Chi-
nese technicians. In the end, the Chinese fail to sell their poor quality, un-
economical grass seed but are sold on the idea of grass—which they buy
from Chin-Ning’s American client. She exults, “In the 1990 Asian Olym-
pic Games in China, the fields were covered with American grass” (50).
Chin-Ning, self-described teacher of business warfare and advocate of
Sun Wu’s The Art of War, could not be more explicit in invoking Trade
Is War as the metaphor that motivates her story, but I—frankly—have a
difficult time seeing the war in her Trade Is War story. To me, war is vio-
lent confrontation: Gettysburg, Normandy, the Tet Offensive, the rain-
ing of Patriot missiles onto Baghdad during the Gulf War. To her, war is
something described by Sun Wu: a series of deceptive actions, undertaken
to avoid direct confrontation. She has, apparently, a different prototype
of war in mind.
So it is with Trade Is War and all of the elements of its constituting con-
versation. We can recognize the way the conversation typically proceeds;
we can know the etiquette that guides the conversation at a particular time,
in a particular place. But regularities are not rules. An etiquette, though
it may seem systematic in ways, is not a universal or rigid system. Yet an
entrenched metaphor such as Trade Is War cannot function without an
etiquette of some kind. It becomes meaningful as part of a conversation.
And conversations are not random motion but motivated activity.
62 Three (Doubtful) Premises of Metaphor Theory
4
Three (Doubtful) Premises
of Metaphor Theory
The entire image-structure, in the American mind, of Japan is a
metaphor that links World War II, specifically Pearl Harbor, with
present-day commerce, such that everything Japan does is open
to the possibility of being perceived as invasion, as taking over, as
evil.
—John Deutsch, on Nightline, 1996
With all its variety of detail, most metaphor theory embeds three pre-
mises—fundamental premises that are products of the Aristotelian, two-
part model of metaphor. The first is that a metaphor changes in charac-
ter over time, following the pattern of a life span. Metaphoric life span
assumes a metaphor enters the language as a forceful expression, rich in
implications; then, after long aging, it dies into a literal expression whose
metaphorical quality—if it survives at all—is largely irrelevant. In twen-
tieth-century metaphor theory, the notion that metaphors can be readily
identified as “dead” or “alive” is routinely embedded in theorists’ as-
sumptions and, if explicitly mentioned, is afforded usually only a sentence,
a paragraph, or a few pages at most. Yet, in important ways, the life span
thesis underlies theorists’ selection of metaphoric exemplars and funda-
mentally shapes their view of what metaphors, dead or alive, are capable
of doing.
The second premise is that metaphor amounts to a false assertion of
category. Categorical violation argues that if we say my love is a rose (to
use a favorite example), we recognize the metaphor’s untruth because my
love (a person) does not belong to the category flower, which is the com-
mon category most immediately superordinate to rose. Categorical viola-
tion is said to contribute to, if not constitute, the comparison’s metaphoric
quality because it juxtaposes metaphorical truth and categorical falsehood
within a single expression, forcing a linguistic, conceptual incongruity.
62
Three (Doubtful) Premises of Metaphor Theory 63
The third premise is that metaphor involves isomorphic correspon-

dences—mappings—from source to target. Metaphorical mapping argues
that when we say my love is a rose, we attribute the individual features
of rose, as well as the relations between those features, to the domain of
humankind. For instance, many would say that roses are beautiful, deli-
cate, and sweet smelling, and that the metaphor applies these features to
my love, usually a female. While metaphor theory offers varying accounts
of mapping, most accounts assume that metaphoric mappings bring into
relief one-to-one correspondences between target and source domains and
that the aptness of mappings has to do with similarity in structure of target
and source domains.
These three premises—metaphoric life span, categorical violation, and
metaphorical mapping—are described differently by different theorists,
but no one questions their fundamental reliability. However, this appar-
ent reliability is an artifact of the methodology of metaphor theory, not
an inherent feature of metaphor itself. Typically, metaphor theorists do
not consider concretely occurring examples of metaphor, and therefore
avoid many of the complex relations between metaphor and its larger
discursive and conceptual context. Even when more recent theorists at-
tend to some of the larger landscape of metaphor, they often return, in
the end, to rule building on the basis of a few isolated examples, which
are examined with little regard to the dynamic conversation that gives
rise to them in the first place.
Most theory presumes that metaphors have mainly an internal func-
tion, a crucial, governing relation between term A and term B. This em-
phasis on internal function diverts attention away from any given meta-
phor’s involvement in discourse and its necessarily responsive attitude,
making possible premises such as metaphoric life span, categorical vio-
lation, and mapping. In turn, the premises reinforce the internal-function,
two-part model, each in its own way. The life span premise rules out in-
convenient metaphors as objects of study, since few theorists find “dead
metaphors” worthy of much attention; categorical violation reifies mis-
taken notions of cognition, making possible mistaken assumptions about
the internal functioning of metaphors; and mapping all too often is used
to further a formalist theory of metaphor, which emphasizes preexistent
structure rather than language in use.
I wish to reconsider these premises in the light of metaphor’s rhetori-
cal constitution. In so doing, I will consider examples routinely used by
theorists, suggesting specific ways these examples can show us more than
they do when seen in light of an imagined responsive conversation or,
where possible, in light of an actual conversation. In addition, I will exam-
ine each premise in relation to Trade Is War as it occurs in concrete locu-
tions and in light of its constituting conversation. When we see metaphor

as part of the larger movement of language, inseparable from concrete oc-
currences, which are in turn inseparable from their discursive and concep-
tual environment, we can also see that the premises of metaphor theory—
which have seemed self-evident to many—either do not function in the
way we have believed, do not function for the reasons we have believed,
or do not function at all.
Metaphoric Life Span

Metaphors, we say, live and die. This life span thesis is most commonly
expressed in the phrase “dead metaphor,” which implies, it is safe to say,
that the metaphor was once alive. The notion that all metaphors live and
die is treated by most students of metaphor with such blasé assurance that
it is not afforded much ink. John Searle, for example, writes, “We are all
familiar with the processes whereby an expression becomes a dead meta-
phor, and then finally becomes an idiom or acquires a meaning different
from the original meaning” (90).
Nelson Goodman echoes the notion in this way:
Still metaphor is not sheer ambiguity. Applying the term cape to a
body of land on one occasion and to an article of clothing on an-
other is using it with different and indeed mutually exclusive ranges
but is not in either case metaphorical. . . . When one use precedes
and informs another, the second is the metaphorical one. As time goes
on, the history may fade and the two uses tend to achieve equality
and independence; the metaphor freezes, or rather evaporates, and
the residue is a pair of literal uses—mere ambiguity instead of meta-
phor. (70–71)
Goodman asserts a questionable etymology here. Cape in its geographi-

cal sense derives from the Latin caput, which means head. Cape as an ar-
ticle of clothing once referred to a hooded garment, hence its relation to
the head. That association is all but lost in modern usage. Goodman gives
us no reason to think he is referring to both capes’ relation to the head but
rather seems to mean the geographical term is a lost metaphor that may
once have associated the land formation with various aspects of the ar-
ticle of clothing. This etymological vagueness further demonstrates the
insidious force of the life span thesis. That is, the life span thesis leads Good-
man to assume that his contemporary awareness of cape’s polysemy must
be explained in accordance with a life span metaphor. In fact, it is contem-
porary polysemy alone that gives cape a faint metaphoric quality—no mat-
ter how Goodman may wish to deny it. Moreover, while it is interesting
that Goodman avoids an explicit life span metaphor, preferring a rabbit-
or-duck water metaphor (“freezes, or rather evaporates”), he nonethe-
less uses a life span framework (“As time goes on, the history . . .”) to
describe the change from metaphorical to literal meaning. Necessarily, this
casts dead metaphors as one-time living metaphors.
By itself, the idea of conceptual metaphor does not help us to rethink
the notion of dead metaphors, except in a very broad sense. Lakoff, John-
son, Turner, and others have argued that many so-called dead metaphors
form conceptual systems that organize our experience of the world. When
we utter a dead metaphor such as she’s on top of the world, the meta-
phor is comprehensible only because we place it within the culturally gen-
erated and cognitively entrenched system of metaphors named by More
Is Up and Success Is Up. Indeed, Lakoff, Johnson, Turner, and others make
a persuasive case that “dead” metaphors warrant serious attention as we
try to explain how language works, how culture works, and, in fact, how
the brain works. As part of that argument, Lakoff and Turner, as well as
Turner alone, maintain that literary metaphors—those usually thought
most alive—are generally enabled and constrained by the same concep-
tual metaphors that underpin more conventional locutions. Nonetheless,
even though the idea of conceptual metaphor is important, the question
of metaphoric life span remains untouched.
Consider Goodman’s example. Cape (as a land formation) might be
supported by a conceptual metaphor such as Geographical Formations
Are Familiar Objects and instantiated by a cluster of land metaphors: the
panhandle of Texas, the boot heel of Italy or Missouri, snow-capped moun-
tains, river bed, ocean floor, and so on. Without insisting that Geographi-
cal Formations Are Familiar Objects really constitutes a conceptual meta-
phor—it might as easily be comprised by other physical analogies that
would include I beam, C clamp, hour-glass figure, and the like—we none-
theless can better comprehend the functioning of cape if we see it as op-
erating within a system of conventional metaphors. In fact, this larger
pattern probably accounts for Goodman’s assumption that the land for-
mation cape is derived from the article of clothing, rather than from
antiquated words for head. To note this pattern, however, does not help
us explain why cape sounds, to everyday ears, either nonmetaphorical or
only distantly metaphorical. This leaves metaphoric life span standing as
the only explanation for the relative difference in metaphoric quality be-
tween “dead” and “live” metaphors. Metaphors grow old. They die.
But dead metaphor is a problematic idea. Sometimes it is difficult to
tell whether a metaphor is dead or alive. Zdravko Radman points out
that declaring a metaphor dead shortchanges our “semantic memory.”
In other words, if dead metaphors are really dead, why won’t they lie
down? Why do theorists recognize metaphoricity and attempt to deny it
at the same time? Andrew Goatly attempts to explain away this prob-
lem by positing a cline—or continuum—between dead and living meta-
phors. He argues that metaphoric vitality ranges from dead, to sleeping,

to tired, to active (31–35). Prudently, Goatly presents dead metaphors
as those whose metaphoricity is simply not retrievable without etymolog-
ical digging. For instance, he points out that only Latin scholars might know
that the English word “inculcate” derives from the Latin word meaning
“to stamp in”; thus, it has no active metaphoricity. Yet, by taking extreme
cases, Goatly sidesteps the question of dead metaphor altogether.
In attempting to resolve the dead metaphor problem through careful
definition, Goatly highlights a persistent problem. The most commonly
cited dead metaphors are what Goatly prefers to call sleeping or tired me-
taphors, expressions whose metaphoricity is conventionalized, such as
squeeze when referring to financial pressure. The existence of these mid-
range metaphors is what gives rise to the life span thesis. That is, if we can
find sleeping, tired, and moribund metaphors in the language all around
us, we often assume that dead metaphors must have passed through this
stage in their “lifetimes.” But at least two things argue against this as-
sumption. First, as Goatly’s examples show, when we cannot revive a so-
called dead metaphor, it is because a literal term has disappeared from
the language, not because the metaphor itself has been worked to death.
Second, even if some, many, or most lexicalized expressions progress from
metaphoric to literal, this process tells us more about the nature of lit-
eral words than it does about the nature of metaphors. Some subset of
metaphors may become literal words over time, but there is no reason
to think that all or most metaphors are subject to this process. Rather,
we have a variety of types of metaphors to consider, some vital, some tired,
some sleeping, some dead. No progressive sequence need be assumed.
Moreover, the distinction between dead, sleeping, tired, and vital—to use
Goatly’s convenient taxonomy—requires much reconsideration when we
understand metaphor as part of a rhetorical conversation.
Max Black is helpful in this regard because he makes explicit what he
means by a living metaphor. He objects to the phrase “dead metaphor,”
on the grounds that if a metaphor is dead, it is no longer a metaphor at
all. He remarks affably, “This is no more helpful than, say, treating a
corpse as a special case of a person” (“More” 25). Black points to the
“extinct” or “dormant” metaphors muscle (musculus) as a little mouse
and obligation as bondage (“More” 25). Thus, Black is consistent with
Goatly—or, more accurately, Goatly is consistent with Black—in setting
apart “metaphors” whose only meaning is a current literal meaning. So
far, so good.
In dismissing truly dead metaphors as an object of study, Black may
bolster the life span thesis, but he also adds valuable complications. He
argues that while some metaphors are “dormant” or “extinct,” others are
“vital” or “active.” Among active metaphors, he argues that some are
particularly “emphatic” and “resonant” and can thus be called “strong”

metaphors (“More” 26). By “emphatic,” Black means that the speaker
insists upon the metaphor, that the metaphor is not disposable; by “res-
onant,” he means that its implications can be and are expected to be elab-
orated upon. Black’s distinctions make good sense. We know a dead meta-
phor because it does not do anything; we know a live metaphor because
it is actively metaphorical; and among live metaphors some seem to be
more alive than others. Thus, in distinguishing between “weak” and
“strong” metaphors, Black gives us a way of discerning what we mean
by a metaphor that is alive—something I will consider more closely be-
low. As I proceed, however, I want to adhere as much as possible to com-
mon parlance. What Black calls weak metaphors are what most people
call dead metaphors: leg of the table, the eye of a needle, the foot of the
mountain. Therefore, I will refer to these weak, sleeping, or tired meta-
phors as “dead metaphors.”
There is ample evidence that metaphors do not follow a progres-
sive life span of the kind usually thought. In fact, when we examine me-
taphors in the context of relevant conversation, the evidence is strong that
no sequence is easily discernible at all. Rather, single metaphors are
grouped with—operate in coordination with—other similar metaphors.
Some of these may be ossified in form, others expressed with some nov-
elty. But the constituting conversation—the thing that makes both the
dead and the live metaphor make sense—is necessarily vital. Trade Is War,
like other conceptual metaphors, encompasses the ossified and the novel,
demonstrating well the way dead metaphors fit into a dynamic, ongoing
conversation.
It is, of course, an old metaphor. Although we cannot say with any
certainty how old it may be, we do know that it was recorded as early as
the English Renaissance and that the opposing literal concept that enables
it, trade is peace, was recorded as early as Genesis. The things that hap-
pen to very old or “dead” metaphors have happened to Trade Is War in
the phrase trade war. Goodman is right that “dead” metaphors seem to
have both frozen and evaporated. A “dead” metaphor usually freezes into
a fixed locution that refers directly to the literal world; thus, the dead
metaphor’s metaphoricity seems to have evaporated. Trade war is just
such a frozen or ossified locution. That is, we do not need to play out its
metaphoric quality in order to understand it. We readily know the lit-
eral state of affairs to which trade war refers: a state in which nations
do not trade with each other except with the utmost reluctance, and in
which they actively attempt to undermine the trade activities of the op-
posing nation. We also know very well the precipitating acts that lead to
a full-blown trade war. Speakers of trade discourse know rather imme-
diately that the precipitating acts of a trade war are dumping, imposing
punitive tariffs, enforcing cumbersome regulations on foreign goods, re-

fusing to purchase foreign goods, and so on.
When trade war is uttered in talk about trade, its direct literal refer-
ence often remains unelaborated—just as it would be with, say, rental
agreement or job offer. Sometimes, however, trade war is accompanied
by a recitation of its precipitating acts, enumerated with a cautionary tone.
Business Week recites Japanese acts of trade war in an article titled, “The
Secret Weapon That Won’t Start a Trade War”: for example, “Foreign
trade zones in the U.S. allow foreign companies to import parts from home
duty-free if the companies create jobs here. . . . Japanese companies, cit-
ing quality concerns, resist buying American components” (Harbrecht
and Gross). This recitation does not offer new information about what
causes trade wars but rather confirms that acts known to cause trade wars
have occurred. The recitation thus serves as a warning to policymakers
that brinkmanship may go too far. Moreover, by warning against a trade
war, and by bolstering its alarmed tone with a recitation of offenses, the
article maintains its probusiness, pro-free-trade stance—a seemingly clear-
eyed, clear-headed acknowledgment of trade risks. Characteristic of a
globalist, free-trade trajectory, the article ascribes Trade Is War to an op-
ponent and recommends a moderate course that would avert the trade
war portended by Japan’s aggressive trade practices: “The U.S. should
consider [changing its trade zone policy] before waving a big stick” (Har-
brecht and Gross).
Trade war’s range of literal reference is so well known and so central
to the discussion of trade disputes that the precise locution need not be
present for the reference to do its work. That is, the risk of trade war may
be the problem that centers a trade discussion, but depending upon a
speaker’s discursive trajectory, it may also be unmentioned. The words
are freely uttered by those who want to avoid a trade war or who accuse
others of bringing one about by employing its precipitating acts. But those
who advocate those precipitating acts usually prefer to leave the explicit
words unspoken. We often see the same strategy with respect to shoot-
ing wars. Those who favored American intervention in Korea and Viet-
nam preferred such terms as police action and conflict. These were not
only legalistic terms used to circumvent constitutional war powers pro-
visions but also a way to avoid the rhetorically intense war.
In a 1990 article, Fred Barnes, a conservative commentator and pro-
ponent of trade sanctions against Japan, catalogs literal acts of trade war
committed by the Japanese, but characteristic of sanction proponents, he
leads with nonwar metaphors closely related to Trade Is War. The article’s
title uses Trade Is A Game to attenuate trade war resonances: “The Ja-
pan That Won’t Play Fair.” A subhead emphasizes container and journey
metaphors, neutralizing accusations of trade war mongering: “While we
welcome the Japanese into our markets, they fiercely resist our entering
theirs. It’s time we made trade a two-way street” (33). Variations of trade
war such as “economic warfare” and “adversarial trade” find a place in
tertiary headings and in direct quotations, but they apply only to Japa-
nese actions, not our own. They are ascribed.
Nonetheless, although trade war is the term Barnes dare not name,
there can be little doubt that it permeates the article not only because it
is a constant of trade discourse regarding Japan but also because trade
war’s indirect literal referents, the precipitating acts of trade war, are
spelled out with emphasis—in fact, with outrage. Paragraph one, sentence
one: “American construction firms, among the best in the world, are all
but excluded from Japan’s $275-billion-a-year construction market” (33).
Paragraph two, sentence one: “At one point, Tokyo bureaucrats sought
to bar American skis from Japan” (33). Paragraph three, sentence one:
“And though Japan brought the game of baseball from America, the
Japanese discouraged the import of American bats for years” (33). Barnes
recites a litany of trade war–like acts in a style rhetorically reminiscent
of the litany Jefferson offers in the Declaration of Independence, accus-
ing the Japanese of inciting a trade war, while demurring when the mo-
ment comes to actually utter the locution trade war. Paragraph four, sen-
tence one: “Japan isn’t playing fair with the United States” (33, emphasis
added). Barnes is not rhetorically timid; it is just that his hawkish dis-
cursive trajectory requires him not to utter trade war. Moreover, the lit-
eral references associated with trade war, direct and indirect, are so well-
known, there is no need to say the words.
Thus, in at least two ways trade war behaves like a dead metaphor: it
is frozen into a single conventional locution, and its metaphoric quality
has evaporated, leaving primarily literal reference. However, in other ways,
it behaves as if it is very much alive. In fact, it qualifies as one of Black’s
“strong” metaphors in that it is both emphatic and resonant. Black argues
that emphatic metaphors insist upon themselves; thus, cape is not em-
phatic because we might just as well say promontory or headland. Dead
metaphors are disposable. Trade war insists upon itself. Its near syn-
onyms—economic warfare, commercial warfare, trade conflict, and so
on—are not interchangeable with trade war in the way that promontory
substitutes for cape. These near synonyms do not preserve the same range
of associations, evoke the same implicatures, or provoke the same heat.
Moreover, speakers and writers emphasize trade war in two ways: first,
by centering the trade debate around it; second, by making its metaphoric
quality explicit. Unlike such metaphors as the leg of a table or the heart
of the matter, trade war invites controversy. That is, in trade discourse,
trade war entails a for-or-against stance—or more accurately, since most
are ostensibly against it, trade war requires speakers either to attack it
or to minimize it. This is why in the Crossfire discussion analyzed in chap-

ter 1, the climaxes—signaled by raised voices and ad hominem confron-
tation—center around trade war. Congressman Levin accuses John Sunu-
nu: “Every time, I don’t understand this. Every time America stands up
for its workers and businesses in trade, you yell trade war!” Later, Sununu
loses patience with Levin and raises his voice: “We are putting the focus
on Japan! But we also read history. And what happened in the world
before World War II is a trade war that cost everybody.”
While Black is correct that live metaphors tend to be emphatic, the kind
of emphasis given to trade war on Crossfire is not necessarily evidence
that the locution trade war or the larger category of metaphors named
by Trade Is War constitutes a live metaphor. Such nonmetaphorical words
as protectionism or simply war often generate as much heat. Nonethe-
less, since trade war draws emphatic notice, an opportunity is created for
its metaphorical resonance to emerge. This resonance meets Black’s sec-
ond criterion that says strong metaphors entail elaboration. Importantly,
while trade war’s literal range of reference is re-envoiced ritually, its
metaphorical resonances are seized as an opportunity for creative speech.
Trade writers forever renew trade war as a living metaphor.
Thomas Friedman—foreign affairs correspondent for the New York
Times and author of The Lexus and the Olive Tree, a book about global-
ization—finds trade war to be so resonant as to be humorous (“Trade”).
“The only people ever killed in a trade war were the ones who died of
boredom,” he writes. His title parodies Sherman’s famous assessment of
shooting wars: “Trade War Isn’t So Swell Either.” And his subhead calls
to mind Prescott’s equally famous exclamation at Bunker Hill: “Don’t
fire until you see the whites of their tariff increases!” However amusing
Friedman finds “fortress Japan,” “tactical retreats,” and “Japanese bu-
reaucrats as ‘the real enemy,’” he also tries his hand frequently enough
as a trade war metaphorizer—and does so with deadly earnestness: “This
[trade sanction] would be the trade equivalent of locking and loading a
rifle but without pulling the trigger” (“Clinton to”).
While trade writers do play out the metaphorical resonances of trade
war, to focus upon ways they expand trade war may unintentionally re-
inforce the life span thesis. We cannot assume that when trade writers
create novel elaborations of trade war that they are reviving a “dead”
metaphor. In a misguided sense, it would seem plausible that Trade Is War
died into the locution trade war, and that each elaboration upon the fro-
zen locution revives an earlier, more vital metaphor. But this line of rea-
soning ignores the metaphoric give and take that currently influences trade
war. Trade war’s resonances can be activated easily because Trade Is War
is already in motion, perpetually generating new instances that are re-
lated to but do not depend upon the standard locution trade war. On the
other hand, I suspect that such so-called dead metaphors as leg of the table
were dead on arrival, that they never operated within a living, dynamic
conversation but rather came into being merely to fill semantic gaps. Leg
of the table is akin to mouse, a clever, but nonemphatic, nonresonant
computer metaphor.
Trade war, a so-called dead metaphor, is a living byproduct of the dy-
namic conversation of Trade Is War. It moves within an environment that
treats not just international trade as war but any business transaction on
any scale as war. Consider an article titled “IBM’s Three Battlefronts”
from PC Magazine. IBM is not usually a key participant in trade disputes
between the U.S. and Japan, and as this passage indicates, IBM’s “trade
war” is played out in a domestic theater:
Once the most unstoppable force in the world, the Big Blue army
finds itself on a cold Northern plateau, confused, outgunned, and
surrounded. On the Western front stand the fearsome Windownites
[Seattle]. Formerly allied with the Big Blue army, this well-armed
legion is determined to do one thing—dominate. Bivouacked on the
Eastern front [Boston] are the less aggressive though very focused
Lotusputians. This outfit knows exactly what it wants. From the
south [Utah], the Oracleians—who are almost as focused as
Lotusputians—show the most outward aggressions. (M. Miller)
In this passage, Trade Is War is emphatic, is resonant, and is deployed

with some degree of literary novelty. In a conversation filled with vital
instances of Trade Is War, trade war—conventional, familiar, entrenched
though it may be—is as much a derivative of ongoing activity as it is a
beginning point for metaphoric elaboration. Furthermore, death is only
death if it is irreversible; it exists as a domain entirely separate from life.
But because the “deadest” version of Trade Is War that we have, trade
war, stands at the elbow of the most vital instances of Trade Is War, it is
“revived” as often as not. If Trade Is War has a life span, it is only in the
sense that, at one time, we did not produce instances of it, and someday
we will perhaps stop producing instances of it. But Trade Is War’s life span
is not one of lively youth, followed by a middle age of conventional fa-
miliarity, followed by decay into the literal, followed by death. Indeed,
it manages to be both vital and moribund at the same time.
Now, having objected as strenuously as I can to the life span thesis,
let me also insist upon the possibility of metaphoric dynamism, not just
dynamism in a given moment of conversation but long-term evolution.
While there seems to be no evidence that metaphors die from long use,
and while there is evidence that dead and vital metaphors work in tan-
dem, it is nonetheless likely that metaphors evolve over time—to change
in character in keeping with material conditions, ideology, and cultural
familiarity. A common misunderstanding about conceptual metaphors is
that they are thought to be universal. This universality assumption may

derive from the emphasis Lakoff, Johnson, and others have placed on em-
bodiment, which is sometimes seen as suggesting that metaphors are in-
nate. But neither Lakoff, Johnson, nor any of the major proponents of con-
ceptual metaphor claim that conceptual metaphors are universal. No
matter how widespread, metaphors are always specific to cultures. In turn,
we should infer that they are specific to times—which raises the ques-
tion of evolution.
Clearly, Trade Is War responds to political, economic, philosophical,
social, and professional conditions, and these conditions evolve. The like-
lihood, then, is that Trade Is War has also evolved, and is evolving. Chap-
ter 5 cites specific instances that indicate differences in the ethical valence
of Trade Is War for pre- and post-Vietnam generations of Americans.
Similar long-term changes in metaphoric preferences have been noted in
the sciences, particularly in psychology (Gentner and Grudin). So it is not
unlikely that as these metaphors passed in and out of fashion that they
also changed in character.
Tim Linzey suggests a possible structure for the evolution, or life span,
of a successful professional metaphor. Nothing in Linzey’s observations
indicate that a metaphor necessarily dies after long use. However, he does
speculate about the change in character a metaphor may undergo from
the time it first enters a professional discourse until the time when it gains
general acceptance—if it ever does. Linzey proposes that metaphors pass
through distinct stages. First is the metaphor stage in which the possi-
bilities are explored playfully, sometimes extravagantly. Second is the
simile in which the metaphor’s valid implications are explored. Third is
the model stage in which implications of a metaphor aid in problem solv-
ing. The final stage is the metaphoric assumption stage, in which the
metaphor is generally considered valid—in which it becomes a meta-
phoric ontological assumption. Of course, Linzey allows for overlap of
the stages and for the possibility that a metaphor will not necessarily
make the full journey.
Linzey’s most direct evidence for this “life span” thesis—a thesis very
different from the common premise to which I have objected—comes
from a psychology class he taught. He proposed to his students the meta-
phor of psychologist as seer (or psychic). In its first stage, the metaphor
stimulated much speculation about the nature of psychologists’ work,
such as the category extension that psychics might really be the lunatic
fringe of psychologists. In the second stage, less extravagant similarities
between the psychologist and the psychic were considered, similarities
such as the way both psychologists and psychics must persuade clients
to accept their professional authority. In the third stage, students used
the metaphor to solve problems—for example, to discuss how clients
must feel when they visit a psychologist for the first time. Fourth, the
metaphor was not successful enough to become a metaphoric ontologi-
cal assumption.
Obviously, Linzey’s empirical evidence is not extensive enough to es-
tablish beyond doubt that his model is valid for the long-term life span
of successful metaphors. But he does suggest a reasonable way of consid-
ering metaphor over time—not as progressing from life to death but rather
from status to status. Determining the validity of Linzey’s model would
require much more research and would, of course, become enormously
complex if metaphors other than discipline-forming metaphors are con-
sidered. Moreover, each metaphor would have to be considered as it re-
sponds to other rhetorically active, relevant metaphors and concepts.
Trade Is War, it is clear, has a long history, one that might transgress
an ameliorative account of life span such as Linzey’s. What can we say
about a metaphor that may have been successful as an ontological as-
sumption, for example in the eighteenth century, during the rise of the
mercantile system, but which later falls into general disrepute and simul-
taneously spreads? Given that the rhetorical etiquette attached to Trade
Is War requires the metaphor nearly always be ascribed to a villain of
sorts, can we call it successful? Is it at a stage beyond metaphoric onto-
logical assumption? Is it a metaphoric ontological falsehood? Could it
gain acceptance again?
Categorical Violation
A second premise of metaphor theory, categorical violation, was first
touched upon by Aristotle but has only reached its full status in the last
half of this century. As I have said, categorical violation argues that meta-
phor is constituted by a false categorical assertion. That is, when we say
A is B, term A is falsely asserted to belong to the category that comprises
term B. In keeping with this notion, Aristotle’s oft-quoted definition of
metaphor reads, “Metaphor is the movement of an alien name from ei-
ther genus to species or from species to genus or from species to species
or by analogy” (“Word Choice” 295). To apply Aristotle’s scheme—as
it has been taken up—to Trade Is War, we might say that trade and war
are each species within the genus intercourse between nations. When the
alien name—a word such as weapon, drawn from the category of war—
moves to the domain of trade, it is not used in its ordinary sense. Instead,
we have a categorical violation. Aristotle’s observation is a powerful one,
and it has never been expressed so succinctly again.
Ironically, while Aristotle prompted the notion of categorical viola-
tion, he is one of the few who gives us reason to question it. Perhaps he
does so because he is less concerned with theoretical description than with
giving good advice to speakers. Whatever the reason for his perspicacity
on this point, his general formulation is more workable than what has
been derived from him. He advises,
One should speak in epithets and metaphors that are appropriate,
and this will be from an analogy. If not, the expression seems inap-
propriate because opposites are most evident when side-by-side each
other. But one should consider what suits an old man just as a scar-
let cloak is right for a young one; for the same clothes are not right
[for both]. And if you wish to adorn, borrow the metaphor from
something better in the same genus, if to denigrate, from something
worse. I mean, for example, since they are opposite in the same ge-
nus, saying of a person who begs that he “prays” or that person
praying “begs,” because both are forms of asking. (On Rhetoric 223)
In this instance, Aristotle’s emphasis is not on violation of category as a

marker of metaphor in general but upon consonance of category to en-
sure the aptness of a metaphor in particular. Subsequent to Aristotle, and
especially in recent decades, aptness remains a research concern, but the
relation between metaphors and categories is turned around.
I argue that categorical violation, while it sometimes can be observed,
is not what it is generally assumed to be. While it is presented as a so-
phisticated permutation of Monroe Beardsley’s “metaphors are obviously
false statements,” categorical violation is not fundamental to identifying
metaphors at all. This is so for a variety of reasons that I will discuss, not
all of them having directly to do with metaphor as rhetorically consti-
tuted. However, once we put categorical violation into a proper perspec-
tive, the notion of rhetorically constituted metaphor becomes important
to analyzing how metaphors and categories work together. In analyzing
metaphor and category, I will focus at first upon some well-worn ex-
amples. Afterward, I will return to Trade Is War, demonstrating what it
can tell us about categorical violation—and, of course, what categorical
violation can tell us about Trade Is War.
Categorical Violation and Asymmetry

The idea that metaphor yokes together (to use Dr. Johnson’s verb) things
from different categories is widely accepted by twentieth-century meta-
phor theorists from Paul Ricoeur to an array of cognitive scientists. It
usually incorporates a “differential equation” view of metaphor that is
integral to what I have called Aristotle’s algebra. That is, theorists con-
figure metaphor not just as a two-part entity but also configure the parts
in fixed, asymmetrical relation.
The categorical violation thesis is perhaps most thoroughly detailed
by Eva Feder Kittay, who argues,
Literal comparisons take place within fixed, common, or given cat-

egories, for example, when hippopotami are compared to ele-
phants—a comparison within the category of large mammals—or
when the Church and the State are compared—a comparison within
the category of authoritative and powerful institutions. But compari-
sons in metaphor and simile cross categorical boundaries, for in-
stance when a large mammal is compared to an authoritative pow-
erful institution. (19)
The effect of categorical violation, Kittay tells us, is to make a metaphori-

cal comparison asymmetrical. That is, comparisons within categories are
balanced, each side of the equation exerting equal force upon the other.
But for metaphorical comparisons, the category (or semantic domain) that
is imported dominates:
[I]n metaphor one domain will take on the role of an originating
field—the field of the source of the metaphor. Metaphorical analo-
gies are asymmetrical for just this reason—that one side of the anal-
ogy has a privileged status in regard to the other. A simile based on
a metaphorical analogy is not—or at best paradoxically—reversible.
A simile based on a non-metaphorical analogy would be. Compare
“my love is like a rose” with “the tornadoes of the interior plains
are like the hurricanes of the coastal regions.” While we can reverse
the latter comparison without significant alteration of sense, we
cannot do so in the former case. (152)
Thus, in Kittay’s view, we can unproblematically identify the source do-

main, and that source domain—the “originating field”—always exerts
a greater semantic force than that of the target domain. That is, we can
identify the source domain, rose, as the imported term and observe that
its semantic field is incongruously applied to the target domain, my love.
Rose changes our understanding of my love.
This fixed asymmetry does seem intuitively correct, and it receives
some experimental confirmation in cognitive science. Andrew Ortony has
found that the source’s features are predictably more salient than those
of the target (164). For example, he asked subjects to list important fea-
tures of various terms such as billboard and wart. The feature (or “predi-
cate”) list for wart included “ugly” as a high-salient feature. The list
for billboard, however, did not include “ugly” at all. Thus, Ortony con-
cludes that when we say billboards are warts, the statement derives its
metaphoricity from a salience imbalance between similar features in tar-
get and source domains (351). Numerous similar experiments have been
conducted, giving rise to varying but compatible versions of the asym-
metry assertion (compare Becker). Representative of the kind of disagree-
ment that arises, Roger Tourangeau and Lance Rips find that metaphors
cause nonsalient features to emerge in both target and source, but they
also note that features in the source are comparatively more salient than
those in the target (460).
However, the experimental techniques of cognitive science are not
effective for seriously questioning the semantic dominance of the so-called
source over the so-called target. Consider Tourangeau and Rips’ method
of presenting subjects with examples: “We then culled out [literary meta-
phors] that were difficult to interpret when taken out of context” (465).
Do Tourangeau and Rips really imagine that any metaphor can be inter-
preted without context, whether supplied by an explicit or tacit ongoing
discourse? Their technique—shared by an army of cognitive scientists and
psychologists—suggests that they do. Now, to give serious thinkers their
due, it is not the case that cognitive scientists are unaware of contextual
effects, but these effects are generally thought to be localized and purely
pragmatic. Albert Katz, for example, notes with regard to “the context
problem”: “Even if we recognize that figurative meaning is intended by
a speaker, we must still compute the intended meaning” (608). In other
words, Katz—whose perspective, it seems to me, represents his field—
understands that context matters but does not see it as far-reaching or
fundamentally constitutive.
Surprising things happen when we discard the fiction that metaphor
can somehow be examined in experimental isolation. We see that even
seemingly decontextualized examples operate within an ongoing conver-
sation that preconditions conventional metaphors to have conventional
asymmetries. For example, Kittay’s my love is like a rose comes precon-
ditioned as poetic praise for a woman. Here the force of a conventional
discourse makes it seem as if the features of rose necessarily project onto
my love. So thoroughly preconditioned is my love is like a rose that we
can accommodate innumerable nuances within it and still not disturb the
semantic power relation between target and source.
Consider the role of Female Lovers Are Roses in popular songs of the
late twentieth century, when the pronouns you, he, and she almost in-
variably refer to the singer’s fictional love interest. In a genre so saturated
with conventional—in fact, hackneyed—habits, we can hardly overes-
timate the tacit operation of metaphoric commonplaces about love and
lovers. Thus, when Female Lovers Are Roses enters the conversation, the
metaphor is conditioned by what we all can be counted on to supply. When
Ben E. King sings, “There is a rose in Spanish Harlem” (Spector and
Leiber), we understand not only that he is singing—quoting—a love song,
and that rose is his love, but also that the garden metaphor is being used
paradoxically, a garden metaphor in an urban setting. Still, in spite of con-
siderable reconfiguring, rose exerts its semantic force upon my love, more
than the reverse.
Imagine, though, an unconventional context in which lovers and roses
carry different freight—a conversation in which the tacit assumptions are
different and that has different metaphors afoot. Suppose a flower grow-
er says to another of his profession: My wife is my life, my passion, my
indispensable companion. She’s like my roses. Here the idea of the
gardener’s wife is just as dominant as our idea of a rose. That is, the gar-
dener’s discursive trajectory—his presumed commitments and inclina-
tions—mutes the qualities of rose conventionally ascribed to my love, such
as delicate beauty, softness, and perfumed fragrance (Barnet, Berman, and
Burto 51). His utterance says as much about the way he regards roses as
it does about the way he regards his wife because rose is treated as some-
thing with which one has an emotional relationship: it takes on human
qualities as more than my love takes on inanimate qualities. What we have
come to call “target” and “source” are not fixed entities at all. They are
products of over-arching discourse.
The gardener’s metaphor reconfigures a deeply entrenched conven-
tional metaphor, but its conceptual underpinning is not novel at all. Gar-
dening writers, like my invented gardener, often ascribe a lover’s agency
to the rose and to other flowers. For instance, in The Glory of Roses, Allen
Lacy, who purports to be on more “intimate” terms with his herbaceous
perennials than with his roses (12), quotes Candace Wheeler’s 1902 ob-
servation on the rose: “A mysterious something in its nature—an inner
fascination, a subtle witchery, a hidden charm which it has and other flow-
ers have not—ensnares and holds the love of the world” (19). Yet more
amorous, turn-of-the-century rose lover S. Reynolds Hole advises would-
be rose gardeners, “To win, [the gardener] must woo, as Jacob wooed
Laban’s daughter, though drought and frost consume” (qtd. in Lacy 43).
In fact, given the long history of gardening talk, it would not only be
imaginable but probable that, speaking of his or her roses, a gardener
has uttered the precise locution my love is a rose. Here the qualities of a
lover would be attributed to rose, and my love would refer not to a physi-
cal lover but to the rose itself as both actual and metaphoric lover. And
since there is no human lover to be given the qualities of a rose, it is nec-
essarily the case that the idealized my love influences our understanding
of rose more than the reverse. Moreover, the metaphoric transformation
of careers into a human spouse is conventional in many venues: musi-
cians are married to music, executives to their jobs, priests to the church.
(Compare Perelman 121.)
We can say, then, that metaphors are asymmetrical. But we cannot
formalistically predict how that asymmetry plays out. Target and source
interact, fluidly shifting degrees of influence upon the other. As always,
the force of overarching conversation—discourse that coalesces around
given topics and encompasses socially shared evaluations of those top-
ics—is more powerful than micro-level rules for metaphor. But its influ-
ence is largely invisible to us. When the wind is at your back, it is easy to
believe you are moving under your own power. But face the wind and its
pervasive force is undeniable. Or, to press my wind metaphor a bit fur-

ther, explaining metaphor while ignoring discourse is like explaining a
rainy day while ignoring the jet stream. Conversation at large, not just
snippets of prompting talk, constitutes the relation between the parts of
metaphor. Furthermore, the conversational quality of metaphor involves
more than two parts in most metaphors, because the two parts that
Aristotle first noticed are always enmeshed in the give-and-take of other
metaphors and concepts. As a consequence, Black’s interaction theory is
essentially correct, more correct than many of Black’s embedded assump-
tions take into account. Whether or not my love or rose dominates in my
love is like a rose, they always act upon each other, and this interaction
always has to do with larger metaphor systems.
It is worth noting also that conventional assumptions about target and
source have much to do with the sentence structure used in most discus-
sions of metaphor. Even considering the gardener’s use of my love is like
a rose, where my love semantically dominates rose, we nonetheless feel
the pull of rose as a would-be dominating force. This is because the simple
copula structure of the sentence places rose in the emphatic position—
at the end. Even without our conventional understanding of my love is
like a rose, the sentence structure would have its effect. My love is the
topic; like a rose is the comment. (See Joseph M. Williams for a lucid ex-
planation of emphasis, what he terms “topic-stress.”)
Topic-comment structure influences literal comparisons in the same
way. My favorite illustration involves two chain-smoking priests who
have difficulty foregoing nicotine during prayer. One priest queries his
bishop, “Would it be all right if I smoke while I’m praying?” His request
is denied. The other queries, “Would it be all right if I pray while I’m
smoking?” His request is granted. The order of terms always makes a
difference. Similarly, Kittay’s the tornadoes of the interior plains are like
the hurricanes of the coastal regions implies that tornadoes are being
compared to hurricanes, more than the reverse, simply because hurricanes
of the coastal regions appears at the end of the sentence. An alternative
phrasing that places both tornadoes and hurricanes in the subject slot puts
the comparison on a somewhat more equal footing: The tornadoes of the
interior plains and the hurricanes of the coastal regions are alike. Even
so, word order still matters.
Why, then, do theorists prefer the simple topic-comment structure
when stating and analyzing metaphors? In part, this preference derives
from Aristotle’s algebraic reasoning. But in addition, we have to take into
account tendencies in canonical phrasings. Yeshayahu Shen has conducted
experiments to study the effect of canonical phrasing in zeugma, a fig-
ure of speech that presents dissimilar terms in an incongruous equal re-
lation: for example, I caught three fish and my breath. Zeugma can be
thought of as metaphorical categorization: fish are something caught lit-
erally; breath is something caught metaphorically. Shen presented par-

ticipants in an experiment with lists of zeugmas and asked prompting
questions a few minutes later to stimulate recall. For example: What did
the baby do? Answer: The baby swallowed milk and kisses. The partici-
pants showed a marked tendency to reverse noncanonical zeugmas into
standard order, placing the metaphorical term at the end—in the emphatic
position. Indeed, our habits of mind are quite strong.
But there is more to the standard formulation of metaphors as simple
copula than habitual thought and phrasing. Aristotle originally proposed
that metaphors are “alien names,” a formulation that reveals more ac-
curately what underpins metaphor’s functioning than the simple copu-
las that theorists select as examples. The alien name formulation depicts
metaphor in its larger operation—not as a metaphoric word appearing
in a sentence predicate but rather as a word made metaphoric because
of its emigration from one discourse to another. To note this emigration
is to note asymmetry writ large. For example, when Ben E. King sings,
“There is a rose in Spanish Harlem,” rose is an alien name substituting
for woman. This substitution cannot not take place unless the alien name
enters a larger discursive context. In “Spanish Harlem,” the topic of ro-
mantic love is already established by tacit convention. Since a female lover
is the topic at hand, it is only natural for rose to comment upon it, not
the other way around. But it is not an internal function of metaphor that
creates the asymmetry; it is the preponderance of female lover in the con-
versation, its tacit presence as a topic awaiting comment. When we state
metaphors habitually in the simple copula form, we are comporting with
the way the conversations that guide metaphors generally work.
Asymmetry in Literal Comparison

In light of metaphor’s persistent asymmetry, we must ask whether asym-
metry (or nonreversibility) is a property that distinguishes metaphor from
literal comparison. Put another way, we must question the pervasive
premise of metaphor theorists that asymmetry distinguishes comparison
across categories from comparison within categories. In fact, it does not.
Amos Tversky and Itamar Gati point to asymmetry in some literal com-
parisons: for instance, that North Korea is typically seen as more simi-
lar to Red China than Red China to North Korea. But this tendency is
more far-reaching than is ordinarily noted. We can see that asymmetry
functions as pervasively and complexly in literal comparisons as it does
in metaphor if we consider two things: first, recent theories of categori-
zation; second, literal comparisons’ relevant conversation.
Lakoff, who broadly applies and expands upon Eleanor Rosch’s research
on categorization, tells us that categories do not operate in the classical
fashion as bundles of features but as socially generated, cognitively en-
trenched units (Women 5–8).1 One key difference between classical cat-
egories and cognitive categories is their internal structure. Classical cat-
egories depend upon shared features. They award all members equal sta-
tus on the basis of requisite characteristics. For example, in the classical
view, birds are birds because they have wings, beaks and feathers, lay eggs,
and so on. Any creature that has these features qualifies as a bird and has
equal status within the category. In the cognitive view, categories are made
up of unequal members, whose shared features are secondary to our
perception of membership. For example, as Rosch’s experiments show,
when people identify members of the category bird, they identify “pro-
totypical” members such as robins more quickly than they do “nonpro-
totypical” members such as ostriches (41–42). This does not mean that
ostriches, penguins, swans, chickens, and so on are not viewed as birds;
it means instead that we accept some birds as more “birdlike” than
others. There is an asymmetry within categories based upon goodness
of example.
Moreover, this cognitive effect has a social origin. Lakoff accounts for
the prototype effect by positing idealized cognitive models (ICMs). ICMs
are cognitive deployments of social knowledge. As Lakoff points out, a
category such as mother is constituted by social knowledge and values
that have a crucial effect upon categorization. On the one hand, we have
a cluster of ICMs that converge: the biological model that emphasizes
birth mother, the nurturing model that emphasizes childcare mother, the
marital model that emphasizes wife-of-father mother, and the genealogical
model which emphasizes the closest-female ancestor mother (74–75).
Taken together, these models organize our social experience and allow
us to make judgments about membership in the category mother. On the
other hand, we use (or have used) the housewife mother as a metonymy
for all mothers. That is, the housewife mother tends to be the best exam-
ple of mother, the prototypical robin or sparrow. ICMs, therefore, en-
compass our social knowledge and reflect our asymmetrical judgments.
When we see categories as cognitive units with a graded structure, the
question of reversibility in literal comparisons changes radically. To take
an example from Kittay once again, we have to ask why we can so eas-
ily reverse the tornadoes of the interior plains are like the hurricanes of
the coastal regions. It is not because the comparison is within one cate-
gory but rather because both tornadoes and hurricanes are prototypical
members of the superordinate category natural disasters. Natural disas-
ters’ membership list may vary from place to place and from time to time.
Nonetheless, for most of us, the central members of natural disasters
would be such things as tornadoes, hurricanes, earthquakes, floods, for-
est fires, and so on. A peripheral member of natural disasters might be
heat wave. We can compare tornado and heat wave, but while the com-
parison is within-category, it is—on the face of it—quite different from

a comparison between tornado and hurricane.
But let us consider it in the light of some conversation, for the sake of
good habits. A city might apply for natural disaster funding after a deadly
heat wave and argue that a heat wave is like a hurricane. Following a
deadly heat wave in July of 1995, Chicago’s medical examiner made just
this sort of comparison: “The medical examiner said that residents must
realize that the heat wave was a natural disaster just like a hurricane or
a flood” (Kaplan and Stein). The city is not only urging a literal compar-
ison, but it is also depending upon the asymmetry within the compari-
son in order to make its point. That is, the city does not want it under-
stood that a hurricane is like a heat wave but that a heat wave is like a
hurricane, a disaster that nearly always warrants federal funds. More-
over, since the city’s assertion of categorical membership is made in ear-
nest, the comparison is not metaphorical but decidedly literal.
But asymmetry between prototypical members and nonprototypical
is not all we need to consider. Unconventional discursive trajectories can
create an asymmetry between hurricane and tornado into relief, even if
they are both central, salient members of the same category. Hurricane
and tornado are seen as similar in explanatory, taxonomic discourse. Con-
ventionally, speakers compare tornadoes and hurricanes for the express
purpose of pointing out the features these storms share: high wind, de-
structive power, and so on. In addition, tornadoes and hurricanes are
conventionally paired—lions and tigers, cars and trucks, tornadoes and
hurricanes. Thus, what makes it seem that hurricane equals tornado
equals hurricane is a typified discursive trajectory and rhetorical purpose,
not just that they are prototypical members of the same category.
Suppose we depart from the standard taxonomic talk that emphasizes
constant similarities between types of storms. Instead, imagine a mid-
western columnist who is concerned about a regional slight. She thinks
that her part of the country is given too little notice for its hardships. News
reporters do not cover tornadoes so extensively as hurricanes; the national
weather service does not glorify them by giving them names; tornadoes
are too soon forgotten. This is unfair, she argues, a result of the fact that
hurricanes are so lumberingly slow. She writes: Why not name tornadoes?
Tornadoes of the interior plains are like the hurricanes of the coastal
regions. Here it matters a great deal what is being compared to what.
Tornadoes are like hurricanes—significant and worthy of a name; hurri-
canes are not like tornadoes—disastrous, but ephemeral. The literal com-
parison is asymmetrical.
It is crucial that we notice, both for the standard taxonomic compari-
son and for the columnist’s asymmetrical comparison of tornado and
hurricane, that the literal nature of the comparison does not arise because
it is within-category. Once we dispose of a supposed inherent symmetry

of within-category comparisons, we have no good reason to distinguish
within-category and cross-categorical comparisons, automatically call-
ing one literal and the other metaphorical. Instead, just as overarching
conversation controls asymmetry, it also controls the metaphoric qual-
ity of comparison. That is, it is entirely possible for within-category com-
parisons to be metaphors.
Imagine another midwestern columnist, this one not concerned with
a regional slight but concerned with a particularly destructive tornado
that has destroyed many homes and businesses. She might refer to the
tornado as an inland Andrew, giving the tornado the name of a large and
famously destructive hurricane. The utterance is metaphoric hyperbole,
not unusual since almost all metaphors incorporate either overstatement
or understatement. Calling a tornado Andrew amounts to a within-cat-
egory metaphor that is, like many literal comparisons, asymmetrical and
nonreversible. Similarly, we might imagine a mixed metaphor (they come
that way most often): A tornado is a hurricane on fast forward. Both tor-
nado and hurricane are likened to the spool of a tape recorder, which is
a standard cross-categorical metaphor. However, tornado and hurricane
within the metaphor are both within-category and nonreversible.
Within-category metaphors do occur naturally and not infrequently.
Consider the metaphor so often uttered by owners of intrepid but foolish
chihuahuas. He thinks he’s a Doberman pinscher, they say. Both are dogs.
Consider a man’s home is his castle. Both are places to live. And some
literal comparisons are cross-categorical. The [pick an object or space]
is a big as a bread box. The object or space need not be categorized as a
container or a kitchen item or something manmade—or fall into any of
the categories that immediately subsume bread box.
Metaphor as Category
So far I have argued these five things: First, within-category literal com-
parisons can be asymmetrical. Second, metaphors are also asymmetrical,
but asymmetry is not a distinguishing feature of metaphor. Third, both
within-category and cross-categorical comparisons can be metaphorical.
Fourth, most metaphors are cross-categorical, but cross-categorical com-
parison is not a distinguishing feature of metaphor. Fifth, in asymmetrical
comparisons, literal or metaphoric, asymmetry is influenced by a subsum-
ing conversation. A change in discursive trajectory or rhetorical purpose
can change what part of the comparison semantically dominates.
These five points lead us to two unavoidable broad conclusions: First,
categorical violation, as it has been described in metaphor theory to date,
is wrong; it is neither a distinguishing feature nor a necessary condition
of metaphor. Second, asymmetry between target and source is a feature

of metaphor, but since it is not a distinguishing feature of metaphor, it
has also been understood wrongly—that is, it describes metaphor, but it
does not help us identify metaphor. Yet it bears considering why these
two notions about metaphor have been so widely accepted. Metaphor
theorists have been mistaken in treating categorical violation and asym-
metry as distinguishing features of metaphor, but they have not been mis-
taken in observing categorical violation and asymmetry in the metaphors
they have studied. There is a reason for this.
Metaphor is itself a category. It is the category of nonliteral statements
that we call metaphors (this is tautological, I recognize, but accurate none-
theless). Like all other categories, it is a graded category in which some
exemplars seem more centrally representative than others. But remem-
ber, prototypes are a consequence of entrenched social conditioning. In
discussions of metaphor from Aristotle forward, the prototypical meta-
phor has become the simple copula A is B, the conventional my love is
like a rose, the for-the-sake-of-discussion man is a wolf. These exem-
plars—as well as many similar prototypical exemplars—obey the “rules”
of metaphor: categorical violation and asymmetry. However, prototypes
neither outnumber other categorical members, nor do they tell us all there
is to know about the broad spectrum of categorical members. Just as an
ornithologist would not study birds by studying only robins, sparrows,
and seagulls, we cannot study metaphor by studying only prototypical
members of the category metaphor—particularly since those members
have been made prototypical largely as a consequence of theorizing.
Furthermore, much of theorists’ concern over how we can identify met-
aphors directly results from a mistaken notion of metaphor as a category.
Unlike bird, metaphor is not amenable to classical, feature-based catego-
rization. Scientists have identified features that qualify birds as birds. But
metaphor is a category more akin to Wittgenstein’s famous example, game
(3). The expressions we loosely refer to by the name metaphor are related
through family resemblance. Some have the feature of categorical viola-
tion, but many do not; all have the feature of asymmetry, but all birds
have legs, and this does not help us tell birds from people. Nonetheless,
we have little difficulty as competent speakers of English in identifying
metaphors—especially prototypical metaphors. It is crucial that we no-
tice the primacy of recognition over criteria, even among those theorists
who attempt to find universal criteria for identifying metaphor.
Each time an apparently sensible scheme for recognizing metaphor is
laid to rest, it is laid to rest by a metaphoric exemplar that belies the cri-
teria—an expression that everyday speakers and theorists alike feel so
intuitively certain is a metaphor that we simply must trust our intuition
over the theoretical yardstick. For instance, I have noted Monroe Beards-
ley’s criterion that metaphors are literally false. Max Black refutes this
rule of thumb by proffering literally true, yet undeniably metaphorical
statements—such as people in glass houses should not throw stones, when
spoken of someone who actually lives in a glass house. I have used the
same sort of strategy in refuting categorical violation and asymmetry. I
have proffered exemplars that do not depend upon categorical violation,
and I have proffered literal comparisons that are asymmetrical. This is
possible because metaphor is a graded category that includes members
that do not share all of the features of prototypical members.
When we recognize metaphor as a category by virtue of family resem-
blances, we are left without a hard and fast technique for knowing meta-
phors when we see them. However, I would argue that this is a cost we
can easily bear because as competent speakers of English, we invariably
rely upon more than theorized criteria. We are sensitive to the conceptual
and discursive influences that inflect the metaphors we recognize, and we
make competent judgments about what is meant literally and what is
meant metaphorically. Most of us know when the hypothetical midwest-
ern columnist refers to an inland Andrew that she knows hurricanes do
not occur in her part of the country, and that this was a particularly large
tornado, and that when she utters her comment, she knows we will not
think she really thinks the town has been leveled by a hurricane. We know,
with general accuracy, what the speaker knows. A younger audience,
however, might not know that hurricanes are a coastal phenomenon and
take the comment literally. Moreover, if the child were to metaphorize a
tornado as a hurricane, we might wonder whether the child knows the
difference between tornadoes and hurricanes, and we might then take the
comment as both literal and incorrect.
This is not to say that anything one of us deems to be a metaphor is a
metaphor for all. Some matters are ontologically debatable—the Judeo-
Christian creation story, for instance. It is to say that we use our famil-
iarity with culturally specific conversations in order to take expressions
as they are meant. And most of the time, we get things roughly right. We
know metaphor in the same way that we know literary language, when
expressions are offered as metaphors and are taken up as metaphors.
There is a substantial benefit to discarding the pursuit of identifica-
tion criteria. When we see metaphor as a category that includes both pro-
totypical and nonprototypical members, we are able to see a larger land-
scape of metaphors and to see that landscape as part of a larger rhetorical
environment. Furthermore, when we consider metaphor’s discursive and
conceptual milieu, we can more readily examine the ways metaphor is re-
lated to categorization and asymmetry. By setting aside the question of
identification or by simply admitting that identifying a metaphor is always
in some sense tautological, we are then able to replace is it or isn’t it? with
what are metaphor’s capabilities?
Trade Is War and Categories

Trade Is War manipulates categories and asymmetry in a complex, am-
biguous fashion, stretching metaphor’s capabilities to its limit. First, let
us consider categories.
Like other entities, trade and war are categorized in multiple ways, and
these categorizations overlap. Nonetheless, one of the ways we most com-
monly categorize them is in relation to their international function. Trade
and war belong to the category foreign relations. They are, in fact, pro-
totypical members. Consider the three United States executive depart-
ments that deal extensively with foreign affairs: Commerce, Defense, and
State. Defense, by and large, deals with war, Commerce, by and large,
deals with trade, and State deals with both. Of course, if trade and war
are central members of the category foreign relations, it follows that some
other members must be peripheral. These peripheral members would
include such things as athletic exchanges, environmental agreements,
cooperative science projects, and so on. Thus, in foreign relations’ graded
structure, trade and war almost certainly share a similar degree of pro-
totypicality. It is difficult for us to say whether trade and war are pre-
cisely equal as prototypical members, but semantic symmetry is always
an approximation.
Second, it may be that the symmetry between trade and war contrib-
utes to their productivity when they are linked in metaphor. Trade and
war are basic-level categories, mid-level categories in a hierarchy of cat-
egorical types that have a distinct social and cognitive status (Rosch). For
example, we most commonly identify domestic canines as belonging to
the basic-level category dog, rather than to the superordinate categories
animal or mammal or to such subordinate categories as Russian wolf-
hound, Pomeranian, and wire-haired terrier. We are capable of catego-
rizing multiply, but basic-level categorization differs from categorization
at levels above and below because, as Lakoff explains, at the basic level
we (1) name things readily, (2) give things simple names, (3) attribute cul-
tural significance, (4) remember easily, and (5) perceive holistically. Such
basic-level categories as dog, cat, tree, trade and war satisfy all of these
criteria. Foreign relations is a superordinate category above trade and war.
Below trade and war, we find specific activities that constitute the basic-
level category. Below trade, we have purchases, shipments, contracts, and
so on; below war, we have battles, attacks, missions, and so on.
According to Mark Turner, basic-level categories (and categories above
the basic level) make good candidates for analogy because they have little
or no overlap in their membership: they are categorically distinct (Read-
ing 129–31). Turner’s use of “analogy” is somewhat idiosyncratic, tak-
ing in both literal and metaphoric analogies. For present purposes, since
Turner emphasizes that ostensible falsehood signals analogy, we can with-
out great harm substitute “metaphor” for “analogy” (Reading 131).

When we see an instance of Trade Is War such as the headline “U.S. Fires
Retaliatory Shot Over EC Oilseed Dispute” (Wyant), we might analyze
it according to Turner’s scheme, which claims that it is the basic category
that is one step up in the hierarchy of categories that matters. To fire a
retaliatory shot is an activity of the basic-level category war. Likewise,
“oilseed dispute” is an activity of the basic-level category trade. Thus,
we have a metaphor that juxtaposes categorical domains that have little
or no overlap in membership. The metaphor urges a comparison that is
impeded by cognitively entrenched categorical boundaries.
Most analyses of Trade Is War would operate in roughly the same way
as the one above, but not necessarily so directly. As we have seen, Trade
Is War operates within a larger conversation, what I am calling for con-
venience the discourse of trade. We cannot, then, lift an instance out of
its context and declare our understanding complete. Even a brief passage
such as this one from a review of Lester Thurow’s Head to Head compli-
cates the analytical task immensely:
[Japan’s] “communitarian capitalism” has proved murderously ef-

fective in head-to-head competition with individualistic, US-style
capitalism. Like good generals, Japan’s corporate chieftains seek
expansion, in the form of market share, rather than higher profits.
They rally their troops not just with money . . . but with job secu-
rity, perks and pride of belonging. (Case)
The passage first evokes violence with the word “murderously.” Then
it makes its metaphor explicitly military in a simile, “Like good gener-
als. . . .” But the route from category member to superordinate basic cat-
egory is not direct. The passage names only two members of the basic cat-
egory war, “generals” and “troops.” Other members of the domain of
war are referenced indirectly: money, job security, perks, and pride of
belonging. Even though the first three in the list—money, job security,
and perks—are directly traceable to the category business, which is part
and parcel of trade, they bid for metaphorical membership in the category
war. Money, job security, and so on equate to such things as military dis-
cipline, training, soldierly esprit de corps, medals and awards. I would
not venture to guess what equals what, and even a good guess would not
be enlightening.
More important than the precise equation—since there very likely is
no precise equation, even in the writer’s mind—is that “money, job se-
curity, perks and pride of belonging” have been made metaphorical, not
from the bottom up but from the top down. In other words, in such lo-
cutions as “U.S. fires retaliatory shot over EC oilseed dispute,” the meta-
phor occurs with the entry of the alien name “fires.” In the Thurow pas-
sage, “money, job security, perks and pride of belonging” are all, in a
sense, alienated from their basic category, trade. Because they are con-
trolled from above by the category war, they no longer reference ordinary
activities of business and trade in an uncomplicated way. Instead, they re-
fer indirectly to things such as military discipline, training, and so on. These
indirect referents cannot be specified, but nonetheless, they point upward
to their superordinate category, war.
What becomes evident is this: at some point metaphor comprehension
becomes a top-down process, similar to the top-down textual compre-
hension process described by Gregory Colomb and Mark Turner (407–
10). In the passage above, the basic category war, having been suggested
by explicit naming of members, saturates the discourse enough to influ-
ence our understandings of things ordinarily in the category of trade. But
what enables this saturation to happen so quickly and thoroughly? Would
a top-down permeation take place so effortlessly if the writer had writ-
ten, Like good dominant dogs, Japan’s corporate leaders discipline their
pack not just with money, but with job security, perks, and pride of be-
longing? This alternate metaphor makes some sense. Dogs are predatory,
territorial, gregarious, hierarchical, and are metaphorically comparable
with humans. Yet the category members indirectly referenced by money,
job security, perks, and pride of belonging, while perhaps retrievable, are
not readily at hand. The like generals simile, though, is enabled from the
top down because we know the category list well, and we habitually com-
pare the domains of trade and war.
In chapter 3, we saw that Trade Is War has been a part of the discourse
of trade for at least several hundred years and that, over time, it has come
to show itself in typified ways. The reviewer who writes, “Like good gen-
erals, Japan’s corporate chieftains” uses the same port of entry as Defoe,
who writes of England’s one-time corporate chieftain, Henry VII, “The
king acted like a wise and war-like prince . . .” (97). It is the same port
of entry used by Marx and Engels: “As privates of the industrial army
[workers] are placed under the command of a perfect hierarchy of offic-
ers” (13–14). The same port of entry is used by Lester Thurow, who des-
cribes the old Soviet system in Head To Head, saying, “Basically plant
managers were army officers . . .” (99). Indeed, this port of entry has been
used so often, we can only recall a minuscule fraction of its instances.
The top-down force of Trade Is War’s constituting conversation makes
the metaphor accessible, enabling the juxtaposition of the basic catego-
ries trade and war to make an effective metaphor. In the sense that trade
and war are juxtaposed basic categories, Trade Is War is, at least in many
of its instances, an exemplar of categorical violation—a prototypical met-
aphor. However, in at least two senses, it is not.
First, as I have already noted, trade and war are each members of the
common superordinate category foreign relations. This makes the meta-
phor within-category. Second, and just as importantly, as Trade Is War
occurs in the discourse of trade, it is frequently triggered by the locution

trade war. Trade war may or may not constitute a basic-level category,
but it does name a legitimate, common category of some sort, one that is
composed of the metaphor Trade Is War and generates much of the mo-
tion in Trade Is War. We know that trade war is a legitimate category be-
cause its categorical members—the activities that constitute trade war—
are easy to name. Earlier I have called them trade war’s indirect referents:
dumping, imposing punitive tariffs, imposing cumbersome regulations on
foreign goods, refusing to purchase foreign goods, and so on. Moreover,
trade war has a graded structure with both prototypical and peripheral
members. A prototypical act of trade war would be imposing a punitive
tariff. Peripheral or nonprototypical acts would be such things as display-
ing a “Buy American” bumper sticker or writing a book titled The Ja-
pan That Can Say No (Shintaro). That trade war names a category makes
Trade Is War ambiguous with respect to categorical violation. Trade Is
War is, on the one hand, an unexceptional metaphor that abuts two ba-
sic categories, activating itself by importing an alien name from war to
trade. On the other hand, it conventionally manifests itself as trade war,
a literal phrase, the name of a common category. Thus, the category trade
war both encompasses and effaces a categorical violation.
Trade Is War’s ambiguous position with respect to categories calls to
mind Boaz Keysar and Sam Glucksberg’s notion that every metaphor is
a categorical assertion, that the linking of seemingly disparate categories
always amounts to creating a new superordinate category (647–48). For
example, they argue that when we say his sermon was a sleeping pill, we
are not juxtaposing incompatible categories so much as we are invoking
a broad category that encompasses soporific things such as sleeping pills,
sermons, lectures, and lullabies (647). In a sense, Keysar and Glucksberg
argue for a world that is infinitely categorizable. Like contestants on the
long-running game show The $25,000 Pyramid, we are presented with
seemingly disparate member candidates and through induction catego-
rize such things as sermons and sleeping pills as things that make us sleepy.
However, when we are presented with an instance of Trade Is War, we
do not need to induce its superordinate category. Usually, the superor-
dinate category is trade war, a category that has long been created—that
is in fact deeply entrenched. Moreover, trade war stands side by side with
foreign relations, a deeply entrenched category that encompasses trade and
war as prototypical members. If the world is infinitely categorizable, it also
accommodates overlapping categories. Likewise, metaphor accommo-
dates the multiplicity and messiness of categorizations without sacrific-
ing its metaphoric quality. The common category trade war accommo-
dates the cross-categorical metaphor Trade Is War embedded within it,
and we have no difficulty recognizing it as both category and metaphor
at once.
What is more, the basic categories that make up Trade Is War accom-
modate within-category metaphors. For instance, in the Crossfire discus-
sion analyzed in chapter 1 (in a portion not previously quoted), Repre-
sentative Levin says, “Trade abroad is like trade at home. You have to
push for yourself” (2). Certainly, Levin means to assert a conventional
analogy, but it is not a literal analogy. Economists perennially debunk the
notion that local economic activity can be literally likened to international
trade. Economist Paul Krugman, for example, makes the same argument
first advanced by Adam Smith: “Countries . . . do not go out of business.
They may be happy or unhappy with their economic performance, but
they have no well-defined bottom line” (31). Levin evades the logical fal-
lacy of asserting a far-reaching literal similarity between international and
local trade by making his metaphoric comparison explicit: “You have to
push for yourself.”His rhetorical purpose makes trade abroad is like trade
at home metaphorical within the category of trade. Moreover, this within-
category metaphor is embedded within a prototypical cross-categorical
metaphor that likens aggressive economic activity to physical pushing.
We can see by now that Trade Is War utilizes categories ambiguously,
simultaneously acting as a cross-categorical comparison and as a larger
category in the phrase trade war, as well as accommodating within-cat-
egory metaphors. In addition, the conversation that guides Trade Is War
sometimes shifts the semantic power relation between target and source,
trade and war.
Trade Is War—as the ordering of my simple copula tends to indicate—
ordinarily allows war to semantically dominate trade. In the examples so
far proffered, we have seen the domain of war imported into the domain
of trade, causing us to rethink the nature of trade. Or rather, since Trade
Is War is so conventional, we go through the mental motions of rethink-
ing the nature of trade. For example, when the Los Angeles Times writes,
“The United States is about to launch a potent new weapon in its trade
arsenal” (Pine), the alien name, “weapon,” emigrates from the domain
of war to the domain of trade. Nothing could be more commonplace. We
need to consider, though, what makes this semantic relation between trade
and war within Trade Is War so standard, so predictable.
It is predictable because the metaphor enters a discussion of trade, mak-
ing trade the topic upon which we comment. The conversation surround-
ing Trade Is War is largely homogenous in this way. We are reading, writ-
ing, speaking, and listening in a time when trade and its growing conflicts
are seen as central to international affairs. It has not been long, however,
since the world’s focus was upon war. In the aftermath of World War II,
nations were conceptually divided into military superpowers and their
surrogates. While balance of trade has been a working concept at least
since the time of Elizabeth I, it was less central to twentieth-century Cold
War discussion than balance of power. Although I make no claim that
the conversation constituting Trade Is War in the postwar world precludes

war from semantically dominating trade in some instances, I would sug-
gest that the war-focused conversation of the 1950s enables a discursive
trajectory that reverses the polarity of trade and war in other instances
of Trade Is War.
For instance, in the first paragraph of a 1952 work titled Economic
Warfare, Yuan-li Wu summarizes a dominant portion of the conceptual
and discursive context of his time:
To a generation whose memory of the last war is still fresh, it is com-
monplace to point out that total war today requires the application
of a country’s entire resources in waging it on all fronts: military,
political, psychological, and economic. But for policy-makers as well
as for the intelligent citizen it is not enough to know that wars may
be fought on other than the military front. It is necessary to go a step
further in the inquiry as to how this should and could be done; and
what is more, it is incumbent to find out whether by waging a suc-
cessful war on one or all of the other fronts it would not be possible
to avoid a military conflagration. (1)
This passage stands in startling contrast to current discourse about in-

ternational affairs. Speaking from a U.S. vantage point, ours is a time of
limited wars in carefully circumscribed spaces.
In keeping with the broad character of Cold War discourse, Wu’s fram-
ing of Trade Is War blocks the conventional configuration of asymmetry
that gives war more force than trade. It is key to Wu’s discursive trajec-
tory that war is not a stable concept, that we may have known what it
was once, but no more. According to Wu, the concept of war is distinct
from military conflagration. We can wage “a successful war on one or
all of the other fronts” and “avoid a military conflagration.” In other
words, he asserts that the category of war is larger than previously
thought; the military aspect is only one of four crucial aspects. This cat-
egory assertion—“total war”—rather than being conceptually surpris-
ing, is “commonplace.” Once the superordinate category of Trade Is War
is reconceived—no longer foreign relations or trade war, but rather war—
the semantic power relation between trade and war reverses its polarity;
trade now dominates war.
Consider the treatment of the word weapon in Wu’s discussion, com-
pared to weapon in earlier examples. Wu writes, “Such is our problem.
How to use economic weapons in fighting a war, what weapons to use
in a period of sustained emergency . . . and above all, whether an eco-
nomic war could be substituted for a shooting war” (6). There is no met-
aphoric hyperbole in Wu; compare Wu to the Los Angeles Times’ meta-
phorizing of Super 301 as America’s “potent new weapon.” In Wu’s book,
there is no mapping of economic weapons as cannons, sabers, cudgels,
and such. To Wu, economic weapons are just that—weapons—because

economic war is indeed war. In short, his weapons are not old trade tricks
metaphorized as weapons but new weapons of a new kind of war, un-
tested and unfamiliar to us.
Wu is, it seems, aware that he is reconfiguring Trade Is War. He takes
care to distinguish economic warfare, the trade dominant version of Trade
Is War, from trade war, the war dominant version of Trade Is War. He
heads a section of his first chapter: “Differences Between Economic War-
fare and a Protective Trade Policy.” He argues that in economic warfare
we do not serve the interests of domestic corporations, who benefit from
protectionist policies. Instead, economic maneuvering serves a national
defense interest. Importantly, we must bear in mind that in Cold War dis-
cussions of economic warfare the objective of war is not to gain economi-
cally but to resist the forces of tyranny; thus, the domestic economic ef-
fects of an economic war are byproducts of war, not indicators of success
or failure. In keeping with the large movement of Trade Is War over time,
Wu stresses not only that economic warfare is novel but that it disrupts
conventional ideas of Trade Is War, denouncing protectionism as “mer-
cantilist” (9).
In fact, economic warfare cannot substantially be confused with trade
war. Their categorical membership lists, while they may overlap, are dif-
ferent. Economic warfare shares with trade war tariffs, regulations refus-
ing to purchase foreign goods, and so on, but trade war does not share
with economic warfare military strikes on economic targets, sabotage, and
blockades. Economic warfare is war reconceived in terms of trade; trade
war is trade reconceived in terms of war. Since economic warfare entails
a literal category assertion that makes war superordinate to both mili-
tary and trade activity, we might well ask whether economic warfare
constitutes a metaphor at all. It does. Just as Trade Is War can accom-
modate and be accommodated within the category trade war, it can both
encompass and be encompassed by the category economic warfare. Trade
Is War’s metaphoric quality is not lost; it is only relocated.
No matter how insistent Wu and others may be in categorizing eco-
nomic warfare as war, they cannot undo the sociocognitive entrenchment
of both trade and war as basic categories. This is evident in the need for
adjectives to distinguish between “economic wars” and “shooting wars.”
The very titles of books on economic warfare in the midst of World War
II (e.g., Battles Without Bullets [Brockway, 1939] and The New Economic
Warfare [Basch, 1941]) underscore Trade Is War’s metaphoric quality—
that the broadening of war to include economic warfare, while wide-
spread, is more wish than fact.
Lastly, the shift in Trade Is War’s semantic asymmetry is enabled by
World War II’s discursive emphasis on war, but it is not exclusive to World
War II and its aftermath. We can see the same shift in recent Trade Is War
fiction such as Tom Clancy’s Debt of Honor, in which—as discussed in
chapter 3—the Japanese attack the United States by infiltrating key fi-
nancial institutions, then simultaneously dumping U.S. Treasury Bills,
sabotaging the New York Stock Exchange’s computer system, and occu-
pying the Mariana Islands. In the plot of Clancy’s novel, we see both the
metaphor Trade Is War and a simultaneous literalization of the metaphor.
For Clancy’s Japanese caricatures, just as for Cold War hawks, Trade
Is War.
Mapping
Although mapping is an integral feature of metaphor, it is often credited
with a fundamental force that it does not have. While the formal con-
straints of mapping have typically been seen as the sole reason for meta-
phors to be apt or aesthetically pleasing, mapping constraints are at most
minimum conditions for acceptable metaphors. Metaphors extend and
resonate in concert with a constituting conversation. And while metaphors
do not tend to violate mapping constraints, metaphoric mapping func-
tions in a way that is subordinate to larger discursive conditions.
Mapping encompasses a number of things. We often speak of meta-
phorical mapping without using the term mapping. When students in a
focus group discuss the aptness of Trade Is War by overlaying features
of war onto corresponding features of trade, they are discussing mapping
without knowing it. Metaphor theorists often use everyday terms such
as resemblance to discuss the relation between target and source domains,
taking for granted that there should be a corresponding pattern of fea-
tures between the two. That is also mapping. For both the casual observer
and for the theorist, when features of the source do not correspond iso-
morphically—that is, map—onto features of the target, an incoherence
is perceived in the metaphor. The metaphor does not “make sense.” For
instance, a business student argues that Trade Is War does not “make
sense” because in war you destroy your opponent, but in trade you co-
operate with a partner. In the same way, I. A. Richards objects to Othello’s
“steep’d me in poverty to the very lips” because liquid is a presence and
poverty is an absence. It doesn’t “make sense.”
Among explicit theories of mapping, it is useful to identify three main
varieties: feature mapping, systematic mapping, and image-schematic
mapping. As I will show in this chapter, and in yet more detail in chap-
ter 5, none of these varieties operates discretely. Nonetheless, they are
three distinct aspects of an interpenetrated mapping process.
Feature Mapping. Feature mapping is usually seen as the simplest way
of understanding and evaluating metaphors because it sometimes involves
only physical correspondences between source and target. For example,

in the cliché as skinny as a rail, we map primarily, although not exclu-
sively, the physical feature slenderness. In her discussion of children and
metaphor, Ellen Winner calls these kinds of feature mappings “primitive
metaphors” (39–40). However, feature mapping is seldom so rudimen-
tary—at least, not for adults. Even simple mappings have discursive, rhe-
torical ramifications. Take, for example, she is a giraffe to mean she is
tall, an example of single-feature mapping once used by Dedre Gentner.
The expression seems straightforward enough—except that to be tall, and
to be a woman, and to be a tall woman all have implications that are
bound to a specific time and place. Moreover, there are many tall things
to which a woman may be compared, but none seem to have the same
effect as giraffe. She is as tall as a tree. She is as tall as a flagpole. She is
as tall as the Empire State Building. In addition, we often ascribe social
or psychological qualities to physical characteristics, as in he’s smooth
to mean he has good manners or he is deceptive. I will discuss the way
single features index larger social situations in chapter 5.
Systematic Mapping. It has long been recognized that metaphor of-
ten involves more than simple feature correspondences, that the corre-
spondences between target and source can be systematic. Notably, Max
Black refers to a “system of associated commonplaces” or an “implica-
tive complex” (“More” 28). In a more codified way, Dedre Gentner ob-
serves that we usually prefer metaphors (or metaphoric analogies) that
map multiple features and preserve the relations between those features,
as in analogies of the hydrogen atom and the solar system. According to
Gentner, when the hydrogen atom is likened to the solar system, not only
do we map the surface similarity of the two systems but also the relation
between its parts. If the central object (the sun or the nucleus) were less
massive, the attraction between it and its satellites would decrease, and
the distance between them would thereby increase.
Image-Schematic Mapping. Image-schematic mapping refers mainly
to the way we perceive image-schematic correspondences between and
among domains. It refers to the kinds of complex mappings that under-
pin the conceptual metaphors discussed in this book. It is important to
note that the idea of image-schematic mapping does not repudiate single-
feature and systematic mapping theories. Rather, it offers a way of ac-
counting for metaphoric processes for which the other mapping theories
are inadequate.
All three notions of mapping—especially taken together—have value
and, in fact, help us to explain the way metaphor works. In chapter 5, I
will look at each mapping type, offering specific evidence for its interre-
lation with what I call licensing stories. However, first I want to note the
general way we need to rethink mapping in light of rhetorically consti-
tuted metaphor. Mappings are sensitive to rhetorical contexts and pur-

poses, and we cannot understand mappings unless we understand the rhe-
toric that saturates virtually all metaphor use. Let me, then, briefly iden-
tify three ways mapping is implicated in rhetoric.
Mapping as Preference
Gentner’s systematicity proposal is correct in that metaphor’s impulse
is to expand, to seek systematic mappings where it can, rather than to
rest with single-feature correspondences, but this impulse depends not
on structure but upon rhetoric. In other words, Gentner argues that it is
the structural possibility of mappings that drives the mapping process. But
when we examine metaphors in specific discursive settings, the implica-
tions of systematic mappings appear to be very different.
Mapping is one of metaphor’s microsystems, and it is both enabled
and constrained by a metaphor’s guiding conversation. Gentner’s example
of the solar system/hydrogen atom analogy is controlled by a discourse
so conventional that it nearly escapes our notice. In science, and science
education especially, we often compare the solar system and hydrogen
atoms, using the well-known systematic relations of the solar system to
explain the lesser known relations of atomic particles.
But the solar system and the atom are not always compared as physi-
cal entities that have a similar shape, not even in discourse about science.
For instance, Thomas Kuhn likens the solar system and the hydrogen
atom as objects of study because both helped to shift research paradigms
through quantitative means. Comparing the work of the early astrono-
mer Johann Kepler to that of physicist Niels Bohr, Kuhn writes:
Claims [that raise new difficulties] are particularly likely to succeed
if the new paradigm displays a quantitative precision strikingly bet-
ter than its older competitor. The quantitative superiority of Kepler’s
Rudolphine tables to all those computed from the Ptolemaic theory
was a major factor in the conversion of astronomers to Copernican-
ism. . . . And in this century the quantitative success of . . . the Bohr
atom quickly persuaded many physicists to accept [it] even though,
viewing physical science as a whole, [it] created more problems than
it solved. (153–54)
It is true that Kuhn’s comparison between the solar system and the hydro-
gen atom is only implicit; he compares theories about the solar system
and the atom. But it is easy enough to make the solar system-hydrogen
atom metaphor explicit through the conventional technique of allowing
the object to stand synecdochically for the activity. That is, we can eas-
ily append this sentence: The solar system was the hydrogen atom of its
day. Kuhn’s discursive trajectory inflects the explicit metaphor in a way
that makes the physical similarity of the solar system and the hydrogen
atom largely irrelevant. Moreover, Kuhn’s rhetorical context might make

us note other kinds of systematically related correspondences—that both
the atom and the sun are central to cultures, that each holds both crea-
tive and destructive power, that each is fundamental to life. But whether
we play out systematic correspondences in this way depends upon what
point is being made. The mapping comports with the rhetorical action.
Put another way, the impulse to discover systematic correspondences
is both a mental and a rhetorical preference. We all recognize the meta-
phor game that often occurs during argumentative give and take. Con-
sider a hypothetical discussion of science education as food. Someone
says, We have to teach our children math and science because these sub-
jects are our bread and butter. Someone else replies, True, but man does
not live by bread alone. We need to nourish children’s spirits also. Make
room for philosophy, literature, music, art. The first replies, So you’re
saying, Let them eat cake. Well, we have too much dessert in school to-
day. The second parries, The arts are not dessert. They’re nourishment
for all of us, day in and day out. And so it goes. Of course, the concep-
tual metaphor that underpins this exchange is Ideas Are Food, and that
metaphor is implicated in a metaphor system that constitutes and is con-
stituted by the discourse of education. Nonetheless, the mappings within
Ideas Are Food are subject to rhetorical impetuses and constraints.
We love to map metaphors to their systematic limit—to play out plau-
sible structural correspondences in order to make our rhetorical points.
Usually, since structural correspondences are inherently limited, the meta-
phor breaks down as the correspondences quit “making sense” or as they
become disputed. The crucial point, however, is not that metaphors have
limits but that we have a preference for exploring those limits.
Mapping as Minimum Condition

While we do have a preference for mapping as thoroughly as sense and
rhetoric allow, it is also important not to overstate the impulse to map
and to take into account the conditions that preclude mapping altogether.
To explain these aspects of mapping, George Lakoff and Mark Turner—
who, as we have seen, argue that metaphor is based importantly, but not
entirely, upon image schemas—propose the invariance principle (Lakoff,
“Contemporary”; Turner, “Language”). The invariance principle is a ju-
diciously limited formal principle that points out this simple fact: We do
not necessarily map everything imaginable, but all of the abstract shape
that makes sense. And where the abstract shape makes no sense, we do
not map it.
Turner proffers the example of metaphors whose source domain is death.
According to Turner, death is an event whose shape is “one in which an
entity, over time, reaches a final state, after which it no longer exists”
(“Language” 730). Thus, when we map death onto a given target, we

do not necessarily project every detail of death, or every part of death’s
image schema, but we do map as much of its image schema as is consis-
tent with the target’s image schema. Thus, the invariance principle places
mapping constraints under one umbrella, covering such image-schematic
structures or generic-level constraints as static orientations (up, down, for-
ward, back, vertical, horizontal, in, out, and so on), moving orientations
(rising, dipping, spinning), and, importantly, event shapes such as “con-
tinuity, extension, discreteness, completion, open-endedness, circularity,
part/whole relations, and so on” (729). At the same time, it avoids the
pitfall of predicting with fine precision what will be mapped.
It does seem that most or all metaphors adhere to the invariance prin-
ciple. We do map compatible portions of image schemas, and we do not
map incompatible portions. But it is important to realize that while it is
a formalist principle, it is a modest one. It leaves a large portion of map-
ping unexplained, the portion that is connected to metaphor’s rhetorical
constitution. Simply put, it does not attempt to explain how we come to
apply image schemas in the first place. We must ask, therefore, how the
invariance principle operates in relation to metaphor’s larger conversation.
How do abstract mappings come to make sense in concrete discourse?
The functional relation between concrete discourse and abstract map-
ping can be demonstrated well with respect to Turner’s strange but fas-
cinating example language is a virus. Turner explains language is a virus
this way: “We map the generic-level information in the nature of the vi-
rus onto language, to arrive at the interpretation that those who show
the symptoms of ‘having language’ pass language on to others, who con-
sequently develop the same symptoms” (732). In other words, the skel-
etal shape of virus’s events are mapped onto language. Turner’s reading
of language is a virus is reasonable enough—we can easily imagine a con-
versation in which this mapping would make sense.
But the nature of the virus is itself a fluid construct. Disease is un-
derstood in various ways—as clinical phenomenon, as a behavioral phe-
nomenon, even as divine earthly retribution. Each way of understand-
ing disease is inflected by political and philosophical concerns. A striking
example of this is the AIDS virus, a politically volatile disease whose
nature is seen differently by various interest groups. But all diseases are
understood through some political, philosophical paradigm. If a physi-
cian says that language is a virus, he or she very likely means something
different from a social worker, from a fund-raiser for a disease founda-
tion, from a Christian Scientist, or from William Burroughs, the author
of this odd metaphor.
Burroughs’ idea of virus is not one in which people who “show the
symptoms of ‘having language’ pass language on to others.” Instead, he
subordinates language is a virus to a very strange sequence of events.

He says,
Dr. Kurt Unruh von Steinplatz has put forward an interesting theory
as to the origins and history of this word virus. He postulates that
the word was a virus of what he calls “biologic mutation” affecting
a change in its host which was then genetically conveyed. . . . He
postulates that alterations in the inner throat structure were occa-
sioned by a virus illness. And vot an occasion! . . . Since the virus in
both male and female precipitates sexual frenzy through irritation
of the sex centers in the brain, the male impregnated the females in
the death spasms and the altered throat structure was genetically
conveyed. (qtd. in Lydenberg 129)
Burroughs’ story preserves some of the skeletal shape of Turner’s conven-

tional virus events, but it also adds some notable elaborations to it. He
not only specifies the type of virus in language is a virus, one of “biolog-
ic mutation,” but also he overlays dramatic elements upon the nature of
the virus—such as sexual frenzy at the moment of death. And that is not
all. In further comments, Burroughs builds an evolutionary aspect into
language is a virus, theorizing that human beings are currently at a state
of equilibrium with the virus, which makes the virus undetectable. The
dormant virus might at any time become deadly again (Lydenberg 130).
Admittedly, Burroughs tells a peculiar story. But then, it is part and
parcel of Burroughs’ rhetorical stance to tell peculiar stories. Burroughs,
the literary iconoclast, cuts prose into strips and randomly puts them back
together. He trades upon his suspicion of establishment power and the
hidden force of its language. Because Burroughs tells a peculiar story, lan-
guage is a virus becomes a peculiar metaphor. That is, just as narrative’s
impulse is to elaborate, metaphor’s impulse is to map in concert with the
elaborations of a controlling story—to map more things and different
things than we might guess when examining a bare metaphor. Moreover,
we can easily see that such an odd story can only be told as part of an
iconoclastic rhetoric. The rhetoric governs.
Of course, Lakoff and Turner make no claim that image schemas are
immutable. They are akin to what Lakoff calls idealized cognitive mod-
els, broad understandings of physical and social phenomenon that are
specific to cultures (Women 68–76). If we stipulate that image schemas
can vary depending upon cultures and even for subcultures, the invari-
ance principle works well for predicting minimum mappings, something
we need to know in order to understand how metaphors work. But it is
just as important to emphasize the variability of image schemas as it is
to note the invariance of mappings that depend upon image schemas. The
selection of image schemas is key to the variability inherent in metaphor.
Metaphor is subordinate to larger discursive conditions—the rhetorical
points we want to make, the cultural evaluations we embed in our writ-

ing and talk, the degree of resistance we exert (or do not exert) against
contextualizing culture.
Mapping as Modulation
One of the main points I have made in this book is that metaphors can
be regulated. We may rely upon broadly understood conceptual metaphors
to give our particular metaphoric utterances abstract shape and cultural
coherence, but particular locutions tend to intensify or attenuate the larger
metaphor. Here, I want to distinguish between attenuation and intensi-
fication between metaphors (for example, attenuating Trade Is War by
shifting to Trade Is A Game) from controlling the rhetorical intensity of
a particular metaphor. When we control the intensity of a particular met-
aphor, we are mapping in accordance with rhetorical imperatives. For
example, we often instantiate the metaphor Happy Is Up with standard
locutions such as I’m feeling up today, she’s riding high, he’s floating on
air, I’m on cloud nine, and so on. We even see outlandish literalizations
of it such as the character in Mary Poppins who floats on the ceiling while
singing, “I Love to Laugh.” Neither common locutions nor any that we
might invent conveys precisely the same degree of rhetorical force. But
the way we modulate these locutions is not random.
An intensified instance of Happy Is Up makes use of the abstract im-
age schema, exaggerating it, while at the same time relying upon our gen-
eral knowledge of the physical and social world. It’s nice to feel up, but
it’s nicer to defy gravity and walk on clouds. And it is both nice and cul-
turally significant to feel, as the Rodgers and Hammerstein post–World
War II song puts it, “high as the flag on the Fourth of July.” This modu-
lation of image schema and cultural knowledge is evident in every con-
crete instance of a conceptual metaphor. Moreover, modulation is not
simply a matter of turning the rhetorical heat up or down; it’s about un-
derstanding what rhetorical response a particular mapping will stimu-
late. Consider Ideas Are Food. We might say that a university’s course
offerings are an intellectual cafeteria. Or we might say that the course
offerings provide an intellectual feast. Both are relatively intense map-
pings, but they call for different responses.
Trade Is War and Mapping

When we consider mapping as part of a rhetorical conversation, one that
involves competing trajectories and numerous metaphors, any account of
a particular mapping becomes a complex interpretive problem. Seldom
can one mapping be comprehended without taking into account other
mappings. That is, not only do conceptual metaphors respond to other
conceptual metaphors in a broad sense, particular locutions respond to
other particular locutions, as well as to other general concepts. Trade Is

War is subject to the same mapping processes as other metaphors. Its
impulse is to map as thoroughly as it can until the mapping inevitably
reaches its limit; it maps in conformance with a variable yet broadly com-
prehended image schema; and it is modulated according to long-term and
immediate rhetorical requirements. Moreover, every mapping is impli-
cated in the larger conversation so far described.
Consider this subtly complicated mapping from a 1993 Atlantic
Monthly article written by James Fallows. The article appeared near the
outset of the Clinton administration and advocates a government trade pol-
icy similar to that of Japan. Such a trade policy flies in the face of the phi-
losophy that guided the Reagan and Bush administrations, who pursued
a laissez-faire, antigovernment ideal with an almost religious zeal. In
1993, observers did not anticipate the Asian economic crisis that currently
worries the United States, and fear of Japan’s economic success in auto-
mobiles, consumer electronics, and high-tech products caused some com-
mentators to recommend the U.S. emulate Japanese economic policies.
Fallows, typical of the alerting voices, admires Japanese success, warns
of its deleterious effect on Western economies, and attributes Japanese
postwar economic gains to a distinctly foreign way of thinking and behav-
ing. Citing Japan’s large and nationally insular semiconductor market,
Fallows asserts that Japan does not follow the “nationally blind, price-
minded mentality” that most policy makers—and Japanese spokespeople
who write in English—would have us believe is a universal economic fact.
Instead of buying less expensive semiconductors from other countries,
Japan developed and bought its own. He explains,
In Japan the companies that made chips were tightly connected to
the companies that bought chips—and connected by something be-
yond the prospect of business advantage which momentarily binds
buyers to sellers in the American marketplace. The closest analogy
from American life is the military. Just as the U.S. Air Force, with
its allies in industry and congress, competes bitterly against the Army
and the Navy (and their respective allies) for budget dollars and
prestige, so do Toshiba, NEC, and Fujitsu, with their allies, compete
bitterly against one another for primacy and market share. Yet each
kind of competitor recognizes limits to its rivalry. Fundamentally, it
is on the same team as its rivals, and at certain points all must sup-
press their immediate interests for the common good. According to
Western economic theory there is virtually no “shared interest”
among business competitors. Members of the American military
system, and of the Japanese business system, need no theory to ar-
ticulate why they are on the same side. (78)
Fallows’ conceptual metaphor is couched beneath the theme of unspo-

ken, shared assumptions. But, clearly enough, he does what many eco-
nomic nationalists do. He ascribes Trade Is War to Japan. In so doing,

he enacts complicated metaphoric mapping.
At this point in my argument, I hardly need to mention that Fallows’
Trade Is War is implicated in a conversation among related metaphors.
Certainly, Fallows will not revert in the next paragraph to metaphors of
friendship and journeys. (He does not.) And we should not be surprised
if the metaphors of games and containers come into play. (They do.) The
questions, then, are, how does Fallows modulate Trade Is War, what role
does the systematic mapping impulse play, and how do image schemas
constrain the metaphor?
First, let me note that modulation is a matter of controlling empha-
sis, and emphasis is a matter of relative degree. What might amount to
an intensification of metaphor in one writer’s prose might amount to an
attenuation in another’s. Fallows writes, as most Atlantic contributors do,
in a measured, cerebral register. It is fair to say that the Atlantic trades
more upon intellectual challenges than upon sensational phrase making.
In keeping with this stylistic parameter, Fallows’ thesis is that tacit as-
sumptions inform action such as economic policy making. Therefore,
when Fallows sidles into his instance of Trade Is War—two thousand
words into a twelve thousand word piece—the very mention of the meta-
phor is an intensification. No need to mention bombs and blood. Sec-
ond, the placement of the metaphor is emphatic. It comes at the end of
an important section, the culminating moment when Fallows at last as-
serts why American semiconductors have declined and Japanese semicon-
ductors have ascended. This is the stressed position Joseph Williams and
Gregory Colomb call “the point slot” (“Coherence II”). Not only does
Fallows introduce a rhetorically incendiary metaphor, he puts it where
it will have the greatest effect.
The mapping, then, is modulated both with reference to a large con-
versation and with internal reference to the writer’s register. The meta-
phor nonetheless uses the same tools for modulating previously identi-
fied. While he avoids such standard feature mapping as bombs and
arsenals, he does select an image-schematic mapping that is intensified.
Many image schemas entail internal competition paired with outward
unity. Metaphors of games, social clubs, families, and orchestras do. In
fact, Fallows implies a game metaphor by using the word “team.” But
none of these alternative metaphors exaggerate the image schema. The
U.S. military, on the other hand, entails the hostile-action image schema
on a global scale. Although understatement can at times be pointedly dev-
astating, when it comes to modulation of metaphors, more is, generally
speaking, more.
This upward modulation is reinforced by the systematizing impulse.
Fallows is explicit in his penultimate and ultimate sentences—an emphatic
rhetorical slot—that his point has mainly to do with similarity of tacitly

shared interests: “According to Western economic theory there is virtu-
ally no ‘shared interest’ among business competitors. Members of the
American military system, and of the Japanese business system, need no
theory to articulate why they are on the same side.” In a sense, this ex-
plicit interpretation of his own metaphor gives Fallows plausible denia-
bility—he can claim not to have characterized Japanese industry as mili-
tary in every respect but rather merely to have asserted the similarity of
a single feature. But this claim of single-feature mapping rings hollow,
coming on the heels of a mapping that links actors, actions, objectives,
outcomes in a complex, isomorphic overlay. In Fallows’ metaphor, the
branches of the U.S. armed services correspond to internally competitive
Japanese industries, the U.S. Congress corresponds to the Japanese mar-
kets, gaining U.S. tax-funding corresponds to gaining Japanese market
supremacy, and so on. These corresponding systems may be driven by
similar tacit assumptions, but because the military metaphor is described
in detail and Japanese industry is asserted to be systematically similar,
the single-feature mapping—shared interest corresponds to shared inter-
est—takes a back seat to the preponderance of mapped social action.
Of course, it might be said that the mapping of the military image
schema requires that we comprehend all of these systematic overlays. In
some sense, that is correct. We do need to comprehend a degree of inter-
nal competition paired with cooperative, outwardly directed hostile ac-
tion. But Fallows’ particular systematic mapping emphasizes the aspect
of internal competition. That is, Americans generally realize that the Navy
and the Marines compete in many respects, but this is not an important
part of the abstract image schema that informs most instances of Trade
Is War. This phenomenon—the recasting of image schemas—raises the
question of invariance. That is, if the invariance principle is valid, then
why so much variance?
Two things are important to remember: First, the invariance princi-
ple makes no claim about the universality of image schemas. All image
schemas and the values placed upon them are culturally variable. We have
the cognitive capacity for deploying and recognizing image schemas, but
we are not “hard-wired” to configure or judge them in any particular way.
As I pointed out in chapter 3, war has many possible image schemas—
war as direct confrontation, as indirect maneuvering, as siege, as deceit,
and so on. When we observe the rhetorical etiquette of Trade Is War, we
have to realize that the image schemas that underpin metaphors are po-
tentially as variable as the rhetoric that attends them.
Second, the invariance principle takes into account both what will be
mapped and what will not be mapped. That is, the invariance principle
claims that we map as much of the source domain’s image schema as is
compatible with that of the target domain. It stands to reason, then, that
as we reconceive the target domain, more or different aspects of the source
domain’s image schema will map. This is just what has happened in Fal-
lows’ mapping of Trade Is War. He has explicitly re-explained the nature
of Japanese industry, making it compatible with an aspect of the stan-
dard war image schema that has always been available to be mapped but
that has been previously unimportant. Moreover, there are numerous
aspects of the most common war image schema—the direct confronta-
tion model—that almost never map in instances of Trade Is War because
they are incompatible. For instance, many or most English speakers un-
derstand war to entail grief, moral imperatives, and victory celebrations.
None of these aspects tend to map in instances of Trade Is War. They are
not compatible with generally shared notions of trade.
As we have seen, mapping is complex and fluid—sensitive both to the
regularities and vicissitudes of rhetoric. But even an account of mapping
that encompasses various sorts of mapping is not enough to give us a com-
plete picture of how mapping works. It is not sufficient to link mapping
as a micro-system and rhetoric as a macro-system without acknowledg-
ing that other factors may be involved. That is why, in the following chap-
ter, I explore the interanimating force of narrative.
5
The Story of Metaphor
“Business is business,” the Little Man said,
“A battle where ‘everything goes,’
And the only gospel is ‘get ahead,’
And never spare friends or foes.
‘Slay or be slain,’ is the slogan cold;
You must struggle and slash and tear,
For Business is Business, a fight for gold,
Where all that you do is fair!”
“Business is Business,” the Big Man said,

“A battle to make of earth
A place to yield us more clothes and bread,
More pleasure and joy and mirth;
There are still some bandits and buccaneers
Who are jungle-bred beasts of trade,
But their number dwindles with passing years
And dead is the code they made!”
—Berton Braley, “Business Is Business,” 1927
Metaphor is not the only figure of speech we use to make sense of our
world, although current emphases may make it seem so. Perhaps because
metaphor study has been so prolific in recent decades, it is tempting to in-
fer a sort of metaphor chauvinism: that no matter what the question, met-
aphor is the answer. Jeanne Fahnestock, for one, responds to this seeming
hegemony of the metaphor by pointing out that so obscure a figure as anti-
metabole (obscure in language scholarship, not in speech) has important
ramifications for scientific discovery. But metaphor chauvinism is prob-
ably more impression than actuality. From time to time, although not as
often as one might like, theorists and researchers have observed the com-
plementary relation of metaphor, metonymy, and irony. I want to show
here that a rhetorical view of metaphor makes it impossible to describe
metaphoric functioning without acknowledging its integral relation to
other discursive forms: in particular, narrative.
103
104 The Story of Metaphor
Since Roman Jakobson, metaphor theorists have, by and large, as-

sumed that metaphor and story are distinct, that metaphor operates on
the paradigmatic or synchronic axis and that story (or narrative) operates,
along with metonymy, on the syntagmatic or diachronic axis (369–70).
This assumption is embedded in virtually all metaphor theory simply be-
cause it so persistently discusses metaphor without discussing story at the
same time. Of course, narrative theory generally recognizes that the to-
tality of narrative effect includes ostensibly synchronic elements. But the
precise relation between metaphor and story has never been adequately
explored in a discussion of how metaphor itself works.
I have made a habit in this book of criticizing the Aristotelian view of
metaphor, but Aristotle does get one thing right. He claims that the best
metaphors are those that achieve a “bringing-before-the-eyes,” which are
metaphors that “signify things engaged in an activity” (On Rhetoric 245–
48). Bringing before the eyes—making sequential, motivated human ac-
tion visible—is an important function of stories. But the specific way
stories are intertwined with metaphors goes beyond what Aristotle ob-
serves. Aristotle and others have noted that most metaphors can be made
into mini-narrations. This suggests something about the fluid interface be-
tween metaphor and story. Yet it also suggests a simple conversion mecha-
nism, as if the relation between metaphors and stories is really a matter
of alternate forms and degree of elaboration.
Along this line, some see metaphor as the root of a story. In his study
of organizational problem-solving and “generative” metaphors, Donald
Schön argues that the “framing of problems often depends upon meta-
phors underlying the stories which generate problem setting” (138). Al-
though Schön is correct that stories play an important role in framing
problems, and that particular metaphors are conventionally associated
with certain problem-setting stories, it is erroneous to assume that a
metaphor can “underlie” any story—as if it were the hidden origin of the
story. Similarly, Richard Boland and Ralph Greenberg see metaphors as
creators of “organizational myths, images, and stories” (31). But, aside
from a commonly held belief that metaphor holds near mystical genera-
tive powers, there is no reason to think that metaphor is the origin of even
mythical stories.
Perhaps the best effort to define the relation between metaphor and
story has been made by Donald McCloskey, who argues that in economics
all stories are answered by metaphors, and all metaphors are answered
by stories (“Storytelling” 5). Thus, McCloskey begins to explore the way
that economists’ metaphors are more than just seeds of stories, that it is
part and parcel of both metaphor and story to be attached to a rhetori-
cal position. However, McCloskey does not explore the complementary
relation between metaphor and story, except in its most conventional
The Story of Metaphor 105
form, allegory, where one story corresponds isomorphically to another.

He links metaphor and story in dialogic relation, but he configures them
as opposites.
Some stories can contradict some metaphors. But metaphor is not fun-
damentally opposed to story. When we select our metaphors, we validate
our stories; conversely, when we comprehend the world through story,
we license some metaphors and not others. Moreover, because what I call
licensing stories overarch the more localized function of mapping, story
is one of the chief means through which we understand and deploy meta-
phor. That is, licensing stories help us to determine the viability of par-
ticular metaphoric mappings and guide our endorsements of metaphors.
Having said this, it is important to reemphasize that theorists have not
been mistaken in seeing metaphor as a partial mapping of source onto
target—and that various sorts of mapping play an important role in the
way we make sense of metaphor. I have said as much, with some crucial
elaboration, in chapter 4. Some cognitive scientists make a much larger
claim: that because we understand metaphor through mapping, meta-
phoric mapping constitutes a basic structure of our thought. This claim
grows out of what Raymond Gibbs calls “the cognitive wager,” the wa-
ger that language is not separate from thought but representative of it
(15). If we accept the cognitive wager, as I am inclined to do, then we
must then take special care in examining how all of the language associ-
ated with metaphor functions, not just that language which leads us to
notice mapping.
In other words, since metaphors are inseparable from larger commu-
nicative circumstances, we cannot assume that one mechanism for un-
derstanding metaphor functions in the same way or with equal impor-
tance for every metaphor. Rather, we must note a repertoire of tactics for
interpreting metaphor. These tactics include various sorts of mapping;
they include story-based tactics; and all of these tactics operate in con-
cert with each other. I base my argument primarily upon data gathered
in a series of focus groups, in which licensing stories were a prominent
tactic for interpreting and evaluating metaphors. However, the phenom-
enon of licensing stories is observable in naturally occurring discourse,
as shown in the brief case study of Bill Gates that closes this chapter.
Story and Understanding

At least since Shakespeare wrote “All the world’s a stage,” people have
spoken of the world and its events as stories. Life Is A Story is a concep-
tual metaphor long re-envoiced by literary writers and everyday speak-
ers alike. David Copperfield begins “Whether I shall turn out to be the
hero of my own life, or whether that station will be held by anybody else,
these pages must show.” That Life Is A Story is so often associated with
fictional genres may account for its often suspect status compared to non-
narrative writing. It is often seen as artifice, inadequate to represent facts.
Many current researchers, however, view story as vitally important to
the construction and conveyance of fact. For example, in urging that story
be legitimized in composition classrooms, Anne DiPardo argues, “The
narrative urge is as ubiquitous as our desire to understand our condition,
and just as important as knowledge gleaned through more systemati-
cally rational means” (63). Similarly, research into disciplinary writing
shows that story is integral to fields most closely associated with, to bor-
row DiPardo’s phrase, systematic and rational means. Greg Myers not
only concludes that story is important to the biological research article
and to understanding scientific facts but also that unlike literary stories,
which are open to virtually endless interpretation, scientific stories reach
consensus, which in constructionist paradigm is tantamount to fact:
To say that these scientific texts are stories is not to say that they are
just stories, and that therefore the literary and anthropological spe-
cialists in stories can understand them on a deeper level than the
understanding of the scientists themselves. Scientific texts are differ-
ent from literary texts. . . . As we have seen, scientific texts seem to
have many different versions at the beginning, but as the process of
interpretation within the discipline and in the public proceeds, one
version is used for practical purposes, for placing one’s claim in his-
torical context, for drawing lessons for the research community, for
explaining one’s research to the public, for training students to be
researchers. We end up with just one standardized story of split genes,
one “adenovirus” story. (120–21)
Similarly, Karin Knorr-Cetina, Misia Landau, Donald McCloskey, Hay-

den White, Richard Boland and Ramkrishnan Tenkasi, and Elinor Ochs
and her associates point out that stories are a key to constructing both
standard and provisional truths in hard sciences, in social sciences, in
historical writing, in the workplace, and in everyday talk.
However, the importance of story goes beyond ubiquity of use. As
Jerome Bruner argues, story is a basic psychological capability. Bruner
differentiates between story (or narrative) and what he calls “paradig-
matic” forms of expression—logical, nonsequential discourse associated
with science (Actual Minds 11). He argues that story is not only as im-
portant as paradigmatic discourse but also that story is fundamental to
the way we construct notions of ourselves and of the world (Acts of Mean-
ing, “Life as Narrative”). With respect to autobiography, Bruner argues,
“Culturally shaped cognitive and linguistic processes that guide the self-
telling of life narratives achieve the power to structure perceptual expe-
rience, to organize memory, to segment and purpose—build the very
events of life” (“Life” 15). For Bruner, story is not just a way of telling
about our lives, nor are the stories we tell about our lives just stories. Story
is a cultural and mental instrument without which we cannot perceive,
remember, or tell about our lives and our worlds; it is not a possible way
of conveying fact but rather a cultural and cognitive structure that is fun-
damental to fact.
An even stronger version of this thesis has been offered by cognitive
scientists Roger Schank and Robert Abelson. Schank and Abelson pro-
pose:
1. Virtually all human knowledge is based on stories

constructed around past experiences,
2. New experiences are interpreted in terms of old stories,
3. The content of story memories depends on whether and
how they are told to others, and these reconstituted
memories form the basis of the individual’s remembered
self. (“Knowledge” 1)
Thus, according to Schank and Abelson, story is not an important struc-

ture in human understanding, it is the important structure in human un-
derstanding. Of course, most strong theses are met with opposition, and
Schank and Abelson’s story-as-understanding thesis has been criticized.
But even Schank and Abelson’s critics support some weaker version.
William Brewer rebuts Schank and Abelson, saying, “Story memory is
an interesting and important part of human memory, but clearly human
memory is a mansion of many rooms, including spatial memory, causal
memory, and musical memory” (113). David Rubin says simply, “All
knowledge cannot be reduced to a single system, even if that system is
stories” (153). In other words, story may not be all there is to human un-
derstanding, but it is most certainly a large part of it.
Schank and Abelson’s argument is essentially this: Thinking and un-
derstanding are functional. While we may know static facts such as whales
are mammals, this sort of factual knowledge has little to do with ordi-
nary cognition. Ordinary thinking and understanding take place as part
of social interaction. Since social interaction is characterized by the in-
dexing and exchange of stories, it makes sense that we understand each
others’ stories by mapping them onto our own similar stories. Importantly,
what Schank and Abelson mean by story is something more than mere
scripts or episodic memory, both of which apply to known situations.
Through story, we make sense of unknown situations in light of our sto-
ries about known situations. They argue:
Understanding the world means explaining its happenings in a way

that seems consonant with what you already believe. Thus, the task
of an understander who has a memory filled with stories is to deter-

mine which of those stories is most relevant to the situation at hand.
The old story is then used as means for interpreting the new story.
(“Knowledge” 5)
In short, Schank and Abelson refute cognitive theories that argue that
understanding is a rule-governed processing of bundles of decontextua-
lized facts or propositions. The evidence Schank and Abelson use for story-
based understanding is taken largely from conversations (as is much of
the evidence in this chapter), but they argue that conversation is a reli-
able indicator of what is important to understanding—and an important
component of memory and understanding: “Conversation plays a major
role in the shaping and alteration of memories. Material that is not talked
about, or at least rehearsed, is not edited and integrated into the rest of
memory. For all practical purposes, such material remains inert and use-
less” (“So All” 228).
For the sake of my argument, it is not important that we accept Schank
and Abelson’s strong hypothesis but rather that we recognize the general
consensus about story that is now coalescing. This consensus suggests that
story is essential to the construction, memory, and conveyance of facts and
beliefs. Facts and beliefs are versions of truth as we understand it. And
stories are—at least—among the fundamental ways we engage issues of
truth and falsehood. I argue that stories are essential to our understand-
ing of metaphors. We treat metaphors, like all other meaningful utterances,
as verifiable—true or false in varying degrees. The main way we deter-
mine the truthfulness of metaphors is through licensing stories.
The Focus Groups

Focus groups provide a way of examining cognitive and social processes
because they allow participants to elaborate upon their views and to in-
teract with other points of view. As Peter Lunt and Sonia Livingstone ob-
serve, “Focus groups can reveal cognitive or ideological premises that
structure arguments, the ways in which various discourses rooted in par-
ticular contexts and given experiences are brought to bear upon interpre-
tations, the discursive construction of social identities, and so forth” (96).
My purpose in conducting numerous focus groups with varying demo-
graphic compositions was to generate a variety of talk about metaphors
that would put their social and discursive dimensions on display.
I conducted eight focus groups. The groups had as many as eight dis-
cussants and as few as three (thirty-eight participants in all). Each group
was composed of people who were roughly similar in age and professional
status. In order to prompt talk about metaphors, discussants were pre-
sented with a questionnaire that asked them to rate the truthfulness of a
series of trade and business metaphors (see appendix). Discussants rated

the metaphors on a five point scale as follows: 1 = not very true, 2 = could
be seen as true, 3 = somewhat true, 4 = very true, 5 = absolutely true. Dis-
cussants took “truthfulness” to be roughly equivalent to “aptness.” That
is, while occasionally a discussant noted that trade is not actually war, by
and large, discussants assumed that the metaphors were not literally true
and discussed their metaphorical aptness. Most of the metaphors drew
from conceptual metaphors that permeate the language of business and
trade such as Trade Is War, Trade Is A Game, Markets Are Containers,
Trade Is A Journey, Companies Are People, The Economy Is A Machine,
Companies Are Animals, and Companies Are Machines. The questionnaire
also included dance metaphors (e.g., trade is a dance), which are present,
though rarely, in the standard language of trade and economics.
The metaphors were selected specifically for these focus groups and
were worded both as equation-like metaphors (A is B) and similes (A is
like B). They included conventional metaphors such as trade is war, busi-
ness is like football, business is a two-way street, IBM is a giant, and the
economy is a machine. They also included whimsical metaphors such as
business is a bombing mission, IBM is Babe Ruth, trade is a voyage of
exploration, business is the process of choreography, and markets are bub-
bles. (Even these relatively whimsical metaphors represent a kind of ex-
pression found in standard trade talk. For instance, it is standard to de-
scribe the end of a short-lived market boom as the bursting of a bubble.)
Although it is not always possible to categorize a metaphor definitively—
markets are fortresses, for example, can be categorized equally well as a
war metaphor and as a container metaphor—the questionnaire presented
approximately five metaphors from each category.
After rating the metaphors, discussants wrote brief rationales for four
or five metaphors that they found to be most true and four or five meta-
phors that they found to be least true. Both the numerical ratings and the
brief rationales formed the basis of audiotaped discussion. I encouraged
discussants to compare answers and to explore areas of agreement and
disagreement. Because the focus groups were held in informal settings,
the discussions were relaxed in tone. Discussants spoke freely, shared
ideas, wandered from the topic, and made jokes both about each others’
answers and about the questionnaire task itself. However, in the main,
discussants spoke seriously about the metaphors and the issues raised by
the metaphors.
How Mappings Are Licensed

The focus groups provided evidence for all of the varieties of mapping
that have been mainstays of metaphor theory: feature mapping, system-
atic mapping, and image-schematic mapping. As discussed in chapter 4,

by feature mapping I mean the Aristotelian notion of corresponding fea-
tures; by systematic mapping I mean the notion that we prefer relational
mappings to simple feature mappings; and by image-schematic mapping
I mean mappings based on image schemas such as the verticality image
schema of More Is Up or the pathway image schema of Life Is A Journey.
No variety of mapping operates discretely. Rather, feature mappings
always carry a hint of systematic and image-schematic mappings; system-
atic mappings entail features and image schemas; and image-schematic
mappings readily accommodate feature and systematic mappings. Thus,
for focus group discussants, all of the tactics were ready-at-hand all of the
time. However, while all of the mapping varieties were possible—indeed,
discussants showed considerable facility in generating many mappings—
the aptness of any particular mapping depended upon the ideological bent
of the discussant. That is, discussants evaluated possible mappings in the
light of their political, philosophical, social, and personal commitments.
These commitments were at minimum revealed by, and perhaps were con-
stituted by, what I am calling licensing stories.
Licensing stories come in different varieties. Some are stories of personal
experience: narrations short and long that provide first-hand evidence of
how business and trade typically functions. Many of these personal nar-
rations are presented as recollections (I once had a boss, who . . . ). Some
licensing stories are common-knowledge stories: narrative truisms that
sum up what “everyone knows.” These might be thought of as the “when-
ever” stories (whenever a company tries to . . . ). Other stories are au-
thoritative: repetitions of published stories or of those told by an expert.
Still others are fables: anecdotal truths about the world that are not repre-
sented by actual occurrences but rather are exemplified by idealized tales.
The stories may be of any length, some more elaborated than others.
In fact, many fables and authoritative stories are so well known that they
can be indexed very briefly. Whatever the length or style of presentation,
they hold in common an explicit or easily recovered narrative structure
that includes such elements as characters, sequence, complication, and
resolution. Moreover, and importantly, they are all—whether fact or fic-
tion—touchstones of truth, demonstrative instances of the way people,
companies, societies, and nations function. A licensing story may sound
whimsical, but there is no whimsy at its root because even the whimsi-
cal story is evidence of how the world works.
Licensing stories are not merely supporting narratives that happen to
be confluent with a given metaphor. They are individual and cultural keys
that people use to establish some disposition toward a metaphor—either
a conceptual metaphor or a specific instance of it. As Tim Linzey points
out, metaphors may be deployed in various ways that give them varying
degrees of force in a conversational context. He identifies heuristic, ex-
planatory, and fiduciary “repositioning capacities” of metaphor—which

I take to mean roughly that conversants may utter metaphors with greater
or lesser insistence upon its ultimate truth value. In evaluating a meta-
phor, we may be disposed to endorse it wholeheartedly, to reject it alto-
gether, or to negotiate its interpretation or aptness. All of these disposi-
tions, from endorsement to rejection, are licensed by stories.
Because in the focus groups licensing stories exerted a controlling in-
fluence over mappings, I want to propose something akin to Lakoff and
Turner’s invariance principle. As I have said, the invariance principle as-
serts in part that metaphoric mappings will not violate image-schematic
correspondences. Similarly, for us to regard any mapping as apt, it must
comport with our licensing stories—our repertoire of ideologically in-
flected narratives, short and long, individual, professional, and cultural,
that organize our sense of how the world works and how the world should
work. Below I offer evidence of how licensing stories guided discussants’
feature-based, systematic, and image-schematic mappings.
Feature Mapping and Licensing Stories

One difficulty with the idea of single-feature mapping is that single fea-
tures are always made up of parts. Even so common a physical-feature
metaphor as he’s hard as rock to mean he’s muscular involves at least some
analysis of hardness: that hard things do not give when we press on them,
that hard things do not feel pain, that it hurts to be hit by hard things,
and so on. The single feature is never quite single. Nonetheless, we do com-
bine these analyzable features into gestalts. The gestalt becomes analyz-
able in a different way when we ascribe psychological qualities to physi-
cal characteristics, as in he’s a rock when uttered to mean roughly he’s
dependable. When we map psychological qualities, feature mappings are
licensed by both individual and standard cultural stories. When he’s a rock
means he’s dependable, the feature dependability indexes a standard rep-
ertoire of stories that constitute dependability. This repertoire would, no
doubt, include stories of people who help in times of crisis, people who
always arrive on time, people who maintain an emotional equilibrium in
the face of trouble, and so on. Indeed, the utterer of he’s a rock would
probably have in mind a set of dependability stories specifically about the
person to whom the metaphor refers.
In focus groups, discussants frequently explained their metaphor pref-
erences on the basis of one or more shared characteristics. For example,
explaining his high truth rating for business is combat, Peter, a college
junior, noted the feature competitiveness in both business and combat:
I think that one’s—I think that one is absolutely true because in busi-
ness you constantly—you’re competing against people. People,
people inside of a business are competing against each other and it’s
basically a fierce—it’s basically a fierce battle. And that’s what I get

from the word combat, it’s a battle. So it’s a struggle between people
as—in business to succeed and get higher in the business. Or, also in
the business world, it’s, it’s a struggle between companies. So those
are my reasons behind that.
Although Peter’s explanation centered ostensibly on a single, shared fea-

ture, it entailed broader cultural understandings that were evidenced by
key words, words that referenced standard stories. He equated “combat”
with “battle,” a word commonly used to describe business activity. With
this shift toward the commonplace business parlance that associates com-
petition with success and speaks of the process of succeeding as a “battle”
or a Darwinian “struggle,” Peter evoked in just a few words the most stan-
dard of business stories, found in popular business books, in earnest busi-
ness theory, and in the satiric plot of How to Succeed in Business Without
Really Trying (Mead). Moreover, the story was deployed with multiple
orientations. At first, he framed business competition as personal com-
bat, worker against worker. Toward the end of his comment, he noted
that the competition between businesses is also fierce, adding, “Or, also
in the business world, you know, it’s, it’s a struggle between companies.”
It was not a single story that licensed Peter’s mapping but two related
stories—or more likely a larger set of stories, some of which were tacit.
Moreover, Peter’s story embedded a number of tacit metaphors and
concomitant image-schematic mappings. He spoke of a “struggle between
people as—you know, in business to succeed and get higher in the busi-
ness.” Thus, he invoked a blend of the standard conceptual metaphors
More Is Up, Happy Is Up, and Success Is Up. These metaphors, familiar
to all English speakers, are part and parcel of everyday business discourse.
Unless we remain at the bottom of the totem pole, we climb the corpo-
rate ladder or rise through the ranks in order to become upper manage-
ment. And when we reach the pinnacle of success, we may find the ver-
ticality metaphors literalized by a penthouse office. These verticality
metaphors blend readily with war metaphors because, while war and
battle usually operate on a horizontal plane, victory is vertical. We come
out on top or become king of the hill. And our enemies are flattened, laid
low, and beaten down, where they will never rise again.
Now, although Peter’s specific comprehension of business is combat
depended upon a global comprehension of common metaphors, the apt-
ness of business is combat—its capacity to convey a truthful representa-
tion of circumstances—depended not upon the standard conceptual blend
of metaphors alone but rather upon Peter’s assessment of how the world
works, an assessment that was expressed in brief narrative phrases and
in key words that indexed standard business stories. He found business
is combat true because “in business you constantly, you know, you’re
competing against people,” “people inside of a business are competing

against each other,” and it is a “struggle between people as—you know,
in business to succeed and get higher in the business.” In short, Peter’s
licensing stories encompassed a view of external circumstances that, to
him, were not merely comprehended but known—known, in Peter’s case,
in the form of narratively structured truisms.
Not all licensing stories are drawn from truisms. Often licensing
stories are historically specific, learned from the press or crafted from per-
sonal experience. Jim, a software entrepreneur, invoked competition-
success narratives in mapping survival behavior from animals onto com-
panies. He explained his endorsement of companies are animals as a
simple, isomorphic correspondence: Survival behavior is a salient feature
of animals; likewise it is a salient feature of companies. But he used this
simple mapping as focal point for a complex of licensing stories. Jim’s
first story was nonspecific, like Peter’s truisms: “A company, I think, is
an entity quite above and apart from the people who run the company
because the company is an entity. It’s an economic entity, and its goal is
survival. And it survives no matter what.” The company’s need for sur-
vival meant, “It doesn’t matter who gets fired or laid off or what it has
to do.”
Subsequently, perhaps because of his long business experience, Jim’s re-
pertoire of business survival stories included an authoritative thumbnail
history of U.S. business, its electronics industry in particular. He explained,
Well, animals survive. They adapt because of their environment, and

businesses do, too. I mean, American business has adapted a lot in
the last fifteen, twenty years. And that wasn’t their choice. [Laughs.]
They’ve paid no small price in order to retool their electronics in-
dustry. It’s something they had to do because if they didn’t do it, they
wouldn’t survive.
Jim saw the story of the U.S. industry as pervasive, empirical, and gener-
alizable. Because most of us are at least loosely familiar with the changes
that have come about in U.S. electronics, we can easily imagine the many
subsidiary stories that are indexed by Jim’s brief narrative—stories of large
corporations challenged by new, low-price foreign competitors who at-
tain market share, forcing American corporations to streamline manufac-
turing operations, often laying off workers as they do so. So familiar are
these stories, we can readily appreciate Jim’s darkly humorous comment,
“And that wasn’t their choice.”
But it isn’t just our familiarity with American industry over the “last
fifteen, twenty years” that makes the abbreviated story accessible; it is the
long-standing master narrative of economic Darwinism that is attached
to the word “survival,” especially when it is invoked with respect to both
animals and economics. Economic Darwinism is one of our standard

cultural allegories, and it licenses any number of metaphoric clichés such
as it’s a jungle out there, dog-eat-dog, and commerce’s food chain. We
can easily fill in the richly detailed stories that are indexed by such fea-
tures as survival behavior—and, in turn, for these standard stories to li-
cense a metaphor.
Systematic Mapping and Licensing Stories

In chapter 4, I discussed systematic mapping in terms of physical system-
atic correspondences, as exemplified in the analogy of the solar system
and the atom. In addition to this physical systematicity, Catherine Clem-
ent and Dedre Gentner have explored systematic mappings in analogies
between stories. Clement and Gentner found that when people are asked
to find analogic correspondences between brief stories, they map features
whose “causal antecedents” are similar from story to story. Like Clem-
ent and Gentner’s subjects, focus group discussants often mapped one
story onto another, finding correspondences between both features and
causal structures. However, the relation between two stories always went
beyond formal, systematic correspondences. Where correspondences be-
tween stories were noted, discussants also asserted that their licensing
stories were either especially accurate or ethically defensible. In other
words, the stories represented the individual’s ideologically inflected per-
ception of the “true” nature of target and source.
Typical of this pairing of formal correspondence and story-based licens-
ing were narrative mappings of machine functioning onto economic be-
havior. One discussant found the economy is a machine apt because, like
machine parts, workers necessarily wear down over time and are callously
replaced because of larger exigencies. Another discussant rejected the
economy is a machine, since the economy seemed to her unmanageable.
Yet she endorsed companies are machines because workers who function
badly can, like machine parts, be replaced. On one level, these two map-
pings were the same. Economic activity corresponded with machinelike op-
eration; workers corresponded with machine parts. However, the causal
sequences varied. One discussant focused upon workers who lacked agen-
cy to control impersonal causes, the other focused upon managerial agency
that effected positive change. The aptness of the metaphors the economy
is a machine and companies are machines depended not upon the possi-
bility of corresponding causal sequences but instead upon the perceived
truth-value of the discussant’s narrative construction of the world.
So far, I have presented instances of conventional metaphors that were
licensed by stories. But licensing stories can also support novel metaphors
such as trade is a dance. Constructing a systematic correspondence be-
tween trade stories and dance stories, one focus group, composed of fe-
male professionals, co-constructed an interpretation of trade is a dance.
Together, they explained that the physical moves of dancers are similar
to the commercial and marketing moves of businesses. In a sense, their
interpretation could be seen as single feature mapping because they iden-
tified motion as a common feature shared by business and dance. How-
ever, their mapping of dancing motion onto business maneuvers also
incorporated a story-based systematicity. Dance and business were un-
derstood in light of recursive stories in which one motion prompts an-
other. Importantly, the motions described were not mechanical actions
and reactions but conscious responses made by participants in a story—
protagonists and antagonists.
After the group explicitly agreed that trade is a dance would make the
most sense if it referred to the dance of a couple, rather than a solo or en-
semble dance performance, they improvised:
Lynn: Competitors make different moves and you have to
respond.
Rikki: Yeah.
Me: What kind of moves?
Lynn: They may decide to copy your product, and you have to
react or—
Rikki: Sue the shit out of them.
Lynn: Or change yours, whatever.
Zoey: Or they get in the market, and you decide you have to
move to a different market or expand your market.
Lynn: Right.
All: Price cutting moves.
No discussant mentioned familiar attributive qualities of dance such as

grace, rhythm, or expressiveness. Instead, they stressed awareness of anoth-
er’s motion and the decision to move in response. Like dancers, business
people “have to respond,” “decide to copy,” decide to “sue the shit out
of,” “decide to move to a different market,” or counter with “price cut-
ting moves.”
Offering a different story-based systematic mapping of trade is a dance,
Tony, a marketing executive, ignored the possible correspondence between
specific dance moves and specific business moves altogether. He empha-
sized that dancelike motion depends upon the consent of both dance part-
ners and trade partners:
So, anyway, my notion is that a dance is a shared . . . symmetry of
motion between two entities. You kind of are agreeing on what
you’re doing, even if the girl doesn’t really know where you’re lead-
ing her, you know. And if you don’t dance smoothly together, well,
you’ll step on each other, and you’ll stop dancing—you’ll stop trad-
ing. In other words, if you, if you exceed the rules of engagement,
either with trade or with a dance, you’ll stop doing it, and it’ll no
longer exist. So to me, that’s why trade is a dance.
Although Tony did not note the correspondence between dance moves
and business maneuvers that many other discussants saw, he did map
some specific features (or characters) and link them systematically. For
him, dance partners equated with trading partners, and one partner’s
motion was the cause of the other’s cooperative motion—until, as he pro-
jected in his story, the mutual agreement breaks down and the symmetri-
cal motion ends.
Image-Schematic Mapping and Licensing Stories

More than any other variety of mapping, image-schematic mapping op-
erated tacitly. Yet its operation was easy to infer. Most striking were oc-
casions when discussants grouped similarly structured metaphors to-
gether, readily transferring underlying image schemas from domain to
domain. Tony, who described dance and trade as a “shared symmetry of
motion between two entities,” preceded his schematization of dance and
trade with a tacit acknowledgment of the image-schematic similarity
between business is a joint excursion, business is a two-way street, and
trade is a dance. Responding to another discussant’s high rating of busi-
ness is a joint excursion, he began,
Yeah, like the business is a two-way street, it’s a joint excursion. And
then, trade is a dance, I gave it a five because I believe once you
make contact with [customers], then that’s all you do, for the rest
of your relationship—is you’re dancing with the person you’re bar-
tering with.
After several exchanges, in which discussants agreed with Tony’s point,

and Tony expanded his approval of business is a two-way street to include
all travel metaphors, Tony specified what it was he saw in common among
these metaphors: exchange. “But each encounter is a, a dance, between
ex—a dance of exchanges, continuously. What we’re doing here today is
an exchange of things. Since I didn’t know what this was, I was doing it
as an exchange of friendship with my friend Dave.” It might be the case
that exchange amounts to a feature shared by target and source in busi-
ness is a joint excursion, business is a two-way street, and trade is a dance;
thus, Tony’s explanation could be seen as simple feature mapping in re-
lated metaphors. However, he soon linked “exchange” to “shared sym-
metry of motion between entities”—a description that does not evoke
strong attributive associations but rather divorces the image schema from
attributive elements.
Moreover, the ease with which he associated several metaphors sug-

gests that it was not an equation between types of exchange with their
concomitant features that facilitated Tony’s explanation. That is, it did
not seem that exchanged money equaled exchanged dance steps equaled
exchanged motion on two-way streets but rather that the shape of the
exchange event—cooperative, symmetrical motion—was transferred from
one domain to another, allowing Tony to fill in specific varieties of ex-
change in keeping with conversational or situational prompts. The spe-
cifics cited by Tony ranged from money to dance steps to friendship—
which was not part of the metaphors being discussed at all.
Also striking were image-schematic mappings linked together in con-
ceptual systems, where conceptual metaphors’ image schemas were mu-
tually entailed. Milo defended trade is war not by discussing trade and
war but rather by illustrating his notion of a market as a pie, a common
instance of the conceptual metaphor Markets Are Containers. That is,
for Milo markets were discrete, bounded entities that, like nations, must
be defended:
I thought that I was very original when I sat down with my bosses
years and years ago, and I said to them, “The market is a pie.” [He
drew a simple bird’s-eye view of a pie and divided it into segments.]
The market is a pie. Now, if you’re going to divide it four ways, or
six, or eight, or sixteen, or twenty, thirty-two—it doesn’t make any
difference. It is the same pie. . . . So who’s going to buy my product
is a question of my ability to sell my product better than anybody
else. It’s war.
By asserting the aptness of trade is war and the conceptually entailed con-
tainer metaphors markets are containers and markets are walled-in spaces,
Milo prompted a debate among discussants who also grouped war and con-
tainer metaphors together but disagreed with Milo’s endorsement of them.
What ensued was a debate between licensing stories. Opposing mar-
kets are containers and markets are walled-in spaces, Joan offered a per-
sonal-experience story:
You know, I maybe took [container metaphors] from our side of the
business, for what we do. We work in a very select, narrow field. And
yeah, it’s one of the things that was probably wrong about how we
started out. We should have been broader. I think you always have
to keep looking to figure out where your goods and services can be
used. And where you can expand. And where you can grow.
Milo responded with a news-based story:

I’ll give you a, a good example. Philip Morris. Fifty percent of their
business is not cigarette related business because they discovered that
their market can no longer expand. And, and they are trying to get
away from the businesses that are more lean, probably. So, they are
trying to get away from it. You will find many, many companies who
are expanding into other areas—I don’t know, hundreds of them.
After this exchange of stories, Joan acknowledged that Milo had identi-
fied a situation that can arise in marketing. Jim, her business partner, agreed,
adding, “I think markets do have limits, and some companies manage
to saturate a market, like the cigarette companies.” The possible image-
schematic mappings were comprehended by all. At issue was the relative
correctness of the stories licensing a cluster of trade metaphors that shared
or entailed the container image schema.
Tacit Mappings and Licensing Stories

Explicit explanations of mappings were, of course, an artifact of the fo-
cus group task itself. In natural conversation, metaphoric mappings are
usually assumed. From time to time, however, a focus group became re-
laxed enough to permit what seemed to be authentic conversation about
trade and business metaphors. In these relatively unguarded moments,
stories dominated the talk, stories that both licensed and embedded meta-
phoric mappings.
Once, after the formal focus group task had been completed, I in-
formed a group that my study centered specifically on war metaphors in
trade and business. I asked for some general comments about war meta-
phors that they encounter in their work lives. The discussion that followed
was wide-ranging, covering cultural attitudes toward war, careers, world
markets, specific industries, metaphors in entertainment, attitudes toward
language, and so on. Instead of weighing the merits of specific mappings,
they explored and debated whether any mapping of war onto trade and
business was compatible with both their generational and individual no-
tions about war and business. And they illustrated their points with li-
censing stories.
Mike, a business executive in his forties, opened the general discus-
sion by theorizing that war metaphors make more sense to an older gen-
eration who fought in World War II and Korea and who brought a mili-
tary mentality into the workplace. Soon Mike began to express his own
attitudes toward work and war in the form of a licensing story that de-
scribed a basic change in how businesses operate:
If you take the structure of companies, if you look at the military
organizational chart, and how that worked through the fifties, and,
and the whole concept of if you were a good cog, a good wheel, you
stayed with the company, you did your job, you did what you were
told, you’d retire from that company with a nice package. I mean,
that whole thing’s been turned upside down. It just doesn’t exist
anymore.
Mike’s notion of how business works today was incompatible with mili-
tary metaphors. It rejected a conceptual blend of metaphors: companies
compete in a warlike manner (Trade Is War); companies, therefore, need
to be structured in an orderly way, like armies and machines (Armies Are
Machines; Companies Are Machines); machinelike organizations are
organized hierarchically (verticality image schema). In rejecting this con-
ceptual blend, he also rejected some feature mappings: workers corre-
spond with cogs or wheels in the machine.
But his story was about human agency. That is, according to Mike’s
licensing story, when the World War II generation began to retire, the
structure of business changed. Consequently, business people began to
behave differently, especially younger business people:
But the military—I see it in our company all the time—the older guys
are terrified of conflict with, with people in positions of power that
are higher than theirs. The other guys [younger guys]—they’ll have
conflict all the time. But they expect a more fluid life in the first place.
It is significant that Mike generalized his view of how business works to

how the world works. He rejected militarylike orderliness in business and
in life overall—and this story of how the world works inflected his un-
derstanding of Trade Is War in its many venues and variations.
Later in the conversation, he told a story of international trade that
he saw as incompatible with Trade Is War and its entailed container met-
aphors:
I mean, look, I love this whole concept of buying an American car.
Define that for me. I mean, you see that ad for Honda. Honda says,
“Here’s our car. And it’s all our bumpers from Lexington.” And by
the time you get done with it, the only thing that isn’t American is
the name. And that’s absolutely intentional on the Japanese’ part.
Again, Mike implicitly rejected a conceptual blend that was not licensed
by his story. For Mike, international trade did not have the clearly de-
lineable structure of the military sphere, where containerlike sides act
aggressively toward each other (Trade Is War, Markets Are Containers).
This, of course, might invite us to infer that Mike rejected Trade Is War
simply because of an incompatibility of image schemas. At root, though,
it was not image schemas that drove his assessment of metaphoric apt-
ness. He was perfectly capable of comprehending business and trade as
belligerent, competitive activity between discrete sides, as his ascription
of this view to an older generation shows. But his narratively expressed
(probably narratively constituted) construals of external circumstances
belied the metaphors—and thus made them inapt.
Mike’s licensing stories were challenged by Brian, who was willing to
see at least some parts of trade and business as adversarial. For example,
he commented, “I look at something more like the apparel market, where

they haven’t, where dollars aren’t—even international finance, where it
is war, where somebody’s got to lose. If you win, somebody’s got to lose.”
Brian’s rebuttal not only comported with an oppositional image schema,
it acted as a brief how all business works story. That is, Brian did not of-
fer his observation in order to cite a possible exception to Mike’s way of
seeing things but rather offered it as a representative story of how busi-
ness generally works. It was in keeping with his remarks throughout the
focus group, just as when he challenged Mike’s generational theory, say-
ing, “Our generation is just as combative. We just don’t put it in the same
terms is what I think.”
The discussion of Trade Is War did not remain within the boundaries
of the metaphor long before it became a discussion of the nature of not
just business but life, of the history of mankind, of personal experiences,
and so on. (Indeed, narrative licensing often expands beyond the meta-
phor at hand.) As Keith explained both his understanding and rejection
of Trade Is War, he gathered into his explanation language-use issues
paired with a personal life-experience story:
I don’t think—the reason that I don’t agree that it’s like war, and all
that thing, is because it’s not like war. War, people die. I, I think that
you can keep that spirit, that aggressive spirit, harness it and use it
to, to an end in business, and not necessarily go out and maim people.
We used to come off the stage in the band, and we’d say, “Oh, we
killed ’em tonight.” Well, we didn’t actually kill anybody. We didn’t
want to. But we made them like us. And we said we killed them.
Disagreeing, Brian pointed out that, after all, Trade Is War is just the lan-
guage of trade, in the same sense that “we killed them” is just the language
of entertainment. Keith was not satisfied. For him, Trade Is War had res-
onances that—although he clearly understood and could generate plau-
sible mappings—made the metaphor neither true nor apt:
But I’m saying, to take it to today’s terms, in modern terms, that
business is where we’re doing that battle now. So to take that lan-
guage and bring it to business—I don’t think we have to have the
actual feeling of gutting an opponent to say things like that. So that’s
why I think likening to war is bad, but—
Keith’s story of how business works might be characterized equally well

as how business should work. He is an entrepreneur in his late thirties, once
a musician and an artist, who has built a successful company that mar-
kets products throughout the United States and internationally. But be-
cause he chafed at his work experience in companies whose style was ad-
versarial, he rejected the language of war—especially intensified feature
mappings of it such as “maim” and “gutting.” It was the totality of his
thought and experience that combined to create his licensing stories, sto-
ries that licensed trade is a voyage of exploration but not trade is war, and
which were distilled in his rejection of Trade Is War generally. Struggling
perhaps with the clash between his culturally intuitive comprehension of
Trade Is War and his personal opposition to war and conflict, he summed
up his view, saying simply, “Well, we can aspire to something better.”
The Storied Bill Gates

Companies are people. In the case of Microsoft, Inc., the company is Bill
Gates. No corporate symbol has ever been more alternately lauded and
vilified than this Harvard dropout who, along with his partner Paul Allen,
first revolutionized, then monopolized, the computer software industry.
It is no wonder he has been both the beneficiary and victim of stories.
The Internet—Gates’s most recent object of desire—is brimming with
Gates haters, who exchange stories of Microsoft’s nefarious business prac-
tices and derogatory jokes about Gatesian megalomania. Gates is regu-
larly accused of pursuing world domination. One circulating e-mail mes-
sage purports to be a Microsoft press release in which Gates announces
his ownership of the English language. Likewise, Gates is skewered for
over-promising and releasing “buggy” products. One Web site relays a
joke about Bill Gates’s arrival at the pearly gates, where Saint Peter of-
fers him a chance to preview heaven and hell before making his choice.
Heaven is the paved-in-gold, angels-and-harps place of Renaissance paint-
ings. Hell is a Caribbean vacation spot. Gates chooses hell. A week later
Saint Peter visits hell, where the bespectacled software mogul is being
singed with hellfire and pricked with Satanic pitchforks. “You lied to me!”
Gates cries out. “Nice demo, huh?” Saint Peter replies.
Gates may be frequently demonized by press and public. But he is at
least equally admired for his intelligence, his enthusiasm for his products,
his reworking of corporate culture—his success. In a sense, Bill Gates may
be corporate America’s Richard Nixon. The verdict is in for Nixon: he
is remembered more for Watergate than for opening China. But for Bill
Gates, it remains to be seen whether he will be remembered for uncom-
mon success or for unscrupulous business tactics. In other words, will
he be remembered for his commercial journey or for his commercial war?
It is currently under rhetorical consideration.
Bill Gates’s public image is enmeshed in the rhetoric that constitutes
Trade Is War—or, more properly, the related metaphor Business Is War.1
The Bill Gates debate parallels the conversation of Business Is War—it is
the same in constitution and character. That is, in the discourse of busi-
ness, the question is unsettled whether business really is war or whether
it really is peace, friendship, journeying, and the like. But the rhetorical
exchange is not simply a matter of shouts from stubbornly opposing sides.
It is a matter of opposing sides arguing plausible positions and leaving

open the possibility of persuasion, without which there would be no real
debate, no conversation. In the same way, Bill Gates’s public image is made
up of two plausible components, one that is crystallized largely in the
metaphor Business Is War, the other largely in the metaphor Business Is
A Journey.
These metaphors are licensed by stories that are circulated on the In-
ternet, in journalistic articles, and in nonfiction books. By looking at some
of these stories, we can see the relation between metaphors and stories
from a different perspective than in the focus groups. In discourse as it
occurs naturally, there is no obvious sequential relation between meta-
phors and stories. That is, speakers and writers do not necessarily encoun-
ter a metaphor and consequently seek stories to either bear out or con-
tradict the metaphor’s aptness. Nor do speakers and writers necessarily
encounter stories and then recruit compatible metaphors. Instead, there
is a simultaneous dynamism to the rhetorical environment. Stories sug-
gest metaphors; metaphors are bolstered by stories. Thus, what fixes the
relation between them is not what comes first—a chicken or egg conun-
drum—but what role each plays.
Metaphors make coherence. They emphasize feature matches, system-
atic correspondences, and image-schematic correspondences, as well as
likely inferences from all of these things. These mappings are almost al-
ways implicated in metaphor systems and conversations that have a rhe-
torical and cultural resonance. Metaphors, therefore, crystallize rhetori-
cal positions. When Bill Gates is metaphorized as a commanding general,
and Microsoft his attacking army, we not only comprehend an abstract
hostile-action image schema, we also infer what kind of business people
make up Microsoft, what they are likely to do in the future, whether they
can be trusted, whether their actions will ultimately benefit us, and so on.
Because they express and index standard ideas, stories may also crys-
tallize rhetorical positions. But they also function in an evidentiary way.
Stories are more than sense-making devices: they are proof. True, some
stories prove things more directly than others. For instance, fables are
self-consciously fictional, but they are nonetheless taken up as evidence
of the way the world actually works because they index parallel nonfic-
tional narratives, which inductively represent the actually functioning
world. As I saw in one focus group, the fable of David and Goliath in-
dexes actual events such as the triumph of small computer companies over
IBM. In the case of Bill Gates, most stories are biographical—presented
as factual, even though some “biographical” stories must certainly be
apocryphal. Some of these stories license Gates as Business Warrior.
Others license Gates as Business Journeyer. Taken together, they create
a contradictory—which is not to say incoherent—account of Gates’s char-
acter, actions, and intentions.
Gates as Business Journeyer

Bill Gates has been profiled in many a magazine, featured on television
news programs, and fleshed out in several biographies. Stories about
Gates are unquestionably plentiful enough and well-known enough to
license some crystallizing metaphors. But not every Gates story licenses
a metaphor. Biographies and profiles have generic requirements; thus, we
can expect the customary recountings of Gates’s childhood hobbies, his
family life, and his personal quirks. These are not necessarily the stories
that license important Gatesian metaphors. The stories that license Gates
as Business Journeyer reveal Gates’s character and practices as a business
person. They explain his success. While they may not always directly ex-
press Business Is A Journey, they nonetheless characterize Gates as some-
one whose personality, beliefs, and desires are consistent with a business
journeyer. That is, while Business Is A Journey is a cultural mainstay,
available to be ascribed to any business person, we need a collection of
evidentiary narratives if the ascription to Gates is to be persuasive.
Business journeys are mainly considered to be commendable. They are
taken by people who begin their road to success with limited resources
and through talent, hard work, vision, and good intentions arrive at a
prosperous end: a financial reward that is not so much a gratification of
the journeyer’s desire for money as it is a consequence of his or her per-
sonal virtue. To be sure, all lives are journeys. Some may be commend-
able and others not. Some people follow the road to hell. But the meta-
phor Business Is A Journey is almost always applied to those whom we
admire. Therefore, the stories that license Business Is A Journey recount
the journeyer’s commendable acts.
Bill Gates’s aggregate public biography is replete with stories that li-
cense Gates as Business Journeyer. He is depicted as a talent, a hard
worker, a visionary, a public benefactor—all of the things that make up
a good journeyer. Given the desirability of these qualities, it is not sur-
prising that Gates tells many of these stories about himself. Likewise, it
is not unpredictable that one of his most comprehensive statements about
his business accomplishments and future plans is titled The Road Ahead.
His preferred public face is that of the business journeyer, the successful
businessman whose prosperity is really to others’ benefit and has not come,
unjustly, at others’ expense.
Talent Stories. Like all heroes, business journeyers have more than
ordinary abilities. This high talent comports with Business Is A Journey
because business journeys progress toward a success that is commend-
ably attained. It is easy to make a case for Bill Gates’s uncommon abili-
ties and their connection to his business success. The stories that license
Gates as Business Journeyer are not false—better that they are not. Typi-
cally, biographies begin with tales of his early intellectual accomplish-
ments: memorizing the Sermon on the Mount on a short car trip; scoring
a perfect 1600 on the Scholastic Aptitude Test; understanding the intrica-
cies of computers as a freshman in high school. That there is plentiful nar-
rative evidence of Gates’s high intelligence is beyond doubt. What makes
these narratives licensing stories that apply to Gates as Business Journeyer
is that they characterize Gates as a business person. The childhood talents
augur the talents that will someday bring him wealth and prominence.
In 1984, when Microsoft first reached distinction in the nascent per-
sonal computer software industry, Time featured Bill Gates on its cover.
Inside, in a sidebar to an article about the new importance of software,
Time profiles Gates, emphasizing the remarkable talent that made his
journey a success (Moritz). It tells of an important high school accom-
plishment, Gates’s creation of a class-scheduling program for the private
school he attended. It tells that his talent wasn’t just for computers but
for business, relating one of the best-known Gates fables:
While he was working as a congressional page in 1972, he and a
friend snapped up 5000 McGovern-Eagleton campaign buttons for
a nickel each just after South Dakota’s George McGovern dumped
Missouri Senator Thomas Eagleton from the Democratic ticket. They
later sold the scarce mementos for as much as $25 each.
These talent stories lead to the unsurprising conclusion that Gates’s busi-
ness journey has been a successful one. The article ends by describing Gates
hunched over his IBM PC in his $750,000 house, where the CEO of Mi-
crosoft spends his evenings working. The final sentence intones, “It’s been
a long way from McGovern buttons” (emphasis added).
Not all talent stories are followed immediately by a re-envoicement
of Business Is A Journey. But it would be a mistake always to expect an
obvious pairing of licensing story and licensed metaphor. The discourse
of business is large and repetitious, and the people who participate in it
have good memories for the elements that matter to them. When we
encounter instances of Business Is A Journey, in order to judge the apt-
ness of the metaphor, we must either conjecture what licensing stories
might be available or draw upon relevant knowledge. In Gates’s case, peo-
ple interested in business have at least a few talent stories readily avail-
able to them.
Visionary Stories. Better known, perhaps, than stories of Gates’s per-
sonal talents are stories of his ability to predict the future accurately. In
a 1995 interview with Fortune, Gates and one-time partner Paul Allen
reminisce about their early vision, which was really an ability to look at
a current trend and extrapolate future events from it:
Allen: I remember having a pizza at Shakey’s in Vancouver,
Washington, in 1973, and talking about the fact that eventu-
ally everyone is going to be online and have access to newspa-

pers and stuff and wouldn’t people be willing to pay for
information on a computer terminal.
Gates: Yeah, we were also fascinated by dedicated word proces-
sors from Wang, because we believed that general-purpose
machines could do that just as well. That’s why, when it came
time to design the keyboard for the IBM PC, we put the funny
Wang character set on it—you know, smiley faces and boxes
and stuff. We were thinking we’d like to do a clone of Wang
word-processing someday. (Schlender 70)
Their vision story comports well with Business Is A Journey. When we

travel a path, we look forward. Talented business people see farther and
more clearly than others and, therefore, succeed. The less talented are sur-
prised by what’s down the road and, therefore, fail. Very likely, Gates and
Allen thought of doing a Wang clone down the road.
The importance of seeing down the road is exemplified dramatically
in the story of Gates and Allen’s first glimpse of the personal computer.
While Bill Gates was attending Harvard, Paul Allen saw in Popular Elec-
tronics the first personal computer: the MITS Altair, a rudimentary ma-
chine made in a storefront shop in Albuquerque, New Mexico. Allen, a
Shakespeare aficionado, showed the photo to Gates, declared that their
vision of the future was at hand, and urged Gates to pursue it. He quoted
an instance of Life Is A Journey from the bard himself:
There is a tide in the affairs of men, which, taken at the flood, leads
on to fortune. Omitted all the voyage of their life is bound in shal-
lows and in miseries. On such a full sea are we now afloat, and we
must take the current when it serves, or lose our ventures. (Wallace
and Erickson 67)
Even more significant than Allen’s long-ago re-envoicement of Life Is A

Journey is the way Allen, Gates, and their admirers continue to craft the
story of Microsoft’s success in visionary terms. In their Fortune interview,
Allen and Gates share several tales of their accurately guessing from cur-
rent developments what would occur in the future: In 1971, they read
about the Intel 4004 chip and predicted a faster, world-altering chip to
come; in 1980, they licensed MS-DOS to IBM, predicting that Microsoft’s
larger success would come with clones of the IBM PC; today, Gates sees
the Internet as the “seed corn” of many products to come.
So important are these seeing-down-the-road stories to constructing
Gates’s public image that he makes them the main emphasis of his book,
The Road Ahead. In the second edition, he confesses his failure as a vi-
sionary with respect to the Internet but plays a game of visionary catch-
up. He says that when the Internet became too important to ignore, Mi-
crosoft was “surprised, fascinated, and pleased” that people “would
endure a lot more in the way of shortcomings than we had expected” (xi).
Then, exercising a kind of retrospective forward vision, he remarks:
All it had taken was for modems to get fast enough, communications
switches to get cheap enough, PCs to get popular and powerful
enough, and content of the Internet’s World Wide Web to get rich
enough, and there was no turning back. I can’t tell you exactly when
this point-of-no-return was reached, but by late 1995 we had crossed
the threshold. (xi, emphasis added)
Now, having sufficiently updated his vision, Gates says that Microsoft is
almost entirely focused on the Internet—that it is the main technology
on the road ahead.
Hard Work Stories. Talent and vision are good things, of course. But
an indispensable part of what makes a business hero in U.S. culture is hard
work. Stories of hard work are not so easily overlaid upon the journey-
ing image schema as intelligence and vision. Directly, hard work has more
to do with the Business Is Building metaphor. Businesses build vendor re-
lationships, a customer base, an organization—a business. This building
has less to do with the serendipity of talent and vision than with up-by-
the-bootstraps effort. Nonetheless, hard work stories license Business Is
A Journey because journeyers are also builders: Business Is A Journey and
Business Is Building are companion metaphors that combine to charac-
terize worthy businesses and worthy business people.
Stories of Bill Gates the indefatigable worker are numerous and prom-
inent. As a young programmer, he is said to have worked several-day
stretches, falling asleep next to his computer only to resume when he
awakened. The fledgling Microsoft was peopled with “hard-core” pro-
grammers who worked day and night (quite literally), swilling Coke and
pizza, breaking only for an occasional movie. Tales of Microsoft’s recent
work environment depict the same work-till-you-drop atmosphere, top
to bottom. When Paul Allen considered returning to Microsoft after a
bout with Hodgkin’s disease, he concluded he could not work at Micro-
soft’s pace. As Gates puts it in Fortune, “There was no part-time way to
come back to Microsoft. If you were going to be there, you were really
going to work hard. We all knew that. It’s still that way” (Schlender 78).
Good-Intention Stories. As important as making a profit is to Ameri-
can culture, the profit motive can be suspect. Even the most committed
American capitalist is likely to decry those who are “just out to make a
buck,” people and businesses who make money in unscrupulous ways.
One of the main ways to offset the negative side of the profit motive is to
claim that its risks are counterbalanced by its benefits—to say that self-
interest ultimately accrues to the public interest. Free-market economists
such as Milton Friedman have argued this point in a scholarly way, but
it is also a commonplace idea. Thomas Edison may have wanted to get
rich on his inventions, but the rest of us are well-served by his light bulb,
his phonograph, his movie camera. Similarly, Bill Gates and his propo-
nents rhetorically offset the huge profits of Microsoft by emphasizing the
public benefits of Microsoft products.
This offsetting strategy is best seen when Gates is accused of preda-
tory business practices. When the federal government denounces Micro-
soft for anticompetitive and unfair tactics, Gates answers:
Innovation is part of the process of building a better operating sys-
tem. The heart of this dispute is that the Justice Department wants
to make it illegal for us to be able to put new functions into our oper-
ating system. The only right we’ve asked for is to be able to listen to
customers and add new capabilities based on that input. Was putting
a graphical interface in Windows a good thing? Font management?
File-system management? I think so. (Isaacson, “Exclusive” 58)
The stories of Gates’s providing the public with new and affordable tech-
nology are incontrovertible. Perhaps that is why, even as Gates’s public
image has declined, a level of acceptance of Gates as Business Journeyer
remains intact. The rhetoric of business permits us both to view business
as war and as a journey, to view customers as friends and also to set about
conquering markets, to see commerce as a peaceful activity and also to
approach it with a warlike spirit. The conversation of metaphors is not
constituted by incompatible ideas but rather by opposing complements.
Gates the Business Warrior

Gates’s public image is currently more warrior than journeyer. This is
probably the result of several factors. First, Gates’s success and power
have become intimidating. After Microsoft’s initial public offering, Gates
became a multibillionaire, and nothing draws criticism like success. Sec-
ond, the computer software market have begun to mature. No longer is
the market unsure about what operating system and software packages
will dominate. If business is war, Microsoft is the victor. This market
dominance has spawned a host of Gates critics—competitors—who as-
cribe Business Is War and other violent metaphors to him. Third, there
is an inconsistency between Gates’s public journeyer image and Gates’s
in-company warrior image.
It is common to read such comments as this from U.S. News and World
Report: Explaining the Justice Department’s zeal in pursuing an antitrust
suit against Microsoft, the magazine notes, “When Microsoft executives
are widely quoted talking about how they intend to attack and destroy
rivals such as Sun Microsystems, some antitrust experts believe they are
giving ammunition to the [antitrust] enforcers” (Holstein, Mitchell, and
Vogelstein 26, emphasis added). When Gates plans to sell PC banking soft-
ware, the headline in United States Banker reads, “Look out home bank-
ing, here comes William the Conqueror,” and the lead invokes World War
II: “Thursday, October 13, 1994, may never be known as banking’s Pearl
Harbor, but it’s already pretty infamous. It was on that day that Microsoft
Corp. Chairman Bill Gates announced his $1.5 billion acquisition of Intuit
Inc., publisher of the leading home banking software” (Radigan 22). Twelve
years after he made the cover of Time, Gates appears again on Time’s cov-
er, now over the headline, “Whose web will it be? He conquered the com-
puter world. Now he wants the Internet. If Microsoft overwhelms Net-
scape, Bill Gates could rule the Information age” (16 September 1996).
Inside, a full-page drawing shows Gates on top of a tank, a three-star gen-
eral’s helmet on his head, a cigar clamped in his sneering mouth.
These metaphoric crystallizations are licensed by stories that contra-
dict the journeyer stories. Like the journeyer stories, the warrior stories
are grounded in factual accounts of a business person whose historical
behavior and values suggest one to whom Business Is War may be justly
ascribed. Business warriors are overly competitive; they take more than
ordinary risks in order to compete; they lie; and while they may succeed
in the end, the nature of this success is the satisfaction of greed. Stories
that license Gates as Business Warrior abound.
Competition Stories. Peruse any recent account of Bill Gates and sto-
ries of his competitive obsession will crop up again and again. These sto-
ries are consonant, of course, with the metaphor Business Is A Game.
However, as we have seen, game metaphors are pliable. They are readily
attenuated so that they fold into friendship and journeying metaphors.
They are also readily intensified so that they suggest war metaphors. That
is to say, game metaphors have a hologramic quality. Seen from one angle,
they are competitive action in the context of goodwill. Seen from another,
they are competitive action in which winning is everything.
By all accounts, Gates’s competitive urge is fierce, unbridled, even un-
nerving. Like the talent stories, the competition stories are often about
Gates’s formative years. In the 1997 Time cover story, Gates’s father says
that games were a part of the Gates household and that “winning mat-
tered” (Isaacson, “In Search” 47). He describes family getaways at Hood
Canal: “On Saturdays there was tennis tournament, and on Sundays our
Olympics, which were a mixture of games and other activities.” Time notes
that this family tradition was carried on after Microsoft had grown large,
when Gates invited friends and coworkers to the “Microgames.” The con-
nection between Gates’s game-playing and Gates’s business style is direct
enough. For example, after quoting Gates on the ways Microsoft out-com-
petes other companies, Time invokes Business Is A Game this way:
Gates is enjoying this. Intellectual challenges are fun. Games are fun.
Puzzles are fun. Working with smart people is superfun. Others may
see him as ruthless, but for him the competition is like a sport, a blood
sport perhaps, but one played with the same relish as the summer
games at Hood Canal. (Isaacson, “In Search” 56, emphasis added)
There is, indeed, a broad tendency for commentators to note not just
Gates’s love for games but the nature of that love—and therefore to es-
calate Business Is A Game, as Time does with “blood sport.” Biographies
and profiles report that among Gates’s first computer programs was a dig-
ital version of Risk, a game of world domination. Much is made of Gates’s
time at Harvard, where, rather than attend classes, he played marathon
high-stakes poker games with an intensity that bespoke something beyond
ordinary competitiveness. A former roommate is quoted in Hard Drive,
“He had a monomaniacal quality. . . . Perhaps it is silly to compare poker
and Microsoft, but in each case, Bill was sort of deciding where he was
going to put his energy and to hell with what anyone else thought” (Wal-
lace and Erickson 61). The roommate is not silly at all. High-stakes poker,
an intensified instance of Business Is A Game, has more in common with
instances of Business Is War than with many game metaphors. In poker,
consequences are real—not just winning and losing in the abstract but
winning and losing money. Time links the poker metaphor with Business
Is War in their cover article on Gates’s pursuit of the Internet. Next to
Gates’s helmeted portrait, a headline reads, “An epic battle is taking place
between Microsoft and Netscape. Each company wants to be your guide
to the Internet, the key to personal computing in the future. The victor
could earn untold billions; the loser could die. Winner take all” (Ramo
58, emphasis added).
Many stories of Gates’s competitiveness have little to do with games,
but rather to do with personal intensity. Gates’s fast driving has become
legendary, evidenced by stories of customers who have refused to ride to
the airport with him and the story of his receiving two speeding tickets
on the way from Albuquerque to Seattle during Microsoft’s first move,
caught twice by the same police airplane. Similarly, abrasive behavior and
a competitive conversational style is part of Gates lore. The most com-
mon Gatesism: “That’s the stupidest thing I’ve ever heard.” This kind of
competitive intensity—a refusal to be impeded—is more than an inter-
esting character trait; it indicates a negative approach that is not merely
a desire to win. Journeyers want to win for the sake of achievement. War-
riors want to win because they take pleasure in others’ defeat.
Deception Stories. Poker is a game of deception, but it is agreed-upon
deception. Other forms of lying suggest a business person who will deceive
customers and competitors in a warlike fashion. The kind of deceit attrib-
uted to Gates is not of the General Eisenhower variety, the clever duping
of an evil enemy. Instead, he is likened, mainly by competitors, to the evil
enemy itself. At 3Com, a company that once joined forces with Microsoft,
Microsoft’s programmers were known by some as “the Hitler Youth”
(Manes and Andrews 377). And Gates, perhaps inadvertently, has played
into this demonization by quoting Admiral Yamamoto, who, after the
bombing of Pearl Harbor, feared the Japanese had “awakened a sleep-
ing giant.” Gates quoted Yamamoto on 7 December 1995, as he an-
nounced Microsoft’s plans to enter the competition for Internet domi-
nance (Ramo 58). No one—not even the most enthusiastic competitor
—wants to be thought of as Hitler, whose military aggression was enabled
by a series of broken agreements, or Yamamoto, whose most famous op-
eration was a sneak attack.
Gates stories suggest a pattern of lying about matters large and small.
For instance, the biography Gates refutes the story of his making a large
profit on McGovern-Eagleton campaign buttons while a U.S. Senate page,
contradicting numerous aspects of the story Gates told to friends and
reporters. Gates claims to have attended the famous McGovern news
conference in which the candidate pledged “a thousand percent” support
for his soon-to-be-abandoned running mate. But Gates was in Washing-
ton, D.C., and the news conference was in South Dakota. Gates claims
to have sold buttons for ten to twenty-five dollars. But contemporary ad-
vertisements offered buttons for one dollar. Gates claims to have distrib-
uted the buttons through congressional pages, who wore the buttons on
the Senate floor. But campaign buttons are not permitted on the Senate
floor, and former pages do not recall wearing the buttons.
These small lies might be chalked up to insignificant boasting. But
when numerous small deception stories become linked to more signifi-
cant deception-in-business stories, the narrative pattern licenses Gates as
Business Warrior. In a chapter entitled “King of the Hill,” Hard Drive
asserts, “As far as Bill Gates is concerned, business is war. You fight to
win” (Wallace and Erickson 381). It goes on to prove the point by citing
examples of aggressive pricing, personal betrayals, and a series of decep-
tions perpetrated on Microsoft’s corporate partners. John Warnock, chief
executive of Adobe Systems, a leader in font technology, complains that
Gates feigned interest in Adobe’s software but after making a woefully
inadequate offer, teamed up with Apple, Adobe’s largest customer, to
produce competitive software. Alan Kessler, General Manager of 3Com,
complains about a joint marketing venture with Microsoft. 3Com was to
pay a fixed monthly royalty for the right to sell Microsoft networking
software. But when sales were sluggish, and 3Com was paying royalties
on unsold packages, Microsoft took advantage of a contractual loophole
and sold the product directly to customers. Other software development
companies complain that Microsoft routinely enters into talks about joint
ventures, previews software applications, then withdraws from negotia-
tions only to emerge with similar software. The head of one such com-
pany, Paul Grayson, remarks that the only person with fewer friends than
Bill Gates is Saddam Hussein (Wallace and Erickson 381–92).
These and many similar stories may not prove that Gates and Micro-
soft are unscrupulous—after all, all stories have two sides—but they do
give plausibility to Gates as Business Warrior. These deception stories ex-
tend the competition stories by demonstrating a lack of moral restraint
in competitive situations, a valuing of victory over peace and friendship.
But, by themselves, they do not fully characterize a warrior, because they
only describe warlike actions, not a warlike motivation. In business, the
usual warlike motivation is greed.
Greed Stories. In a materialistic way, Bill Gates simply cannot be char-
acterized as greedy. He incongruously combines the possession of vast
wealth with a vast unconcern for money. Even his forty-million-dollar
home, which is fantastically equipped with computer gadgets, says more
about a love of technology than a lust for possessions. Gates’s own assess-
ment is assented to by everyone. Asked about a possible drop in Microsoft
stock, he remarks, “I have an infinite amount of money. I would still order
the same hamburger. Believe me, I’m not thinking about the stock price.”
In fact, the richest man on earth leads an impressively unostentatious life
and works harder than many a hungry newcomer.
The kinds of greed of which Gates may be fairly accused—and that
many stories recount—is a greed for control and attention. Competitors
charge that Gates is not content to succeed in his own, well-earned niche
but is also driven to take other companies’ markets. These stories make
up the factual account of Microsoft’s growth from a two-person start-up,
offering a version of the simple programming language BASIC, to the
licenser of the MS-DOS operating system, to the licenser of the Macin-
tosh-inspired (but Xerox-developed) graphical interface program Windows,
to purveyor of software applications such as word processing, spread-
sheets, and home banking, to creator of a Windows/Internet browser
package and Windows NT for networks—not to mention Microsoft’s
forays into “content” such as the online magazine Slate and MSNBC.
Gates and many others would, no doubt, call this diversified growth a
successful journey. To competitors, and even to many customers who
prefer less concentration of commercial power, the story of Microsoft’s
growth is one of greed for power and position, and it licenses Gates the
Business Warrior.
Metaphor, Story, and Thought

Metaphor and story—though surely not the only factors involved in mak-
ing metaphors meaningful—work together to establish a particular met-
aphor’s rhetorical positioning and, not coincidentally, its truth value. Evi-
dence of this mingling of metaphor and story gives us reason to question
what is ordinarily posited about metaphor. Specifically, the metaphor
chauvinist position mentioned at the outset of this chapter suggests that
when we uncover important metaphors, we reveal the exclusive silent

means through which we comprehend and evaluate the world. But when
we see metaphor as constituted by rhetoric, and when we also see the cru-
cial interaction between metaphor and story, “uncovering” a metaphor
means something quite different. To uncover a metaphor is not to reveal
the tacit underpinning of thought but rather to glimpse a complex process
of evaluation that involves metaphors, stories, and, no doubt, other fig-
ures such as metonymy, synecdoche, chiasmus, and the like. In this sense,
metaphor and story help to co-constitute thought, the means through
which we determine what is real, what is not, what is likely to happen in
the future, what is not, what we should do, and what we should not.
One of the main reasons metaphor and story, separately, have attracted
such interest among scholars in the past few years is that they are in-
creasingly seen as constitutive of thought. But what is meant by “thought”
varies. Many cognitivists seek the rules by which we can simulate or
duplicate human thought, believing—as Bill Gates believes (Isaacson, “In
Search” 47)—that the main difference between human intelligence and
artificial intelligence is that the human mind is carbon rather than sili-
con based. In part, it is this view of the mind that motivates cognitive
experimentation with metaphor. This experimentation assumes an infer-
ence-from-fact model of cognition. That is, presented with the fact of a
given metaphor, experimental participants are assumed to make predict-
able, rule-governed inferences.
However, the kind of truth seeking shown in this chapter belies this
view of the mind. Both metaphor and story are deeply social in their con-
stitution. In turn, the kind of thought evidenced by the integral interac-
tion of particular metaphors and particular stories is more “social” than
“cognitive.” This does not mean that we need to reject the “cognitive
wager” that Raymond Gibbs posits. As I have said, I am also inclined to
believe that language reveals the mind as much as anything can. But we
do need to heed signals from the kind of rhetorical activity that meta-
phor and story jointly reveal. We need to regard cognition as more dis-
tributed than contained, more interpersonal than personal, more com-
munitarian than individual. Of course, a collectivist view of the mind has
been voiced by some. Early in this century, Lev Vygotsky challenged Pia-
get’s cognitive egocentricism, and the Vygotskyian paradigm is gaining
some prominence in rhetorical study that focuses upon how we learn to
write. More recently, Edwin Hutchins offers a radically distributed view
of cognition in Cognition in the Wild, in which he challenges the discrete-
mind model of problem solving in favor of a social cognition model.
In most rhetorical study, commentators pay little attention to the mind
as a cognitive entity, assuming the mind—or thought—to be so distrib-
uted and unpredictable as to be ineffable. Social conventions, on the other
hand, are not linked to cognitive function. But as we begin to integrate

the kinds of observations that can be made in a cognitive paradigm with
the kinds of observations that can be made in a rhetorical, or naturalis-
tic, paradigm, we begin to glimpse a fuller and markedly divergent pic-
ture of what it means to think. Although I reject the notion that carbon
and silicon are all that differs between human thought and computer
processing, I wonder if some recasting of The Mind Is A Computer might
help us to rethink the relationship between metaphor, story, and thought.
Typically, The Mind Is A Computer is instantiated by mapping a single,
discrete computer onto a single, discrete mind. But computers do not work
that way. Rather, stand-alone personal computers are linked by modem
or cable to other computers: personal computers, servers, mainframes.
Sometimes the personal computer processes data—thinks—within its own
space, but just as often it links to other computers that do some of the
processing. And the success of any personal computer, even when the
computer seems to be operating discretely, depends upon its compatibil-
ity with other computers. It may sometimes process “alone,” but it is a
poor computer that processes uniquely.
The communitarian nature of thought goes to the heart of rhetoric and
to the heart of metaphor as rhetorically constituted. We cannot under-
stand the functioning of metaphor unless we take into account the rhe-
torical inflections that influence the way we create, re-envoice, compre-
hend, endorse, and reject metaphors. In other words, what we do with a
metaphor cannot be separate from how the metaphor works. At the same
time, it is impossible to study metaphor—the preeminent figure of speech
lauded by one and all—without at the same time studying other forms
and figures. Metaphor is integrally enmeshed in rhetoric and all that
makes up rhetoric. When we recognize the integral relationship between
metaphor and story, we see more of the way metaphor is constituted. But
I doubt we see it all.
134 Metaphor, Culture, and Community
6
Metaphor, Culture, and Community
Sometimes the news from Washington is not what they say but what
they don’t say: Have you noticed that the Clinton Administration
has stopped bashing Japan? It’s possible, of course, that the White
House has simply been distracted by more urgent matters like the
budget and next year’s elections.
But the true explanation, it seems, was signaled earlier this month
in a speech by Lawrence H. Summers, the Deputy Treasury Secre-
tary. Without quite saying so, he suggested that the sophomoric
notion of trade as war had lost its appeal now that the Japanese
economy has been badly wounded by recession. “Prosperity, unlike
power, is not a zero sum game,” he said.
—Peter Passel, New York Times, 1995
In Metaphors We Live By, Lakoff and Johnson say that conceptual meta-
phors reveal something basic about cultures. They remark:
Try to imagine a culture where arguments are not viewed in terms

of war, where no one wins or loses, where there is no sense of at-
tacking or defending, gaining or losing ground. Imagine a culture
where an argument is viewed as a dance, the participants are seen
as performers, and the goal is to perform in a balanced and aestheti-
cally pleasing way. In such a culture, people would view arguments
differently, experience them differently, carry them out differently,
and talk about them differently. But we would not view them as
arguing at all: they would simply be doing something different. (5)
There is gut-level good sense to the observation that we do not understand

a culture until we understand its metaphors, good sense akin to the cul-
tural anthropologist’s truism that we do not understand a culture until
we understand its jokes. Entrenched metaphors, like jokes, are based up-
on tacitly shared perceptions, the invisible underpinnings of culture. Per-
haps that is why so many commentators so easily agree with Lakoff and
Johnson’s assessment, and why some make even stronger assertions.
Donald Schön, who notes a connection between the stories we tell and
134
Metaphor, Culture, and Community 135
the metaphors we speak, says this about the fragmentation metaphor

prevalent in discussions of social policy:
Under the spell of the metaphor, it appears obvious that fragmenta-
tion is bad and coordination, good. But this sense of obviousness
depends very much on the metaphor remaining tacit. Once we have
constructed the metaphor which generates the problem-setting story,
we can ask, for example, whether the services appropriate to the
present situation are just those which used to be integrated. . . . In
short, we can spell out the metaphor, elaborate the assumptions
which flow from it, and examine their appropriateness in the present
situation. (138, emphasis added)
What is most interesting here is the phrase “under the spell.” When we
think of metaphor as an agenda setter or, more broadly, a basis of culture,
we frequently impute to it the status of enchanting, enthralling power—
as if we are helpless in the face of metaphors.
Similarly, Donald McCloskey points to unexamined metaphor as the
locus of disciplinary nonthinking, if not the source of it:
Self-consciousness about metaphor in economics would be an im-
provement on many counts. Most obviously, unexamined metaphor
is a substitute for thinking—which is a recommendation to exam-
ine the metaphors, not to attempt the impossible by banishing them.
(Rhetoric 81)
He offers the invisible hand, Adam Smith’s famous metaphor, as an exam-

ple, suggesting that it diverts many economists’ attention from the con-
tradictions of capitalist theory. He suggests not just that free-market econ-
omists have not considered whether their metaphor is valid but they have
not confronted the mystical force of metaphor that surreptitiously con-
trols them.
As important as metaphor may be, we should nonetheless be leery of
arguments that ascribe mystical force to it. For example, my evidence sug-
gests it is likely that the invisible hand is licensed by philosophically and
politically motivated stories about capitalism, stories that economists, pol-
icy-makers, and business people can explicitly recount rather easily. More-
over, it seems unlikely that the invisible hand metaphor itself is unexam-
ined. The economic debate that has raged since the Reagan years has made
the invisible hand more fully examined and cross-examined than any
other economic metaphor, with the possible exception of trickle down.
The question, then, is what leads us to attribute such power to meta-
phor. In part, I speculate that metaphor is a kind of linguistic scapegoat.
We need ways of accounting for beliefs that, to some of us, seem unbe-
lievable. To me (and perhaps to McCloskey) it seems impossible to look
at the sometimes heart-wrenching cruelties of capitalism and still insist
on the inevitable benefits of the invisible hand. But we cannot attribute

the persistence of the invisible hand to its being unexamined. I suspect
the invisible hand is used as part of a larger disingenuousness. Hard-line
laissez-faire economists may turn a blind eye toward the market’s bru-
tality, but that does not mean they are blind. Whether or not I am cor-
rect in this, we must nonetheless recognize that laissez-faire economists
do think. They are not helplessly manipulated by the invisible-hand met-
aphor but rather they consciously give it their endorsement. Rhetoric is
thought—thoughtful discussion of matters that have not yet been settled.
If metaphors further thoughtful debate, if they are rhetorically constituted,
then they are not quite the unexamined assumptions that the strong met-
aphor-as-culture view might lead us to believe.
A more productive view is community-inflected metaphor. Schön and
McCloskey hint at this view by locating metaphoric power and invisibility
within disciplinary communities. Their mistake, and indeed the mistake
in much scholarly talk about metaphors, is in the characterization of the
metaphoric power itself. We cannot infer unconsciousness from tacitness.
Important conceptual metaphors operate tacitly exactly because they are
not unconscious. Ask any competent English speaker whether life is a
journey, and you are likely to receive a well-considered, self-aware re-
sponse. Ask an English speaker about metaphors that obtain in his or her
community of competence, and you are likely to receive a well-consid-
ered, self-aware, fine-grained response.
I argue this: Metaphors do reveal culture. But culture is complicated.
It encompasses numerous communities, each of which is a self-conscious
location of rhetorical activity. Thus, we cannot sufficiently analyze a
conceptual metaphor without taking into account the intellectual hab-
its, conventional values, and points of controversy that unite communi-
ties around particular topics and communicative occasions. At the same
time, there is such a thing as a culturally pervasive concept. As Lakoff
and Johnson say, Argument Is War, Life Is A Journey, Happy Is Up, More
Is Up, Ideas Are Food, and other conceptual metaphors are basic con-
stituents of at least some English-speaking cultures. They are pervasive
across communities. This overlap may seem to be irresolvably contradic-
tory, but it is not.
When we marry the conceptual metaphor view to an understanding
of metaphor as rhetorically constituted, we can account for both the way
metaphors are shaped by particular communities and for the way meta-
phoric concepts exert a pervasive cultural influence. In this chapter, I want
to discuss these competing ways of functioning in three ways: First, let
me explain community-inflected metaphor by comparing Trade Is War
with the related metaphor Business Is War. Conceptually, Trade Is War
and Business Is War might be considered one and the same. Indeed, I have
sometimes conflated them in previous chapters, where no theoretical harm

was done. But when we consider the two metaphors in relation to com-
munity habits and interests, we can make important distinctions between
them. Second, let me suggest that the cultural pervasiveness of concep-
tual metaphors is organized by networks of community metaphors. Even
though Trade Is War and Business Is War are concentrated in commu-
nity conversations, we can see their influence in conversations far afield.
In particular, I will discuss conceptual networking in relation to the mar-
ketplace of ideas metaphor. Third, let me apply the idea of metaphor-as-
community to one of the most influential and flawed areas of metaphor
commentary: writing pedagogy. As sophisticated as writing pedagogy has
become, as is shown by the burgeoning field of writing studies, commen-
tary on metaphor ignores some of the most fundamental ideas about writ-
ing and communication. When we understand the relation of metaphors
and community, we can cast aside almost all of what teachers of writing
have told students about metaphor.
Metaphor and Community

Mikhail Bakhtin tells us that written and spoken utterances are always
situated. For him, speech is always constituted by “the concrete utterances
of individual speaking people,” and these utterances are always implicated
in the “chain of speech communication” (“Problem” 69, 71, 93). Similarly,
my argument has been that metaphor is subject to the same forces that
shape and reshape language more generally—that metaphor is fundamen-
tally constituted by concrete utterances that respond to other concrete ut-
terances. However, in making such an argument I have taken certain risks.
Because I have said that we cannot adequately understand metaphors
without examining them as uttered by situated speakers, I have neces-
sarily made certain assumptions about the communities “within” or
“among” which Trade Is War operates: I have posited “the discourse of
trade” without first defining who I mean by the community that enacts
such discourse. In the end, though, it is important to clarify what I have
meant by “a discourse” and to explain how Trade Is War functions in
relation to communities.
Among rhetoricians, writing scholars, and applied linguists, the no-
tion of “discourse community” has become an important component of
nearly all discussion of workplace and student writing. Yet the current pre-
vailing understanding of “discourse community” is the result of a stand-
off between equally valid positions on discourse and community. One
position argues that discourse communities are constitutive of all writ-
ing and talk, that without taking into account situated practices, formal
and informal governance, and shared interests and goals, we cannot fully
realize what makes a text come to be. In this view, community member-
ship is characterized by unique, although perhaps evolving, social conven-
tions and thought. The other position argues that discourse communities
are porously related to multiple, interpenetrated, interanimating discursive
forces and therefore cannot be said to operate discretely. It suggests that
while discourse communities may shape many utterances and texts, we
usually belong to multiple communities, and we always operate in poten-
tially multiple contexts. Thomas Kent calls these opposing positions the
“thick” and “thin,” summarizing,
So—again, generally speaking—we uncover a spectrum of different
uses of the term community; on one end of the spectrum are thick
formulations that depict a community as a determinate and codifiable
social entity, and on the other thin formulations that depict a com-
munity as a relatively indeterminate and uncodifiable sedimentation
of beliefs and desires. (425)
The two positions—the thick and thin formulations—seem to be largely

incompatible. How can a writer or speaker fully realize a truly commu-
nity-based discourse and, at the same time, embody an interanimated dis-
cursive world?
It is no wonder, then, that many theorists and researchers split the baby.
One of the most notable Solomons is James Porter, who recognizes diffi-
culties with various formulations of community and, adopting a Foucaul-
tian approach, defines the discourse community as an attracting space that
both unifies discursive activity and encompasses dynamism and diversity.
Porter uses the example of Magnavox, a corporate setting that is at once
diverse and unified. That is, Porter observes that Magnavox comprises a
network of disciplinary and organizational conventions, as well as inter-
relationships with other companies, other plants, government agencies,
and society at large—all of which combine to forge a writer’s “discur-
sive identity” (106). He writes,
The discourse community here is this network, in all its complexi-
ties. Now this “community” is quite different from Kuhn’s sense of
“paradigm,” because there is more than one paradigm operating
here. Writing within this community is much more complicated than
merely determining a simple set of paradigmatic conventions. This
discourse community has broader and more open borders than Fish’s
“interpretive community” and is much broader than either Kin-
neavy’s sense of “situational context” or Bitzer’s “rhetorical situa-
tion”—both of which vary from discourse to discourse. This dis-
course community is not a nice, neat compartment built by the
accumulation of knowledge from within (Kuhn’s description of “nor-
mal science”). Rather, this discourse community is . . . a network of
intersecting systems, institutions, values, and practices. This discourse
community is not, however, the same as culture; this discourse com-

munity is unstable, changing, dynamic—it is a turbulent, chaotic
system that nevertheless operates with some kind of regularity. The
discourse community here is a “strange attractor”—a force field
providing a unity for an entire set of dispersed practices. (107)
A disintegrated integration. A coherent incoherence. A container that is

not too particular about containing. Yet all of this is not so contradictory
as it may sound. Everything that is contained in one way is also integrated
in other ways.
Porter—and, for that matter, almost everyone who writes about dis-
course community—gets the question right. How do we make sense of
the social world that motivates writing, and at the same time make sense
of so finite an artifact as a text? To do that, I suggest, we have to make
sense of broadly shared concepts and the way they are rhetorically in-
flected by discourse communities. It seems to me both viable and illumi-
nating to see discursive coherences based upon geographies, organizations,
activities, and topics and to call these coherences communities. No com-
munity is hermetic; members always bring with them a variety of influ-
ences. But all communities, once they reach a critical mass of coherence,
always influence how members speak. In the terminology of this book,
communities have standard rhetorical etiquettes, and community mem-
bers contribute utterances that both adhere to the etiquette and that are
inflected by a variety of influences.
The community I have posited in studying Trade Is War is “the dis-
course of trade.” It coheres mainly around the topic of trade. Not all who
speak about trade are actively involved in trade between nations, or even
trade on a smaller scale. Journalists, for example, merely comment upon
trade without themselves trading. Government officials make and imple-
ment trade policies without themselves trading. Corporate spokespeople
are directly involved in trading but must influence journalists and gov-
ernment officials in order to create a favorable atmosphere. Thus, the topic
attracts speakers and writers from a range of interrelated activities, each
of whom understands others’ roles. It is not a case, then, of mere adja-
cency of divergent discourses but rather a convergence of discursive in-
fluences into one. When a journalist, a government official, or a corporate
spokesperson contributes to the discourse of trade, that contribution is
informally governed by what I have called a rhetorical etiquette. With re-
spect to important metaphors, each follows the same guidelines for claim-
ing, ascribing, intensifying, and attenuating. Each understands in much
the same way the rhetorical consequences of violating this etiquette.
Moreover, the etiquette inheres not to a formal metaphor—its image-
schematic mappings and entailments—but to the community within
which the metaphor operates. We can see this in the contrast between the
metaphor Trade Is War, a metaphor that is topically relevant to inter-

national commerce, and Business Is War, a first cousin of Trade Is War
that is topically relevant to business-versus-business competition. Business
Is War is conceptually similar to Trade Is War. It entails the same image
schema and converses often with the same metaphors and concepts. But
it follows a different etiquette. It does so largely because the rhetorical
consequences of Business Is War are far different from Trade Is War.
To the degree that some cultural regularity is attached to a very broad
metaphoric grouping—say, all commercial war metaphors—the regularity
acts as a general guide. Nevertheless, it is not controlling. That is, a cul-
tural reticence about war metaphors may always require some way of
addressing rhetorical risk, but how that risk is managed depends on com-
munity habits, agreements, controversies, awarenesses. Managing the risk
does not necessarily mean avoiding or ascribing the metaphor. We are not
innocent utterers. There is always communicative cunning—commonplace
rhetorical shrewdness—to be accounted for, a phenomenon that makes
it difficult for us to distinguish re-envoicement from endorsement. That
is, even when a risky metaphor is not defensively ascribed, there is always
a potential gap between what we say and what we endorse. Not only may
we ingenuously re-envoice entrenched metaphors, embracing their im-
plications, but also we may cunningly re-envoice them, distancing our-
selves from them and denying their most disturbing implications.
This cunning can produce what seem to be contradictions. If, for in-
stance, we ask people whether or not the metaphoric sentence trade is
war is true, it is entirely possible for someone to respond that it is not—
and to express that objection in language that re-envoices Business Is War.
One focus group discussant, Jim, consistently objected to commercial war
metaphors. He argued, with conviction, that the image of killing busi-
ness opponents misrepresented the way business works because business
is more gamelike: in business, we live to play another day. Yet when Jim
expressed a liking for business is international peace negotiations, which
he saw as inconsistent with war metaphors, he embedded Business Is War
in his endorsement: “This time France is our ally; this time France is our
enemy. You know, that sort of thing. Business is a lot like that.” If we
give any weight at all to what Jim has repeatedly said he endorses, we
cannot assume his use of enemy represents a deeply held belief that busi-
ness really is war, after all. Yet there it is. He said it.
It would not be entirely mistaken to chalk up these kinds of apparent
contradictions to ordinary carelessness. Rhetorical etiquettes are not exe-
cuted perfectly, and we all, much as it embarrasses us, contradict ourselves
from time to time. But taking the larger conversation into account, weigh-
ing its persistent regularities more heavily than its inevitable glitches, we
can arrive at a more telling explanation, such as the one that emerged in
a focus group exchange: Russell countered Keith’s objection to Business

Is War with a pithy distinction between what we say and what we endorse.
He simply observed, “Yeah, but we’re talking about language here.” In
other words, we are not always willing to be accountable for the implica-
tions of our metaphors. Whether we have the courage of our metaphors
has much to do with discourse communities.
Trade Is War and Business Is War have associated etiquettes that handle
the endorsement problem differently. They are metaphors for different com-
munities. As closely associated as trade is with business, the “discourse of
trade” is not identical to related discourses of industrial sales, or account-
ing, or shopping, or other subsets of commercial talk. The metaphors that
operate in these discourses are too similar to support an analysis that treats
these discursive locations as conceptually discrete. But the rhetorical pat-
terns of claiming, ascribing, attenuating, and intensifying vary.
Consider this voice-over from a television commercial. The visual is
soldiers in Civil War uniforms loading antique rifles. The sound bed is
drum and fife music punctuated with gunfire. A deep-voiced, high-energy
announcer declares:
The two biggest new car dealers in Champaign County have declared
a price war! Hill Ford and Sullivan Chevrolet have fired the first
shots! It’s the North versus the South! . . . This will be a fight for
sales leadership! . . . This will absolutely be the biggest automotive
sales war this county has ever seen! Hill Ford and Sullivan Chevrolet!
The battle has begun! (Hill Ford)
Some of the elements found in Trade Is War are no doubt a part of this
extended war metaphor. It depends upon a hostile-action image schema,
one side opposing another, Hill Ford versus Sullivan Chevrolet, North ver-
sus South. It entails the container image schema, configuring the metaphor-
ical battleground as a contested space, “this county.” It uses some of the
conventional language of Trade Is War: “fight,” “fired,” “the first shots,”
“battle.” It is relatively attenuated, drawing images from the antiquated
warfare of the Civil War, just as Trade Is War often harks back to blun-
derbusses and cannons and rapiers.
Yet, for all these similarities, a key difference is undeniable. One can
hardly imagine a heartier claiming of the language of war than is heard
in this commercial. Why is it acceptable, on the one hand, to declare a sales
war on a competing car dealership and unacceptable, on the other, to de-
clare a trade war on a competing country such as Japan or China—or,
for that matter, the European Community? Why is it a breach of rhetorical
etiquette to claim Trade Is War and not a breach of rhetorical etiquette
to claim Business Is War? In one sense, the answer is fairly obvious. We
have seen historically that trade wars precede shooting wars—for ex-
ample, the period of intense trade friction that preceded World War II.
Even if we believe the consequences of a price war between car dealerships
could be severe, measured perhaps in lost jobs, they are not as great as for
a shooting war. But compelling as this distinction may be, we also have
to take into account communicative cunning.
When Hill Ford and Sullivan Chevrolet jointly announce their “price
war,” it is, of course, contrived—and tolerably clever in the way that it
plays upon the traditional rivalry between Ford and Chevrolet. The com-
peting dealerships perhaps intend to drop prices in order to stimulate sales.
Nonetheless, they obviously mean for this “war” to be mutually benefi-
cial. Thus, when they hype their products using the language of war, they
do not really mean that they are undertaking, even figuratively, a fight
to the death. In this sense, the ad’s apparent claiming of Business Is War
does not amount to an endorsement at all—not as a deeply held philoso-
phy. This is not to say that the authors of this ad necessarily reject Busi-
ness Is War as an apt metaphor, but only to say that the ad does not amount
to an endorsement of its full ramifications. The subtext of the ad is simi-
lar to the focus group discussant’s assessment of war metaphors—it is only
language. In fact, the ad’s playfulness depends on our recognition that it
is only language.
Of course, it is not impossible to utter Trade Is War cunningly in the
discourse of trade. Asked about the bellicose metaphor in the title of his
book Head to Head: The Coming Economic Battle among Japan, Eu-
rope, and America, Lester Thurow was quick to disassociate himself from
it. The publisher, he informed me, had chosen the title—and had chosen
yet a more objectionable one for foreign editions: War for the 21st Cen-
tury (Letter). At the same time, Thurow’s conceptual, philosophical, and
rhetorical repertoire accommodates both a sincere objection to war meta-
phors and a habitual use of them to describe economic activity. It was
presumably Thurow, not his publisher, who wrote, “Americans cannot
strengthen their economic team unless the president is first willing to tell
them the news from the economic battlefields is very bad” (Head 273,
emphasis added).
I see no reason not to believe Thurow’s regular protestations against
war metaphors; his views are articulated at length, well considered, and
consistent. Thus, if Thurow uses Trade Is War in contradiction to his fun-
damentally globalist trajectory, he must be using it as only language. His
metaphors sometimes represent his endorsements—as he insists his game
metaphors do. Sometimes, though, they do not—as he insists his war met-
aphors do not. Indeed, in an interview, Thurow acknowledges criticisms
of his war metaphors by bracketing them off with the remark: “I sup-
pose I was saying, ‘Hey, I’m going to use a few of these war metaphors,
but don’t take them literally.’”
When Thurow is serious about his trade metaphors, he tends to fol-

low, consciously or unconsciously, the standard rhetorical etiquette that
permeates the discourse of trade. Note the forceful ascription when, de-
scribing Japanese business as a place where market share is valued more
highly than profitability, Thurow writes,
One hears differences in motivation in the very language of conver-

sation. The average Japanese employee loves to tell you how he
works for a company with the biggest market share in its industry.
He or she will even take pride in having the third-largest market
share—in being a soldier in the third most powerful warlord in the
industry. (142, emphasis added)
Similarly, of the old Soviet command economy, he writes, “Basically plant

managers were army officers. Converting a military mentality into a mar-
ket mentality is not easy” (Head 99). For Thurow, when the Japanese see
trade as war, it is a threat; when the Soviets see it as war, it is a liability;
but in any case, the war metaphor belongs to someone else—to the Japa-
nese, the Russians, the Germans, the French, and perhaps to others. When
we see trade as war, though, it is fanciful, decorative, not serious.
We do need to take some care accepting the claims writers and speak-
ers make. Like all claims, the only language claim can be suspect. We may
have no special reason to disbelieve Thurow when he says his war meta-
phors do not represent his beliefs, but we do have reason to disbelieve peo-
ple who use the word nigger—even if they claim the word does not rep-
resent their beliefs. At the same time, we have to apply a different standard
to the only language claim when this word is used by a Ku Klux Klansman
than when it is used by an African American rap artist. It is difficult to
argue that this word—because it is so very inflammatory—is ever really
only language, but it nonetheless embodies varying personal, political,
and philosophical beliefs, depending upon who says it. The same is true
of Trade Is War and Business Is War. It is evident from a wide range of
instances that in the discourse of trade Trade Is War is claimed, ascribed,
intensified, and attenuated in an earnest fashion, and that in the discourse
of business Business Is War follows patterns that can only be followed if
some cunning is involved.
This cunning, broadly enacted, is strong evidence that there is a distinct
discourse community associated with business-to-business competition,
a community separate from the discourse of trade. And it is evidence of
a different kind from that usually noted in metaphor study. Typically,
when metaphors have been used to characterize communities, a particu-
lar metaphor is said to have gained a particular ontological hold on a re-
search paradigm. This phenomenon is real enough. But it is not, by itself,
evidence of community thought, for at least two reasons: First, concepts
overlap discourse communities. Many unrelated discoursers have the

ability to see, even to credit, the war image schema and its cultural value
and to evaluate in a grounded way the ramifications of the metaphor; in
the focus groups, this was demonstrated by a teacher, a nurse, a home-
maker, and two musicians. This overlapping points to the broad cultural
operation of commercial war metaphors, not to their importance to par-
ticular discourse communities. Second, all specialized communities adopt
and recast general concepts. Many create concepts that become accepted
broadly. And the only way we can tell what stems from culture and what
from a discourse community is to note the distinct etiquette a discourse
community insists upon. These distinct etiquettes are evidence of tacit as-
sumptions, the unspoken but articulable rules that constrain what can be
said—how rhetoric is enacted.
Trade Is War and Business Is War do share the same kinds of cultural
endorsements. The cultural value of commercial war metaphors is the same
and, when asked, both trade discoursers and business discoursers, who
are generally free-market globalists, tend to condemn commercial war
metaphors. This conceptual and cultural similarity should be no surprise.
In a sense, international trade is local business in the aggregate. Business
people are likely to be attuned to international trade; international trad-
ers are in business. Most economists, however, are careful not to equate
the functioning of individual companies with the functioning of nations.
Thus, when economists and other commentators compare local business
to international trade, the analogy is metaphorical. This is the case when
Adam Smith famously compares international trade deficits with the trade
deficit one might have with the local alehouse (459). It is the same when
George Will compares trade deficits with the trade deficit one might have
with one’s barber (This Week, 20 Feb. 1994). What we have then is a con-
ceptual affinity between local business and international trade, and it shows
up in such things as shared metaphors and similar licensing stories.
But the overlap of concepts and culture does not negate the distinction
between the discourse communities that make Trade Is War and Business
Is War distinct metaphors. As John Swales points out, we often have mul-
tiple affiliations with discourse communities (27–29); thus, the same per-
son may participate in the discourse of trade and the discourse of business,
meeting a different set of expectations in each community. Nonetheless,
the same refusal of endorsement—the rejection of commercial war meta-
phors—underlies two different etiquettes. In trade, most ascribe or avoid
Trade Is War because participants do not want to endorse it. In bus-iness,
it is permissible to seem to claim Business Is War because participants are
tacitly certain it is not being endorsed.
To put it another way, Business Is War is nearly always uttered with
an invisible wink—an unspoken assumption that everyone is in on the
joke. This invisible wink makes possible some remarkably intensified map-
pings of Business Is War, mappings that would have harsh rhetorical con-
sequences for Trade Is War. Marketing Warfare, in print since 1986, lik-
ens marketing to virtually every aspect of war-making from flanking to
guerrilla fighting and does so with little restraint. For instance, it empha-
sizes the principle of force, a dictum reminding us that superior numbers
inflict greater casualties. Under the heading “The Mathematics of a Fire-
fight,” it invokes high-casualty confrontations from wars that remain
fresh in the minds of many readers:
There’s no secret to why the Allies won World War II in Europe.
Where the Germans had two soldiers, we had four. Where they had
four, we had eight. The skill and experience of an enemy who had
practically invented modern warfare and the leadership of men like
Rommel and Von Rundstedt could not change the mathematics of
the battleground. In the military, the numbers are so important that
most armies have an intelligence branch known as the order of battle.
It informs commanders of the size, location, and nature of the op-
posing force. (The case of General William C. Westmoreland against
CBS was based on whether order of battle documents in the Viet-
nam war were falsified or not.) (Ries and Trout 24–25)
Invoking World War II—thus casting business competitors as Nazis—

is vivid. Invoking Vietnam, the blood-soaked debacle, is near shocking.
But, then, it’s only business talk. Marketing Warfare mixes horrendous
war images with liberal doses of game metaphors. It is all in fun. On the
book cover, the authors are pictured smiling broadly as they ride atop a
military vehicle, wearing trench coats, ties, and helmets.
On the other hand, when the etiquette of Business Is War is violated,
the violation has little to do with recklessly intensifying a mapping, but
everything to do with failing to treat the metaphor as only language. As
I mentioned in chapter 1, Dwayne Andreas, former head of Archer Dan-
iels Midland Company, is said to have a motto that configures Business
Is War this way: “The competitor is our friend, and the customer is our
enemy” (Whitacre 55). If Andreas actually said this, it violates the eti-
quette of Business Is War in two ways. First, it reverses our ordinary ex-
pectations for the roles of competitor and customer in the Business Is War
metaphor. Second, and more importantly, it fails to wink. It is not only
language. Andreas’s metaphor, as presented in the press, was used to jus-
tify price fixing and to persuade competitors to become secret conspira-
tors. Indeed, it is not the reversal of the mapping—making customers into
enemies and competitors into friends—that makes this metaphor an egre-
gious violation but that it represents illegal business practices.
ADM whistleblower and later-to-be-convicted embezzler Mark Whit-
acre describes a company that is uncommonly ruthless, not toward its
customers (the so-called enemy) but toward its competitors (the so-called
friends). Whitacre, once an ADM vice president, describes the company’s
way of entering the market for a feed additive called lysine:
Our first strategy with lysine, of course, was to get customers. Now,
if you’re just starting out, and you sell your product at the same price
as the competitors who have been in business 30 years, you’re sim-
ply not going to be competitive. We decided that our first priority
had to be market share and that profitability would come in the sec-
ond phase. That’s the normal practice at ADM. . . . When we started
selling, prices started falling, and there was a tremendous price war.
Lysine went from about $1.30 a pound down to about 60 cents a
pound. (53)
Whitacre describes robber-baron practices in which the competitor is

clearly the enemy, an exaggeration of the standard competitive situation
exemplified by Hill Ford and Sullivan Chevrolet. However, unlike the car
dealerships who only say the competitor is their enemy, ADM behaves
as if it means it. After this initial price war, Whitacre tells of ADM’s ap-
proaching competitors who have been badly harmed by price competi-
tion. ADM allegedly proposes that both they and the competitor stand
to gain by colluding to raise world lysine prices. And it is only then that
ADM calls customers enemies and competitors friends. But this kind of
friendship is coerced at best. For ADM, at least as it is portrayed in its
bad press, business is always war.
Finally, the discourse community that re-envoices Business Is War does
accommodate both diversity and change. While Business Is War has for
quite some time been acceptable in its only language form, it may be be-
coming less so. Some focus group discussions indicated an evolution in
progress. One discussant commented about the likely attitudes toward war
metaphors among his fellow executives:
I find it real interesting that at the table tonight, almost all of us
objected strongly—we gave ones to all the things that were about
conflict. All of the war analogies at the this table were “no.” I’ll bet
you if you ask my dad and my uncle and that age group, the sev-
enty-year-olds, they’d all give them fives. All these ones that you and
I said, “No way. It’s not how it works.” Those are the fives.
In fact, one of the biggest surprises of the focus groups was the persistent
complaint—across groups and genders—about war metaphors in busi-
ness, which seemed to many discussants wrong-headed and passé. This
changeability does not mean that the boundaries we often draw between
communities are invalid. If anything, that these spaces permit internal
change is a confirming fact. When we follow an exemplar such as Trade
Is War, we find important differences in etiquette, in philosophical and
political consequences, and, therefore, in community-based meaning.
Conceptual Networking of Metaphors

Generally speaking, communities are distinguished more by their rhetori-
cal etiquette than by the uniqueness of their concepts. While some con-
cepts attain prominence and are fully explored because of specialized
research or experience, these concepts are often culturally pervasive none-
theless. For example, the mind-as-computer metaphor that has been im-
portant to cognitive science has its roots in the everyday mind-as-machine
and body-as-machine metaphors. What we need, then, is to examine the
ways concepts, especially metaphoric concepts, move from one commu-
nity to another—how they network throughout cultures in various com-
munity inflections.
I have argued that we cannot understand the functioning of Trade Is
War except in light of concretely operating, community-inflected locutions.
But that is not to say that Trade Is War and related metaphors of contain-
ers, games, friendship, and journeying are conceptually isolable. In fact,
they are networked throughout much of English writing and speech. A
good example of this is the metaphor the marketplace of ideas, a meta-
phor that is well known and vigorously debated in venues from the U.S.
Supreme Court to recent public debate over censorship on the Internet.
Usually the marketplace of ideas is phrased in just that locution. To
make sense of the particular locution, we need to recruit Ideas Are Prod-
ucts, the conceptual metaphor that allows us to buy, sell, trade, value, and
cheapen ideas. Some ideas, of course, have a literal economic value, as
any intellectual property attorney can tell you. But this literal concept does
nothing to interfere with the metaphoricity of Ideas Are Products, just as
the literal concept of economic warfare does nothing to interfere with the
metaphoricity of Trade Is War. In fact, the literal adjacency of ideas and
economic activity probably gives Ideas Are Products more cultural im-
portance than it might otherwise have.
On the most basic level, conceptual networking in relation to the
marketplace of ideas means this. We cannot speak of the marketplace of
ideas without recruiting the metaphors and concepts that explain what
a marketplace is. We cannot help but call upon the rhetorically consti-
tuted metaphor system that defines what it means to promote, price, sell,
purchase, warehouse, distribute, merchandise, and, perhaps, go out of
business. Even if none of these particular activities were explicitly mapped
in any instance of Ideas Are Products (although many of them are), we
still would depend upon the general rhetorical value we give to the do-
main of marketing: marketing—doing business—has an ethical dimen-
sion that cannot be ignored. At the same time, the value any writer or
speaker gives to marketing activities varies in accordance with political,
philosophical, economic, and professional considerations. Not every in-
stance of the marketplace of ideas evokes the same model of marketplace.
Likewise, not every instance evokes the same model of idea. This varia-
tion has the potential to disperse what is meant by the marketplace of
ideas, what its consequences might be, and, therefore, whether it is true
or apt.
Nonetheless, the marketplace of ideas has a dominant rhetorical in-
flection. Haig Bosmajian traces the origin of the marketplace of ideas in
U.S. Supreme Court decisions to Oliver Wendell Holmes’s 1919 coining
of the phrase “free trade in ideas,” a measure of “the power of the thought
to get itself accepted in the competition of the market” (13). The model
Holmes has in mind is an ameliorative marketplace, a Smithian market
of unfettered self-interest in which an invisible hand ultimately brings
about benefits for all—a market where competition takes place in a peace-
ful, ever-improving context. Similarly, when the precise locution market-
place of ideas arises in a 1965 opinion penned by William Brennan, it
evokes the Smithian model of the marketplace. When Brennan wrote his
opinion, the Cold War was at its peak, and the Court had decided to end
a postal regulation that required detention of communist propaganda.
Brennan writes, “The dissemination of ideas can accomplish nothing if
otherwise willing addressees are not free to receive and consider them. It
should be a barren marketplace of ideas that had only sellers and no
buyers” (qtd. in Bosmajian 49). Thus, the bellicose framework of cen-
sorship in which competing ideas are threatening is refuted with the peace-
ful framework of the marketplace in which ideas, even bad ones, are ben-
eficial. It is, as Brennan makes clear, a free market.
Brennan’s metaphor makes little sense without conceptual network-
ing, and it networks in a relatively simple fashion. The main metaphor
that opposes Brennan’s political position is the Cold War. In the Cold War
metaphor, all acts that oppose communism are mapped as acts of war.
To censor communist materials is to fight communism. In order to refute
censorship and its affinity with the Cold War, Brennan recruits a well-
understood concept associated with peace. That is, the marketplace of
ideas networks with trade is peace. Furthermore, marketplace suggests
all of the metaphors that constitute trade is peace such as Trade Is A Jour-
ney, Trade Is Friendship, and often Trade Is A Game. Thus, the market-
place of ideas is easily extended in ways consistent with a standard rhe-
torical position favoring peaceful trade: if we operate in the context of a
peaceful marketplace of ideas (Ideas Are Products), in the end (Trade Is
A Journey), we can trust our friends to buy the best ideas (Trade Is Friend-
ship), and the best ideas will win out (Trade Is A Game or Trade Is War
as only language). In short, one way the marketplace of ideas networks
is to recruit an already operating conceptual system that rebuts an op-
posing metaphor.
Not all marketplace of ideas networkings are so straightforward. Other
metaphors and models may be involved, with networkings less obvious.
For example, Bosmajian criticizes some legal scholars for tracing the
marketplace of ideas to John Milton and John Stuart Mill, who use ex-
plicitly military metaphors (53). In Areopagitica, Milton writes of truth
and falsehood grappling in “a free and open encounter” and subsequently
refers to “the wars of Truth.” Likewise, Mill contends that truth can only
be found through “the rough process of combatants fighting under hos-
tile banners.” These metaphors directly recruit Argument Is War, a meta-
phor that might seem incompatible with the marketplace of ideas and its
apparently peaceful, ameliorative implications. But Argument Is War is
a close cousin of Trade Is War, and thus a networking of Argument Is
War and Ideas Are Products is possible.
Argument Is War follows more than one pathway to reach Ideas Are
Products. One pathway is Argument Is War to Argument Is A Game to
Ideas Are Products. That is, argument is not only war but all other com-
petitive activities, sometimes a game. (Arguers put their cards on the table,
punt, strike out.) Since war and game share some image-schematic simi-
larities, the metaphors are partially compatible, even though a shift from
one to the other has important rhetorical consequences. Therefore, while
one writer or speaker may infer Trade Is A Game from the marketplace
of ideas, remaining true to the Smithian model of markets, another writer
or speaker might compatibly intensify the competitive metaphor, shift-
ing upward from Trade Is A Game to Trade Is War.
Another pathway leads more directly from the marketplace of ideas
to Trade Is War. The marketplace of ideas does not necessarily evoke a
Smithian marketplace. Instead, the marketplace might easily be a war-
like space in which victorious ideas vanquish enemylike foes. Argument
Is War’s image schema is isomorphically compatible with Trade Is War,
permitting argument and the marketplace metaphors to map unprob-
lematically. There is some potential for incompatibility, but it is rhetori-
cal: Trade Is War is, in most inflections, incompatible with free market
ideology. However, depending upon values of the time and community,
Trade Is War might support a free marketplace of ideas and form a
strongly claimed metaphor. At some historical moments, the evocation
of Argument Is War, like war itself, might have a positive value, and thus
might be strongly endorsed, just as Milton and Mill endorse Argument
Is War and some later commentators by implication endorse a military
model of the marketplace of ideas. Simply put, if both war and the mar-
ketplace are seen as ameliorative, then the conceptual networking makes
good rhetorical sense.
Conceptual networking permits a multiple linking of metaphors. It
may seem fairly obvious, by now, that the marketplace of ideas (Ideas
Are Products) networks with the various trade metaphors that have been
the subject of this book but less obvious that it networks in other direc-
tions. It may help to imagine a series of complex of pathways and inter-
sections linking the marketplace of ideas and the conceptual metaphor

Ideas Are Products to other metaphors in all directions. For example, Ideas
Are Products is readily connected to The Mind Is A Machine: if the mind
is a machine, and if machines make products, then ideas are products.
Somewhat more complexly, Ideas Are Products connects to The Economy
Is An Organism, the metaphor that gives us healthy economies and fail-
ing economies: if economies need to be healthy, and if healthy economies
produce marketable products, and if some of these products are produced
by intellectual means, then an abundance of good ideas makes for a healthy
economy. In less syllogistic formulation, we might simply say that when
we envision a healthy economy, we imagine the activities of health, among
them thinking of marketable ideas. The networking may sound complex,
but in fact we make these connections quickly and easily. Indeed, we make
them whenever we say such things as an open marketplace of ideas makes
possible a healthy exchange of ideas.
Many networkings are possible, but they are not all rhetorically equal.
The networking of the marketplace of ideas and metaphors of peaceful
commerce is particularly effective rhetorically in the United States because
it calls upon beliefs that are deeply entrenched. The United States is not
a monolith, but for a great majority, individualism and free enterprise are
core values. Still, there may be situations in which the marketplace of ideas
is advantageous even when it is networked with Argument Is War and
Trade Is War. For example, during the Cold War, the threat of military
conflict—in fact, the threat of nuclear annihilation—was unmistakable.
At the same time, no military conflict was in progress. In part, then, the
Cold War was an argument, as exemplified by the famous Khrushchev-
Nixon kitchen debate (Argument Is War). To permit this argumentative
war to proceed in the United States was thought dangerous, perhaps not
as dangerous as nuclear annihilation but still quite threatening. In this
circumstance, the marketplace of ideas has the advantage of being image-
schematically compatible with Argument Is War, but rhetorically cooler.
That is, Argument Is War is less threatening than nuclear war, even if los-
ing the argument has real consequences. The marketplace of ideas further
metaphorizes Argument Is War, so that it is less evocative of actual dan-
gers. Better to have an argument than to fight a nuclear war. Better to buy
and sell ideas than to pound one’s shoe on a podium.
Furthermore, we must consider trade and economic metaphors ten-
dentially. It is possible to evoke a Trade Is War model of the marketplace
of ideas, but the tendency of the metaphor leaves open the possibility of
attenuation. The marketplace of ideas tends to attenuate Argument Is War
because the free market ideology is so prevalent in the United States. This
tendency is brought into relief when we imagine places where the shift
to a market metaphor would not be seen as attenuating at all. Marxists,
for instance, are attuned to the cruelty of the so-called free market, to
what they view as its inherent inequities and inefficiency. Similarly, among
many university educators in the United States and Canada, who are often
self-described liberals and leftists, the metaphor Ideas Are Products car-
ries with it some undesirable implications. If ideas are products, then
teachers and university professors become sellers and their students buy-
ers. An emphasis on the market ultimately selecting the best ideas becomes
secondary to the immediate need for the ideas (as products) to be use-
ful—that is, income-producing—for the student customers. Indeed, the
metaphor is easily literalized when some proponents of Ideas Are Prod-
ucts see tuition as a payment for goods.
No doubt, Ideas Are Products as instantiated by the marketplace of
ideas is as complex as any other metaphor and cannot be uttered com-
petently or understood well without reference to the fine-grained com-
municative circumstances that constitute it. The conceptual networking
I have described adds a layer of complexity to analyses of it, but the con-
ceptual networking of Ideas Are Products is not special. All metaphors
have the potential to network with other metaphors.
Metaphors We Write With

Community-inflected metaphor has important ramifications, not just for
the way we understand metaphoric functioning and how we analyze met-
aphors in rhetorical texts but also for the most common truisms about
metaphor that affect how we teach metaphor as something we write. In
writing research of the past two decades, no concept has been more influ-
ential than the idea of community. The social view of writing has, it seems,
won the day. But the connection between understanding that writing is
a social process and the teaching of particular aspects of writing has not
been well established. Only a few theorists have struggled with the link
between communities and particular texts, notably Norman Fairclough,
who applies broad critical analysis of discourse to specific texts, and Susan
Peck MacDonald, who traces the textual instantiation of community
influence in academic disciplines. Few have considered what, in light of
the social view of writing, we need to say to our students about writing
metaphors.
In writing research, metaphor is treated not so much as something to
be written but as a force outside the writing process. Usually, writing
research assumes what educational research attempts to prove: that meta-
phors are potentially misleading in learning new concepts (e.g., Gentner
and Gentner; Spiro, Feltovich, Coulson, and Anderson). That is, writing
scholars have worked hard to dispel mistaken notions about what con-
stitutes the writing process, arguing, in effect, that writing is an unknown
or misdescribed domain, over-determined by metaphors. Simply put,

writing research typically shines its light on misleading metaphors that
lead to false assumptions about writing.
Because metaphor itself is largely misunderstood, writing scholars usu-
ally object to one metaphor at a time, ignoring the metaphor systems against
which their views are pitted. Drawing on the work of Michael Reddy, Dar-
sie Bowden objects to the language-as-container metaphor because of its
harmful effect on composition pedagogy. Timothy Weiss urges us to aban-
don the outdated technical-writing-as-sales-job metaphor in favor of a
Bakhtinian “ourselves-among-others” metaphor. To take an especially well-
known example, Carolyn Miller refutes the windowpane theory of lan-
guage, a metaphor that erroneously treats technical language as if it were
a transparent medium through which we perceive unaltered reality (“Hu-
manistic”). Miller’s refutation has been remarkably influential, garnering
sixty-eight citations between 1988 and 1992 in five major technical writ-
ing journals, not to mention numerous textbook endorsements (E. Smith).
Ironically, this tenacious condemnation of erroneous metaphors goes hand
in hand with a consensus that metaphors are both pervasive and impor-
tant. In that vein, Nancy Nelson Spivey offers a thoughtful account of the
social constructivist metaphor that has strongly influenced writing stud-
ies. All of this, however, is meta-analysis. Thus, it provides us nothing
useful to say to students about metaphors in their writing.
The field of writing studies does not benefit by ignoring the connec-
tion between rhetorical theory and the particulars of sentences, para-
graphs, text structures, and figures of speech. Ultimately, though, these
connections cannot be denied, because what often seem to be mere par-
ticulars (or, worse, “surface” features) are constituted by a larger rhetoric.
James Seitz frames the problem well when he laments the way a “reduc-
tive view of metaphor has contributed to a reductive view of composi-
tion” (25). Seitz observes that metaphor is among those things that teach-
ers of English, and teachers of writing especially, wish students came to
class already knowing. If students could only recognize a metaphor, goes
the common complaint, then I could teach more substantive things. I pre-
fer to frame the problem somewhat differently. It seems to me that meta-
phor is treated ambivalently. Increasingly, teachers of English and com-
position recognize that metaphor has far-reaching significance, yet—I
speculate for lack of adequate theoretical tools—it is treated reductively
in the classroom.
Indeed, what writing theory needs is a cogent understanding of the re-
lationship between particular metaphors and the larger milieu that makes
any important metaphor possible. A good beginning point, as Dona Hickey
has recognized in her recent textbook, Figures of Thought for College Writ-
ers, is to recognize explicitly the unavoidability of conceptual metaphor.
But that alone is not sufficient because conceptual metaphor theory has
not fully woven rhetoric into its fabric. The present study, I suggest, pro-
vides the required theoretical connection—it can tell us what to say. And
if there is any doubt that teachers of writing need better guidance, we
need only look at the paucity (and impoverishment) of handbook commen-
tary on metaphor (compare Seitz).
Typically, handbooks rely upon the passé view of metaphor as stylis-
tic flourish—making metaphor seem a dispensable decoration that is
neither conceptually nor rhetorically valuable. Thus, the handbooks al-
most always couple a certain kind of praise with a certain kind of cau-
tion. To cite but one example, Richard Marius issues this warning:
Metaphors should make a point sharply. Extended metaphors seldom
interest readers. You may think it clever to create an extended meta-
phor that likens getting a college education to climbing a mountain:
Admission is like arriving at the base; enrolling in your first classes
is like putting on your helmet and climbing tentatively over the first
rocks; social life is like rain on the side of the mountain because a
little of it is refreshing, but too much may wash you off the cliffs.
You can go on and on with such metaphors, but to most readers they
are contrived and tedious, and by the time you have climbed to the
top, they will long since have abandoned your work. (182)
Marius goes on to praise other metaphors lavishly. But even in dispensing

praise, he encourages us to treat metaphor with near dismissive suspicion.
His praise treats metaphor as exceptional language—dazzling when used
well, dismal when used poorly, and therefore not altogether necessary.
Like Marius’s commentary, most conventional advice about metaphor
is on the one hand sensible and on the other hand oddly naive. Marius
simply advises students not to belabor metaphors such as college-as-
mountain-climbing. Most of us would agree that Marius has a good ear
and offers some valid guidance. However, like most writing gurus, he of-
fers no validation for his advice other than his good ear and perhaps his
experienced hand. This leaves important questions—the key questions—
unanswered. For instance, why would college-as-mountain-climbing
appeal to a student writer in the first place? In fact, we can easily account
for its attraction. A standard blend of conceptual metaphors, associated
with the educational community and familiar to most students, supports
college-as-mountain-climbing. This standard conceptual blend probably
attracted Marius when he selected college-as-mountain-climbing as a bad
example: he “invented” the example because its constituting concepts are
already afoot in the discourse of education.
The first metaphor in the blend is Life Is A Journey. As we have seen
with Trade Is A Journey, not only life but many of life’s main episodes
are metaphorized as journeys. Not surprisingly, then, Life Is A Journey
has the subsidiary metaphor Education Is A Journey. Many journeys, in-

cluding educational journeys, follow an upward trajectory. Thus, the jour-
neying metaphor combines with the upward-oriented metaphors Happy
Is Up, More Is Up, and Success Is Up in order to form Education Is An
Upward Journey. In addition, this upward journeying blend entails the
metaphor Success Is A Place. At the end of the upward journey we reach
a happy place of abundance, where we are successful. We have arrived.
Our everyday language about education depends upon these metaphors.
We issue progress reports; we promote students to the upper grades in
hopes they will partake of higher education and perhaps receive an ad-
vanced degree. It is no great leap from metaphors of progressive, upward
motion to college-as-mountain-climbing. In fact, it is nearly impossible
to imagine someone of our place and time who cannot intuitively meta-
phorize education as climbing a mountain.
But, as always, more than the ability to conceptualize is at work.
Though dominant, Education Is An Upward Journey is nonetheless part
of a rhetorical conversation about the nature of education and the direc-
tion educational policy should take, a conversation that is actively car-
ried out within the U.S. community of educators. Writing scholars Jo-
seph Williams and Gregory Colomb explicitly challenge the value of what
they call “progress as linear movement,” a metaphor that tacitly warrants
views of unsuccessful students as “regressive” and supports Piaget-influ-
enced theories of educational development (“University of Chicago” 97–
101). They counter:
Another—and perhaps, more productive—metaphor for growth is
the equally familiar one of an “outsider” trying to “get into” a com-
munity, a metaphor that models the movement of a learner situated
outside a bounded field, who then “enters” the field and so “joins”
the community by acting like its members. (This metaphor does not
place any single community at the upper right of the chart as an ul-
timate goal.) To join a disciplinary community is, in part, to master
a body of knowledge. But that knowledge does not exist “out there,”
independent of those who control it, just waiting to be acquired.
Knowledge belongs to groups of people who have some shared stake
in exploring, preserving, and expanding it. The outsider must acquire
knowledge from insiders, usually through some form of an appren-
ticeship. (101)
Williams and Colomb’s alternative metaphor requires a radically differ-

ent view of both writing education and education on the whole than the
view that has prevailed for most of the twentieth century. And they are
not alone in promoting education-as-joining. A far-reaching reconsidera-
tion of writing pedagogy is underway that embeds this very competition
of metaphors. My earlier discussion of communities is prompted by this
reconsideration.
Therefore, the question of college-as-mountain-climbing’s attraction

is complex, substantive, and community specific, not just a matter of ser-
endipitous invention or awkward execution. Students, educators, parents,
school boards, and politicians have much at stake in endorsing or rejecting
a metaphor such as college-as-mountain-climbing. Perhaps more impor-
tant than whether the metaphor seems awkward is whether, in re-invent-
ing the metaphor, a student writer is mouthing unexamined assumptions
about what four years of high-priced college are for. We ought to ask him
or her not, Why did you use such an awkward metaphor, but, Why are
you content to endorse the standard view?
At the same time, we should ask ourselves what makes Marius’s bad ex-
ample bad. As presented, college-as-mountain-climbing does seem clumsy.
Here, some sympathy for student writers, and perhaps for all writers, may
be in order. One editor’s clumsiness is all too often another’s elegance. One
thing the education-as-joining metaphor reminds us is that “good” writ-
ing is not an absolute. Nonetheless, there is something other than mere
insider judgment that alerts us to the badness of Marius’s bad example.
Most (although not all) effective metaphors are based upon standard
conceptual metaphors. However, this does not mean every instance of a
standard, conceptual metaphor will be pleasing or effective. When a writer
belabors similarities, saying, as Marius imagines, “admission is like ar-
riving at the base” and “social life is like rain on the side of the moun-
tain because a little of it is refreshing, but too much may wash you off
the cliffs,” the metaphor Education Is A Journey falls flat—and falls flat
for a particular reason. The execution is predicated upon a false theory
of metaphor. It assumes that metaphors have only to do with correspond-
ing features. The more the better. Not so.
The mountain-climbing metaphor can be fully expressed—its image
schema sufficiently conveyed, its entailed cultural understandings amply
suggested—in a single word. If the writer says, for example, “We enter
college, hoping one day to stand on the summit,” summit encompasses
the full blend of Life Is A Journey, Education Is A Journey, Happy Is Up,
More Is Up, and Success Is Up. Moreover, summit calls up associations
particular to mountain climbing (such as struggle, danger, adventure, and
extraordinary achievement) that are easily understood without elabora-
tion. In short, the underlying metaphor in Marius’s example is not an
inherently bad one at all, but the execution is overspecified, largely be-
cause it derives from a misguided view of what a metaphor is. Some suit-
ably applied feature-mapping might be in order, especially if there is a
need to intensify or attenuate the metaphor. But it is not essential.
Furthermore, it may even be that Marius’s bad metaphor is not really
a metaphor at all in its execution—or if a metaphor, a peripheral variety
not worthy of the name. Consider this sentence: “Social life is like rain
on the side of the mountain because a little of it is refreshing, but too much
may wash you off the cliffs.” In form, it is a specified simile. It depends
on a single, corresponding feature that needs explaining, which means it
has more in common with bad jokes than good metaphors. For example,
here is a very bad joke that I heard on A Prairie Home Companion, where
many bad jokes may be found. Why is a divorce like a hurricane? When
it’s over, your trailer’s gone. The joke specifies a shared feature (removes
your trailer), but the feature is so far-fetched that its revelation is humor-
ous (at least, it is to me). Likewise, social life and rain may share the simi-
larity the wrong quantity is harmful, but the revelation of this similarity
is more a punch line than a metaphoric association. That is, neither the
divorce joke nor the rain simile is associated with a well-understood con-
ceptual metaphor; neither illuminates a range of cultural associations; thus,
neither has much hope of resonating well.
We can say, then, that college-as-mountain-climbing is probably a
good metaphor. However, to be well written, it must take into account both
the conceptual structure and the rhetorical consequences of the metaphor
within a community of discourse. Rain and social life simply do not fit.
However, Education Is An Upward Journey does allow room for some
effective variations. In a recent election year, one politician chastised
those who would discontinue college loans, saying roughly, “Your own
rise was funded by the federal government, and now that you’re on top,
you want to pull up the ladder.” This metaphor, of course, makes good
use of the verticality image schema of Education Is An Upward Journey.
It also networks with other success metaphors such as the ladder to suc-
cess. Both metaphors are extended in a humorous way by a subversive
mapping. Usually, Education Is An Upward Journey and the ladder to
success map only an individual’s climb, not a rear-guard action that en-
sures others’ downfall.
It might be objected that we need only our intuition to recognize the
goodness of the pulling-up-the-ladder metaphor. But my point here is not
that we need to avoid giving intuitively good advice but rather that if this
advice is also founded on an accurate theory of metaphor, we have much
to gain. A better theory of metaphor leads to substantive interrogations
of what student writers have to say, not merely as a brainstorming heu-
ristic but as a way of entering into important rhetorical activity. It would
only be a beginning to point out that college-as-mountain-climbing com-
ports with Education Is An Upward Journey and that it converses with
such newer community-based metaphors as education-as-joining. A re-
search paper on the topic of college education might uncover numerous
competing metaphors and, perhaps, evolving values of those metaphors.
Certainly Education Is A Journey and education-as-joining have the po-
tential to be invested with rhetorical values other than those I have so
far noted. Over time, the social and ethical value of Trade Is War has
changed. Other important metaphors will likely change also.
For example, Gregory Clark argues that the metaphor of discourse

communities that emerged in the 1980s may not be as helpful as he and
others once thought. While he once favored the notion of education-as-
joining that Williams and Colomb advocate, he now recognizes the ex-
clusionary aspect of emphasizing discourse communities. In this view, the
metaphor of discourse community becomes less community-as-attractor,
as James Porter describes it, and more community-as-container—a con-
tainer that both keeps in and keeps out. In place of the discourse com-
munity metaphor, Clark proposes we emphasize writing-as-travel, a
metaphor that is supported by Education Is A Journey.
But Clark is not proposing a return to the linear progress model. He
recruits a standard conceptual metaphor, but instead of the usual prog-
ress-toward-success mapping, he selects an importance-of-the-journey-
itself mapping. Clark says,
I am arguing that we need to imagine the discursive collectivities that
are essential to individual and social life in a way that requires par-
ticipants to acknowledge and respect the distinctiveness and the dif-
ferences of others, and to commit nonetheless to the transformative
work of cooperation and connection. When we imagine these collec-
tivities as communities we can deny diverse and digressive identities
and purposes that constitute them; when we imagine them as cities
we can deny the interdependence that is required of individuals who
inhabit the same bounded place. My suggestion is that we can re-
member to acknowledge the reality of both difference and reciproc-
ity in social interaction by imagining discursive collectivity as not a
kind of place but as a kind of process, and that we do that by ex-
ploring the conceptual resources provided by the metaphor of travel.
If we envision the collectivity that is constituted in a discursive inter-
action as a place, its participants occupy a territory where they must
assume and negotiate conflicting proprietary claims and where the
object of their cooperation is the establishment of boundaries. If, how-
ever, we envision that collectivity as a pragmatic encounter of fel-
low travelers whose itineraries are their own but who find themselves
sharing temporarily some problems and some opportunities, our
students might learn to read and write as if they were embedded in
an expansive social space where they must confront and account for
relationships of agency, obligation, and interdependence. (22–23)
Whether Clark’s interpretation of Education Is A Journey will take hold

remains to be seen. Nothing prevents him from arguing at length for a
novel mapping of an established conceptual metaphor, but at least one
factor militates against ultimate success. The metaphor is tendentially de-
termined by existing community rhetoric. No matter how well Clark ex-
presses his journey-itself thesis, a likely response will include some ver-
sion of Education Is An Upward Journey. I would argue—fully noting the
irony of my argument—that no matter how Clark may wish for writing
to be travel, the metaphor he selects is still a matter of community, pre-

conditioned by rhetorical discourse and, therefore, inflected in ways he
cannot fully control.
Nonetheless, there is value in noting that Clark’s writing-as-travel is
far from the Education Is A Journey that shaped writing pedagogy before
the discourse community metaphor came along; it is a re-envisioning of
what it means to write in the context of a classroom, a university, a soci-
ety; and it is probably incompatible with college-as-mountain-climbing.
Considering college-as-mountain-climbing as part of a rhetorical conver-
sation, the student writer might decide to cast his or her metaphor aside
or to explore its most important consequences. Either way, it is impor-
tant for the writer to view metaphors as something other than a decora-
tion. The writer’s metaphors are contributions—witting or unwitting—
to rhetorical conversations that are enriched more by informed utterances
than by accidental ones.
A Final Word about Community

The idea of community is inseparable from a rhetorical understanding of
metaphor. Without it, we risk an overcompensation that, in rightly reject-
ing the worst aspects of the Aristotelian model, leaps to the opposite error:
an assumption that everything is metaphor. This view argues that if dis-
course writes us, then we are also written by our metaphors, that signs are
so inherently unreliable that the checks and balances of rhetoric do noth-
ing to constrain metaphoric meaning. The idea of community, however,
helps us to avoid this excessiveness. Community—in the sense that com-
munities embody intersubjective construals of external circumstances and
constrain responses to our lived-in worlds—encompasses the particular-
ity of our rhetorical lives. We converse about known circumstances and con-
troversies not just in the context of a vast discursive world but in coordi-
nation with immediate and visible concerns held in common with others.
Thus, when we utter Trade Is War and related metaphors, when we
write and speak of the marketplace of ideas, when we “invent” a meta-
phor such as college-as-mountain-climbing, or—for that matter—when
we recruit and re-envoice any important metaphor, we cannot do so com-
petently without navigating the rhetorical intricacies of a community dis-
course. This competence is probably a matter of degrees. In general, I have
assumed throughout this study that public, prominent utterers of trade met-
aphors are competent utterers. I have assumed also that while students
or other novices may fail through imperfect competence to comport with
the rhetorical etiquettes of particular communities, they nonetheless are
competent enough. My assumptions are not wholly arbitrary. Commu-
nity membership, central or peripheral, is prima facie evidence of rhetor-
ical competence to some degree. The members of a community create with
each utterance and each nuanced inflection of an important metaphor the

particularities of a community.
Communities are not, therefore, static entities. They are always chang-
ing in the aggregate through a process of assimilating a broad confluence
of variegated activity. This point has been made best by writing and gen-
re theorists, who over the past decade have pointed out that the genres
through which communities are inscribed are malleable in relation to com-
munity needs and consensuses (e.g., Bazerman; Berkenkotter and Huckin;
Blakeslee; Cross; Devitt; Freedman, Adam, and Smart; Hunt; Miller
“Genre”; Prior; Schryer; Swales). This capacity for evolution is implicit
in my brief histories of Trade Is War and related metaphors. If Daniel
Defoe once unabashedly endorsed Trade Is War in what would now be
thought a reckless violation of rhetorical etiquette, that does not mean
he speaks from a different community. Rather, it means the community
of trade discoursers has evolved a different etiquette over time, an eti-
quette that responds to a collective experience of trade that makes some
metaphors more or less rhetorically perilous. Still, the community itself
is relatively constant, drawn to the topic of trade and placed in the rhe-
torical arena by ongoing, interanimating activity.
The emphasis I am placing, then, on the particularities of community
is not unconstrained. Just as I would guard against the postmodern pro-
pensity to see discourse as amorphous, unpredictably shifting, and tac-
itly controlling, I would also guard against particularism in its ad hoc
sense. While every conversation of metaphors is responsive to some fine-
grained nuances that only particular conversers in particular conversa-
tions may attend to, we do not begin every conversation anew. We neces-
sarily respond not just to the nuances of the moment but to regularities
within a temporal frame that marks as relevant concerns within a col-
lective rhetorical memory. This rhetorical memory—which is really a way
of gauging relevance—permits us coherence in spite of ever-progressing,
moment-to-moment evolution. There is no conversational tabula rasa.
The idea of community is inseparable from all of the aspects of met-
aphor’s rhetorical constitution that I have discussed in this book. It is de-
cidedly not an addendum. The Aristotelian algebra so sorely wanting in
rhetorical context is not improved upon by undifferentiated reference to
cultural discourse. Instead, it is the structured makeup of discourse—its
interanimated segmentation and situated concerns—that trumps formalis-
tic, internal-functioning analyses of metaphor. Many metaphor theorists
and other language scholars have always been willing to say—if some-
what dismissively at times—that metaphor has broad significance in
thought and language. But this concession has led to no substantive aban-
donment of algebraic analyses, because without the notion of commu-
nity the spacious significance of metaphor remains but an afterthought.
A view of metaphor as rhetorically constituted calls for us to recog-
nize patterned specificity among metaphors because rhetoric reveals lan-

guage in its most active and necessary form, where such things as meta-
phors, metonymies, ironies, narrative, and argumentative schemes are indis-
pensably implicated in the common pursuits of communities of discourse.
Communities of discourse coalesce around topics and activities that can-
not be confronted except in relation to others’ similarly construed reali-
ties. In short, rhetoric is what gives coherence to our most complex sym-
bolic exchanges. When we view metaphor not just as an incidental tool
of rhetoric but as a product of it, we begin to see more than simply that
metaphors have far-ranging significance; we begin to see the way that
significance takes and makes shape.
7
Conclusion
Generally, in war the best policy is to take the state intact; to ruin it
is inferior to this.
—Sun-tzu, The Art of War, approx. 500 B.C.
It is generally better to dominate a whole organization or market with

superior service and innovation than to splinter it with destructive
tactics.
—Donald G. Krause, The Art of War for Executives, 1995
When I began studying Trade Is War, I expected to find the kind of cul-
tural pervasiveness and mystical force so often attributed to metaphor.
It took some time for me to abandon this view, although, in retrospect, I
might have recognized some early hints that this would be necessary in
the end. As I pondered Trade Is War as a possible topic, I asked friends
and family the casual question, “Do you think trade is war?” Almost
always, the answerers lamented the fact that trade has become war or
claimed that trade really isn’t war, even though many people think it is.
It was sometimes explained to me that trade is, if anything, a game. Where
was the mystical power of the seemingly ubiquitous Trade Is War?
In focus groups, while views of Trade Is War varied, it became clear
that Trade Is War did not clandestinely control people’s thoughts at all.
Discussants recognized the metaphor and often had given serious thought
to its wrongheadedness long before I arrived with questionnaire in hand.
Oftentimes, when a discussant found the metaphor to be “true,” he or
she supported this assessment with a story of egregious behavior from a
client or an employer who too often metaphorized trade or business as
war. While it is not always wise to accept a study participant’s self-as-
sessment, the frequency of this anti–Trade Is War view, sometimes pas-
sionately expressed, convinced me that, if nothing else, discussants were
clear about their ideals. Thus, I came to think that cultural approval of
Trade Is War is a mile wide and an inch deep (as the saying goes).
Similarly, one of my secondary hypotheses fell by the wayside. I ex-
pected to find, if not cultural unanimity that trade is well thought of as
161
162 Conclusion
war, at least a masculine tendency to metaphorize trade and business as

combat or as rough games. But this proved not to be the case. I do not dis-
count the possibility of gender differences in many areas, but no salient
gender pattern emerged with respect to Trade Is War. Men and women
generally agreed that war metaphors are not ideal or true. This was so in
mixed groups and in single-gender groups. Moreover, while women did
consistently (as expected) dislike war metaphors, they also showed no spe-
cial reticence in creating playful war metaphors for sales and marketing.
In an all-female focus group, the women collaboratively applied Busi-
ness Is War to sales and marketing situations, agreeing upon an oddly
stylized locution: “kabuki combat.”
Me: Back when you were in marketing, did you ever think of it as
combat?
Zoey: Yes.
Rikki: Absolutely.
Zoey: No doubt about it.
Lynn: I mean, when you’re on a sales call, you’re thinking of it as
combat.
Zoey: Absolutely. Yeah, you’re trying to trash them.
Lynn: If the call right before you was your competitor selling a
similar product—
Zoey: I mean, I just sat in a meeting yesterday where there was a
client and two sets of consultants, and you could feel the
consultants, as we consulted [it was] really, “I want the
business. I want the—” I mean, you could just feel it.
Rikki: Yes—
Jane: Combat—
Zoey: I mean, we wanted the business, so we would subtly move
into the direction of our expertise, and then they would subtly
move into the direction of their expertise.
Rikki: It’s kabuki combat.
Zoey: Yeah, exactly. And then there was an independent, one
woman, and she was pulling in another direction. There was
definitely combat going on.
Jane: Combat and competition being related.
Lynn: Right.
Jane: Combat being the expression of the competition.
Lynn: But no matter how subtle, there is a strategy happening
here, and you’re planning your defense and—
Jane: Right.
Zoey: And you’re trying to beat out somebody else—
Jane: Beat out somebody else—
Zoey: Because they’re all going, in this case, everybody was going
for the same business.
This was not, perhaps, an example of the loftiest of feminist ideals. But it
was certainly an example of the rhetorical constitution of metaphor. It
Conclusion 163
may seem, at first blush, that the women were claiming, indeed heartily
endorsing, Business Is War. Yet it is of no small significance that their ver-
sion of war mainly relates to maneuvering rather than to confrontation.
This attenuates the metaphor significantly. And more telling, they move
fluidly from the domain of combat to the domain of entertainment (“ka-
buki”), which indicates a playfulness of tone. War is not really war; it is,
instead, a surreal theatrical representation of war.
In a way, it is good news that my initial hypothesis of a culture-form-
ing metaphor was mistaken. If Trade Is War had that kind of power,
imagine what kind of commercial atmosphere it would generate! Every
transaction would become an act of unmitigated aggression, every com-
petition a fight to the death, every competitor a reviled foe. The happy
truth is Trade Is War is not really a profound shaper of culture so much
as a prevalent component of a cultural debate. At different historical mo-
ments, the influence of Trade Is War waxes and wanes. Even at times when
Trade Is War does not draw the general condemnation that it currently
does, it always operates in contrast to the long-stable concept trade is
peace and intertwines with other economic metaphors.
Likewise, it is good news that Trade Is War is almost always ascribed
rather than claimed and that Business Is War is used almost universally
as only language. Good news for us. Bad news for others. We have seen
that Americans often ascribe Trade Is War to Asians, especially to the Jap-
anese. I have not studied Japanese metaphors, but it seems likely to me
that other cultures encompass competing metaphors, competing ideol-
ogies. But seldom are foreign cultures given credit for internal diversity.
Ascription of metaphors to foreign cultures is one way of “orientalizing”
other cultures, to use Edward Said’s word. Not only do we ascribe Trade
Is War to Asians, but we also impute to this metaphor a mystical, total-
izing force: the ascription implies not just that Asians believe trade is war
but that it is all they believe.
On the other hand, to say that a metaphor does not signify culture in
the overarching way that I had originally assumed is not to say that the
metaphor is less significant than I had thought. In fact, Trade Is War ap-
pears more significant when regarded as a rhetorically constituted figure
than when mistakenly thought a cultural determiner. Rhetoric is about dis-
cussion, disagreement, sometimes progress toward consensus, and always
hope for improvement of the human condition—all of the things that make
human activity worth bothering about. We can say with some optimism,
then, that metaphor is not just about thought, it is also about rhetorical
action. It is of no small importance that an economist such as Lester Thu-
row cares to explain that Trade Is War, as a habitual way of metaphorizing
commerce and trade, may be misguided. On the other side of the issue, it
is equally important that one-time presidential candidate Patrick Buchanan
cares to explain that Trade Is War, as a clear-eyed way of understanding
164 Conclusion
our country’s history and prospects, may help us all. And it is surely of
no less importance that people in more anonymous walks of life give ser-
ious thought to whether commerce should be a war, a game, a journey, or
a seeking of friends.
While conducting this study, and especially in my role as moderator
of focus groups, I felt it important to remain neutral about the relative
worth of trade metaphors. I confess now that while I have been success-
ful in not expressing my judgments to others, I have not been dispassion-
ate about the issues raised by Trade Is War, Markets Are Containers, Trade
Is Friendship, Trade Is A Journey, and trade is peace. And being exposed
to discussions of these metaphors has led me to some surprising conclu-
sions—conclusions that, at the outset, I would have found strange and,
indeed, unacceptable. Like most Americans, I have favored the globalist
position, assuming almost as a matter of faith that protectionism is fu-
tile and destructive. Like most Americans of Baby Boom age, I find com-
mercial war metaphors troublesome. I was weaned on the politics of Viet-
nam, and the intervening years have only provided further evidence of
that war’s moral vacuity. For that reason, I have no liking for the images,
words, and spirit of war—not even in playful only language metaphors.
But upon long reflection, it seems to me that of the social and economic
dangers we face today, Trade Is War represents a small one, and its lit-
eral counterpart, trade is peace, a large and growing one.
Trade is peace is the great truism of the post–World War II era. It is
the touchstone of well-intentioned globalism, which is motivated by the
same spirit of peace that inspired the Marshall Plan and the United Na-
tions. What could be wrong with such a spirit? In fact, I believe there is
much wrong with it as it is applied to trade policy. Before World War II,
we lived in a world of contained markets. National governments protected
local commerce by using high tariffs to shield against foreign competition.
This “protectionism” is often denounced now as short-sighted, fear-in-
spired, and dangerous. In some ways, that is so. But the postwar era has
its own excesses. In its desire to help devastated foreign countries rebuild
and underdeveloped countries mature—all in the hope of avoiding a third
world war—the United States has opened its markets to all comers. The
resulting loss in manufacturing—of automobiles, consumer electronics,
textiles, and semiconductors—has been considerable. But the loss that
should concern us most is not the loss of manufacturing dollars.
What we sacrifice by indiscriminately opening our markets is two hun-
dred years of social progress. In the nineteenth century, the United States
legally permitted slave, child, or coerced labor. Even free adult workers
would have been astonished to hear of a forty-hour work week—with paid
vacation. A heavy price was paid in order to right the wrongs of the unfet-
tered marketplace. We fought a civil war to end slavery. The trade union
Conclusion 165
movement paid for its victories with blood. However, because we have
almost universally accepted the notion that trade is peace—both that it
is a necessary activity of peace and that it engenders peace—each of us
is more likely than not to wear clothes, drive cars, and compose books
on computers that are produced by slave or child labor. At the very least,
we depend upon world markets to provide us with goods produced by
workers who are paid deplorable wages and who have no right to bar-
gain collectively. Trade may be peace—but is it peace at any price?
When we open our borders to products produced by enslaved, under-
aged, and oppressed workers, we pay a moral cost, to be sure. This cost,
however, goes beyond being drawn into the ethical vacuum of buying and
using tainted goods. We face an even greater ethical problem when we
squander our ability to influence foreign conditions. By failing to preserve
minimum acceptable conditions within our borders while acquiescing to
appalling conditions outside of them, we recast all of what we do com-
mercially into a transnational agnosticism. Simply put, the original rea-
son for promoting free trade was to promote peace, a presumed natural
consequence of trade. That rationale remains prominent in trade discus-
sion today. But the unintended consequence has been the creation of na-
tionless corporations for whom a moral and ethical obligation to work-
ers is hardly a matter for concern. Unions once bargained for a living wage
and decent working conditions. Now enormous multinational corpora-
tions are increasingly accountable only to faceless stockholders who are
not confronted daily with the tie between exploitation and profit. We need
only to check our retirement plans to verify that we are, most of us, among
these faceless stockholders.
Meanwhile, as factories and jobs are dispersed around the globe, mil-
lions who once benefited from social progress in the United States are now
thrust into uncertainty, working for lower wages and left relatively pow-
erless in relation to employers. The devastating consequences of this are
perhaps not strikingly evident today because we are enjoying a flush econ-
omy. Most workers in the United States currently derive some benefit
from the law of supply and demand with respect to labor. But a down-
turn in the U.S. economy could bring the problem into stark relief. More-
over, even with today’s robust economy, we see can see fissures in the
social foundation of the U.S. commercial environment. In real dollars, ave-
rage wages are falling steadily. And the disparity between executive pay
and worker pay is greater than ever. At the turn of the century, J. P. Mor-
gan said that executive pay should never exceed worker pay by more than
twenty fold. Today top executives make more than two hundred times
the salary of the average factory worker (Kadleck, Smolowe).
This tangible harm to domestic workers emanates from the seemingly
commendable idea that trade is peace. Am I recommending, then, that
166 Conclusion
we revive and claim the metaphor Trade Is War? No. No matter how we
may try to delimit it, the standard Western model of Trade Is War entails
aggressive action toward others. Neither the United States nor any other
nation benefits from commercial harm to others. However, I do claim that
Markets Are Containers has positive value. That is, we need to retain some
sense of separation between our markets and others’—not for the sake
of hoarding profit but for the sake of maintaining a humane working en-
vironment. While most nationalistic stances emphasize the wages lost by
some American workers, I urge an emphasis upon social progress lost by
the United States as a whole. We cannot ameliorate conditions around the
world while permitting our own conditions to deteriorate.
Some may argue that when we treat our market as a container, pro-
tecting our workers behind a wall of tariffs, we deprive equally deserv-
ing workers abroad of the chance to make a living, no matter how mea-
ger at first, and that we further deprive foreign workers the opportunity
to make economic progress in the future. But this argument follows the
false logic of trade is peace. It cannot be helpful for us to fund oppressed
labor with pieces of our own economy. The way to improve foreign work-
ers’ conditions is through political action, not through economic acqui-
escence. Meanwhile, our own corporate community needs to restore its
productive bond with its workers of all levels. A corporation or a coun-
try that is not answerable to its own workers will be answerable to no
one, especially not while its profits continue to grow.
To be clear, in claiming Markets Are Containers, I do not also claim
Trade Is War. Remember that while Trade Is War entails Markets Are
Containers, Markets Are Containers does not necessarily imply Trade Is
War. Some of our most common instances of Markets Are Containers
either dramatically attenuate Trade Is War or can just as easily suggest
other metaphors such as Trade Is A Game. At the same time, when I ar-
gue the case for Markets Are Containers, I am suggesting a somewhat
novel interpretation of what containment means. Certainly I do not in-
tend to emphasize the exclusionary aspect of containment suggested by,
say, the fortress metaphor. Indeed, I do not know of a common locution
that inflects Markets Are Containers in the way I have in mind, a way
that emphasizes preservation of social well-being without at the same time
fearing or prohibiting outside influence. Thus, what I offer is a position
that requires a new metaphor.
Tempting as it is to offer up a new metaphor, I will not. Instead, let me
describe what characteristics the metaphor should have and how it will
fit into the conversation of trade metaphors already proceeding. Like
Trade Is A Game, the needed container metaphor must have an attenu-
ating effect, less rhetorically heated than either Trade Is War or Trade Is
A Game. Lester Thurow, who projects a future world economy with both
Conclusion 167
competitive and cooperative elements, suggests the metaphor of soccer,

a relatively nonviolent game. But I am leery of this metaphor because the
ultimate goal of even the most benevolent soccer teams is to defeat the
opposition. What we should desire in the United States is a world in which
our economic counterparts succeed well. We cannot, therefore, follow any
fundamentally competitive model.
We need to envision contained spaces that are essentially cooperative
and mutually beneficent. We need not erase all borders in order to wish
success for nations and corporations around the world. When we contain
our market, what we are comprising is not a hoard of goods but a model
for commercial and economic behavior. We can succeed in this and work
for others’ success at the same time. The attached metaphor of success
must not be the prevalent Zero Sum Model. The success of the U.S. mar-
ket need not be measured in growth that supersedes others’ growth, and
the growth of another market need not come at the expense of ours. In-
stead, we need to view the success of markets qualitatively. The preser-
vation and improvement of economic benefits, justly shared, should be
what matters—what makes a “container” of value.
It would seem that even free-market economists would agree with this
objective in principle. Otherwise why would they argue with such persis-
tence that the principle of self-interest works, ironically, for the common
good? Yet I doubt the free-market ideology, which touts trade is peace while
accepting no responsibility for economic devastation, will move us toward
that objective. Notwithstanding the law of unintended consequences, to
argue that the unbridled exercise of self-interest somehow guarantees the
general good rings false. It is backwards-speak. If the common good is
what we value, we need to make it our first objective, not merely hope
that it will be an agreeable byproduct of unrestrained self-interest.
As for metaphors themselves, the effect this study of Trade Is War has
had on me should be instructive. Whether or not my conclusions about
world economics are correct—I have been wrong before and about mat-
ters far less complex—I argue unequivocally that metaphors as they sys-
tematically compete and converse are fundamental to public and private
rhetoric. Metaphors of trade index and constrain what we say and do
about commercial interactions as ordinary as buying butter at the super-
market and as consequential as voting to create the World Trade Organi-
zation. The role of metaphors is not only tacit and cognitive but also pub-
licly rhetorical.
It seems to me that most metaphors are more like Trade Is War than
not. I readily acknowledge that Trade Is War is a more obviously politi-
cal metaphor than some others. But every metaphor, to some degree, calls
upon the way we see the world of action. The chestnuts analyzed ad in-
finitum by theorists show this well. We cannot say man is a wolf or my
168 Conclusion
love is a rose without pronouncing on the nature of humankind. And this

pronouncement is assuredly woven within living, rhetorical conversation.
I set out to study Trade Is War in order to study metaphor itself. But
we cannot study any metaphor well without taking into account the larger
patterns that related metaphors form. Once we recognize that metaphors
form meaningful clusters, we must also recognize that these clusters have
far-ranging rhetorical significance. And once we acknowledge metaphor’s
rhetorical significance, we must acknowledge that conversations among
metaphors are complex and refuse to surrender completely to our analy-
ses. Our conclusions about the relation between metaphor, thought, and
rhetoric must inevitably remain dependent upon our ordinarily unvoiced
sensitivities to cultural and community nuance. This does not mean, how-
ever, that we cannot usefully observe the entrenched and evolving patterns
of rhetorical use that constitute metaphor. It does not mean that we need
to retreat into the Aristotelian formalisms so prevalent in twentieth-cen-
tury metaphor theory. If there is a single point I wish to make most strenu-
ously, it is that metaphor is constituted not by its internal function but
rather its internal function is constituted by a larger rhetorical environ-
ment. Thus, we can never fruitfully train our eye upon a single metaphor.
To study metaphor should always be to study something else.
Appendix
Notes
Works Cited
Index
Appendix
Questionnaire Number One

Each of the following may seem true to you in some sense. Rate how true
each seems according to the following scale: 1 = not very true; 2 = could
be seen as true; 3 = somewhat true; 4 = very true; 5 = absolutely true.
1. Businesses are hungry tigers. 1 2 3 4 5

2. Companies are people. 1 2 3 4 5
3. Companies are animals. 1 2 3 4 5
4. Business is combat. 1 2 3 4 5
5. Trade is like a ballet. 1 2 3 4 5
6. The economy is a locomotive. 1 2 3 4 5
7. Business is a game. 1 2 3 4 5
8. Business is IBM. 1 2 3 4 5
9. Trade is war. 1 2 3 4 5
10. Companies are heroes and villains. 1 2 3 4 5
11. The economy is a conveyer belt. 1 2 3 4 5
12. Business is a bombing mission. 1 2 3 4 5
13. Businesses are mammals. 1 2 3 4 5
14. IBM is a giant. 1 2 3 4 5
15. Trade is a dance. 1 2 3 4 5
16. Companies are like people. 1 2 3 4 5
17. Trade is like a war. 1 2 3 4 5
18. Business is like football. 1 2 3 4 5
19. Business is a ballet. 1 2 3 4 5
20. Business is peace negotiations. 1 2 3 4 5
21. Business is a production at the Bolshoi. 1 2 3 4 5
22. The economy is a computer. 1 2 3 4 5
23. Companies are like animals. 1 2 3 4 5
24. Businesses are dogs. 1 2 3 4 5
25. Business is the process of choreography. 1 2 3 4 5
26. IBM is Babe Ruth. 1 2 3 4 5
27. The economy is a machine. 1 2 3 4 5
171
172 Appendix
28. Business is like a machine. 1 2 3 4 5

29. Trade is a game. 1 2 3 4 5
30. Trade is all about keeping score. 1 2 3 4 5
Please list the statements you rated the most true and the most false.
Explain why.
Questionnaire Number Two

Each of the following may seem true to you in some sense. Rate how true
each seems according to the following scale: 1 = not very true; 2 = could
be seen as true; 3 = somewhat true; 4 = very true; 5 = absolutely true.
1. Companies are like animals. 1 2 3 4 5

2. Trade is all about keeping score. 1 2 3 4 5
3. The economy is a machine. 1 2 3 4 5
4. Trade is like travelling. 1 2 3 4 5
5. Business is combat. 1 2 3 4 5
6. Trade is like a ballet. 1 2 3 4 5
7. The economy is a locomotive. 1 2 3 4 5
8. Business is a two-way street. 1 2 3 4 5
9. Business is a game. 1 2 3 4 5
10. Business is IBM. 1 2 3 4 5
11. Trade is war. 1 2 3 4 5
12. Markets are walled-in spaces. 1 2 3 4 5
13. Companies are heroes and villains. 1 2 3 4 5
14. The economy is a conveyer belt. 1 2 3 4 5
15. Business is a bombing mission. 1 2 3 4 5
16. Markets are fortresses. 1 2 3 4 5
17. Businesses are mammals. 1 2 3 4 5
18. Business is like football. 1 2 3 4 5
19. Trade is a dance. 1 2 3 4 5
20. Trade is a journey. 1 2 3 4 5
21. Companies are like people. 1 2 3 4 5
22. Trade is like a war. 1 2 3 4 5
23. IBM is a giant. 1 2 3 4 5
24. Markets are containers. 1 2 3 4 5
25. Business is a ballet. 1 2 3 4 5
26. Business is peace negotiations. 1 2 3 4 5
27. Businesses are hungry tigers. 1 2 3 4 5
28. Business is a joint excursion. 1 2 3 4 5
29. The economy is a computer. 1 2 3 4 5
30. Business is a production at the Bolshoi. 1 2 3 4 5
Appendix 173
31. Businesses are dogs. 1 2 3 4 5

32. Markets are bubbles. 1 2 3 4 5
33. Business is the process of choreography. 1 2 3 4 5
34. IBM is Babe Ruth. 1 2 3 4 5
35. Companies are animals. 1 2 3 4 5
36. Business is like a machine. 1 2 3 4 5
37. Trade is a voyage of exploration. 1 2 3 4 5
38. Trade is a game. 1 2 3 4 5
39. Companies are people. 1 2 3 4 5
40. Markets are like countries. 1 2 3 4 5
Please list four or five statements you rated the most true and explain
very briefly why they seemed true to you.
Please list four or five statements you rated the most false and explain
very briefly why they seemed false to you.
Notes
1. A Conversation among Metaphors

1. In addition to Metaphors We Live By, some excellent introductions to con-
ceptual metaphor may be found in Raymond Gibbs, The Poetics of Mind: Figu-
rative Thought, Language, and Understanding; Mark Johnson, The Body in the
Mind: The Bodily Basis of Meaning, Imagination, and Reason; George Lakoff
and Mark Turner, More Than Cool Reason: A Field Guide to Poetic Metaphor;
and Mark Turner, Death Is the Mother of Beauty: Mind, Metaphor, Criticism.
2. I use Whitacre’s account as an example but do not necessarily accept its ac-
curacy. After making public his accusations against ADM, thus forcing the com-
pany to plead guilty to federal price-fixing charges, Whitacre was himself con-
victed of a multimillion dollar embezzlement of ADM funds.
3. For an excellent discussion of the metaphors associated with this dichotomy,
see George Lakoff’s Moral Politics: What Conservatives Know That Liberals Don’t.
2. Beyond Aristotle’s Algebra

1. This example is, of course, contrived to preserve the locution man is a wolf,
but man is a wolf underlies such similar expressions as wildlife photographer Jim
Brandenburg’s comment, “If, one day, the wolf no longer finds the world a fit
place in which to live, we may face a similar and inescapable destiny.” Branden-
burg has also written a book whose title suggests man is a wolf and probably
also wolf is a man: Brother Wolf.
2. For a fuller discussion of image schemas, see Mark Johnson’s The Body in
the Mind.
3. Mark Turner and Gilles Fauconnier have theorized a many-space model of
conceptual integration, calling the standard two-domain model of metaphor a
special case of the many-space model (Fauconnier and Turner; Turner, Literary;
Turner and Fauconnier). They point out that when we imagine such things as
counterfactuals and hypotheticals, we use two input spaces, a generic space, and
a blended space, which allows new properties to emerge in the blended space.
Conceptual integration will continue to be a fruitful area in research on mind and
language, but it is distinct, nonetheless, from my critique of the Aristotelian two-
part model of metaphor.
4. A pancratiast combines boxing and wrestling.
3. The Conversation at Large

1. In fact, Kenneth Burke’s conversation metaphor encompasses an extrava-
175
176 Notes to Pages 35–121
gant mixed metaphor that combines Language Is Conversation, Conversation Is

A Journey, Argument Is War, Emotion Is Hot, and Meaning Is An Object.
2. Raleigh quotes from Cicero’s attack on Verres. Cicero, as prosecutor, char-
acterizes his defendant, Verres, a high political official known for bribery. In En-
glish it can be translated, “Nothing is so fortified that it cannot be captured by
money.” Michael Grant renders the sentence, along with the sentence preceding,
“Nothing, he declares, is too sacred to be corrupted by money; nothing too strong
to resist its attack” (Cicero 38). Thus, what Raleigh cites is a Latin metaphor that
treats money as a weapon of war.
3. See chapter 5 for a full description of focus groups.
4. You will, no doubt, have noticed, that in rejecting Trade Is War, Thurow
shifts to the metaphor Trade Is A Game, but let us hold off discussing that for a
moment.
5. without doubt
6. thrive
7. foundation, fund, or founded
8. In chapters 4 and 5, I will discuss the term mapping and its technical mean-
ings. Until then, I use mapping simply to mean ways of rendering metaphors in
particular ways, such as asserting or denying likenesses.
9. In chapter 6, I discuss conceptual networking of metaphors. In Hills’ phrase
“to build upon the goodwill,” we find an example of integral networking. That
is, we need not end an analysis of Trade Is Friendship by noting just its depen-
dence on Nations Are People and National Allies Are Friends nor by noting its
complementary relation to Trade Is Friendship. We might also note all of the meta-
phors that combine to structure the idea of friendship, among them Human
Relationships As Architecture, which tells us that relationships have solid foun-
dations, that people are connected by bridges, and often that relationships need
to be built.
4. Three (Doubtful) Premises of Metaphor Theory

1. As is often the case in academic study, Lakoff has his critics, among them
John Vervaeke and Christopher Green, who defend the classical view lucidly and
well, but to my mind unpersuasively. Nonetheless, they do succinctly explain what
is at stake in Lakoff’s argument.
5. The Story of Metaphor

1. See chapter 6 for a discussion of the differences between Trade Is War and
Business Is War. The main difference is that Business Is War is frequently non-
pejorative. In this case study of Bill Gates, however, Business Is War is, by and
large, a strongly ascribed pejorative. Thus, there is no need to distinguish its rhe-
torical etiquette from Trade Is War. It is also worth noting that Business Is A
Journey is not as incompatible with Business Is War as Trade Is A Journey is with
Trade Is War. This is because business discourse focuses more upon the success
or failure of a single entity rather than the relationship between traders. Thus, a
company may journey toward success and win a war at the same time.
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of Chicago P, 1990. 67–96.
Williams, Joseph M., and Gregory G. Colomb. “Coherence II.” Style: Toward
Clarity and Grace. Chicago: U of Chicago P, 1990. 97–114.
———. “The University of Chicago.” Programs That Work. Ed. Toby Fulwiler
and Art Young. Portsmouth, NH: Boynton/Cook, 1990. 83–114.
Winner, Ellen. The Point of Words: Children’s Understanding of Metaphor and
Irony. Cambridge: Harvard UP, 1988.
Wittgenstein, Ludwig. Philosophical Investigations. New York: Macmillan, 1958.
Index
Abelson, Robert P., 107–8 phors; claiming metaphors; intensi-

addressivity, 30–31. See also response, fying metaphors
rhetorical attributes. See features and attributes
Adobe Systems, 130
alien name, metaphor as, 14–15, 73, Bacon, Sir Francis, 35
79, 86, 88–89 Bakhtin, Mikhail, 8, 30–31, 33, 137,
Allen, Paul, 121, 124–26 152
American Automobile Manufacturers’ Barnes, Fred, 68–69
Assoc., 4 Beardsley, Monroe, 32–33, 74, 83
analogy, 44–45, 65, 73–75, 85–86, 89, Bible, the, 34–35, 37, 67
93–94, 99, 114, 144, 146 bilateralism. See unilateralism, bilater-
Andreas, Dwayne, 3, 145 alism, and multilateralism
anthropomorphizing, 19, 47 Black, Max, 13, 15–17, 32–33, 66–67,
antimetabole, 103 69–70, 78, 84, 93
Apple Computers, 130 Bohr, Neils, 94
aptness, metaphoric, 24, 63, 74, 92, Boskin, Michael, 49
109–12, 114, 117, 119–20, 122, Bosmajian, Haig, 148–49
124, 142, 148 Brennan, William, 148
Archer Daniels Midland Corp. (ADM), Britain, 34, 36, 39, 40–43, 47, 60, 87
3, 145–46 Bruner, Jerome, 106–7
Aristotle, x–xi, 13–17, 22, 25, 32, 42, Buchanan, Patrick, 5, 46, 163
46, 55, 73–74, 78–79, 83, 104, 110, Burke, Kenneth, 30, 175–76
158–59, 168, 175 Bush, George Herbert Walker, 4, 49
ascribing metaphors, xi, 9–11, 28–29, Bush administration, 4, 46, 99
32, 43–47, 50–51, 53–56, 59–60,
68–69, 73, 77, 93, 100, 111, 119, Card, Andrew, 4–7, 10–11, 54
123, 127–28, 135, 139–41, 143– catachresis, 42
44, 163, 175. See also attenuating categorical transgression. See categori-
metaphors; claiming metaphors; in- cal violation
tensifying metaphors categorical violation, xii, 13, 62–63,
Asia, 6–7, 60–61, 99, 163 73–75, 82–84, 86–89
asymmetry in metaphors and compari- categories, 13, 59–60, 62–63, 70, 72–
sons, 74–77, 79–85, 90–91 75, 78–91, 109; basic-level, 85–89;
attenuating metaphors, xi, 9–11, 28– classical, 80; cognitive, 60, 79–91
29, 32, 42, 46–47, 50–55, 57, 59, chiasmus, 132
68, 98, 100, 128, 139, 141, 143, China, 38, 57, 61, 79, 121, 141
150, 163. See also ascribing meta- Cicero, 176
187
188 Index
Civil War, 39, 41, 164 ter, 58; Happy Is Up, 2, 21–22, 112,
claiming metaphors, xi, 9, 28, 32, 46, 136, 154; Human Relationships As
49, 51, 53, 139, 141–42, 163, 166. Architecture, 176; Ideas Are Food,
See also ascribing metaphors; at- 2, 95, 98, 136; Ideas Are Products,
tenuating metaphors; intensifying 147–51; Language Is Conversation,
metaphors 30, 32, 56, 176; Life Is A Journey,
Clancy, Tom, 60, 91–92 ix–x, 2, 47–48, 110, 125, 136, 153;
Clark, Gregory, 157–58 Life Is A Story, 105–6; Love Is A
Clinton, Bill, 6, 23, 45, 49, 55–56, 58 Journey, ix; Love Is A Physical
Clinton administration, 38, 44–45, 99 Force, 2; Markets Are Containers,
cognitive science, x, 14, 17, 22, 74–76, 9–11, 27, 31–32, 50–51, 54–55, 57,
105, 107, 147 109, 117, 119, 164, 166; Meaning
Cold War, 9, 43, 57, 89–91, 148, 150 Is An Object, 176; Mind Is A Com-
Colomb, Gregory G., 87, 100, 154, puter, The, 133; Mind Is A Ma-
157 chine, The, 2, 150; Moral Account-
comparison view of metaphor, 15 ing, 24; More Is Up, 22, 65, 110,
compatibility of metaphors, 23–24, 26, 112; National Allies Are Friends,
48–51, 54, 96, 101–2, 119, 149–50, 47, 176; Nation As Family, The, 24;
158 Nations Are People, 47, 176; People
composition pedagogy. See writing and Are Plants, 22; Success Is A Place,
composition pedagogy 154; Success Is Up, 65, 112, 154;
conceptual integration, 175 Time Is Money, 22, 53; Trade Is A
conceptual metaphor, theory of, ix–x, Fight, 28; Trade Is Friendship, 12,
2–3, 8, 11–12, 21–24, 31–32, 35, 47–50, 148, 164, 176; Trade Is a
71–72, 93, 98–99, 105, 110, 112, Game, 11–12, 26, 28, 50–55, 57,
117, 136, 147, 150, 152–53, 155– 68, 98, 109, 148–49, 166, 176;
57 Trade Is A Journey, 12, 26, 32, 47–
conceptual metaphors: Argument Is A 50, 56–57, 109, 148, 153, 164, 176;
Game, 149; Argument Is War, 2, 14, Trade Is Litigation, 58; Trade Is Sex,
21–25, 27, 136, 149–50; Argu- 58; Trade Is War, x, 2–4, 8–12, 21,
ments Are Buildings, 27; Armies 25–34, 36–61, 63, 67–68, 70–74,
Are Machines, 119; Businesses Are 85–92, 98–102, 119–121, 136–
Machines, 119; Business Is A Game 137, 139–50, 158–59, 161–64,
119, 128–29; Business Is A Journey, 166–68, 176; Understanding Is See-
122–26, 176; Business Is Building, ing, 2. See also metaphors, com-
126; Business Is War, 60, 121–22, mon; metaphors discussed in focus
127–30, 136–37, 140–46, 162–63, groups
176; Companies Are Animals, 109, conceptual networking, 137, 147–51,
113; Companies Are Machines, 156
109; Conversation Is A Journey, conceptual systems, 24, 26–27, 31, 35–
176; Economy Is A Machine, The, 36, 47, 50, 65, 117, 148
58, 109; Economy Is An Organism, contrastive intercourse, 26–27, 29, 32,
The, 150; Economy Is A Person, 34, 37–38, 48–50
The, 58; Education Is A Journey, copula, simple, 78–79, 83, 89
153–54, 156–58; Emotion Is Hot, Crichton, Michael, 44, 60
176; Female Lovers Are Roses, 76; Crossfire (TV show), 4–12, 54, 59, 70,
Geographical Formations Are Fa- 89
miliar Objects, 65; Goods Are Wa- cunning, communicative, 140, 142–43
Index 189
Darwinism, economic, 112–14 features and attributes, 15–16, 19, 23–

data, 2, 105. See also examples, use of 24, 63, 75–76, 79–81, 83–84, 92–
David Copperfield, 105 93, 95, 110–14, 116–17
Davidson, Donald, 17 focus and frame, xi, 16–17, 19
dead metaphor, xi–xii, 1, 64–67, 69, 71 focus groups, 105, 108–11, 122, 144,
Defoe, Daniel, 36, 42, 61, 87, 159 146, 161, 164
dialogism, 31, 33, 105 formalism, 28, 31, 63, 77, 95–96, 159,
DiPardo, Anne, 106 168
discourse and disciplinary communi- France, 4, 38, 140, 143
ties, 26, 136–39, 141, 143–44, 146– free enterprise, 37, 150
47, 151, 154, 157–60 free trade, 5–6, 11, 44, 58, 68, 148,
discourse of trade, x, 3–4, 8, 11–12, 165
26–27, 30–32, 36, 42–43, 46–48, Friedman, Milton, 126, 135
51, 54, 56–58, 67–69, 86–88, 109, Friedman, Thomas, 5, 70
139, 141–44, 159 Frost, Robert, ix, 48
discursive trajectory, 5–6, 8, 10, 18, 20,
27, 32, 40, 44, 53, 68–69, 77, 81– Gates, Bill, xii, 105, 121–32, 175
82, 90, 94, 142 gender, 162
domains, conceptual and semantic, 14, genre, 28, 76, 106, 156
16, 19, 23–25, 34, 56, 63, 75, 86– Gentner, Dedre, 72, 93–94, 114, 151
87, 92–93 Germany, 39, 45
Dutch and Flemish, 40–42 Gibbs, Raymond, 32, 105, 132, 175
globalism, 5, 7–8, 11, 27, 34, 49, 53,
Eco, Umberto, 13–14 68, 70, 142, 144, 164
economic warfare, 34, 39, 43, 59, 69, Glucksberg, Sam, 88
90–91, 147 Goatly, Andrew, 65–66
Engels, Friedrich, 42–43, 87 Goodman, Nelson, 64–65, 67
England. See Britain
entailments, 9, 22–27, 29, 31–32, 39, Hammerstein, Oscar, 98
46, 48, 50, 52, 54, 56, 58, 69–70, handbooks, x, 153
91, 100, 102, 110, 112, 117–19, Heinz, John, 48, 50–51, 54–55
139–41, 154, 166 Hickey, Dona J., 152
episodic memory, 107 Hills, Carla, 46, 50–51, 54–55, 175
ethos, 42, 46, 50, 55 Hitler, Adolf, 45, 129–30
Europe, 21, 36, 39–41, 52–53, 141– Holmes, Oliver Wendell, Jr., 148
42, 145 Hussein, Saddam, 130
everyday and ordinary language, 12, Hutchins, Edwin, 132
20–22, 47–48, 60, 65, 73, 83, 92, hyperbole, 52, 82, 90
105–6, 112, 147, 154
examples, use of, 14, 17–21, 33, 63, IBM, 71, 109, 122, 124–25
76, 79, 153. See also data idealized cognitive model (ICM), 80
extreme abstraction, 24 identification of metaphor, 2, 16, 32,
62, 65, 74–76, 79, 83–85, 88, 152
Fahnestock, Jeanne, 103 image schemas, 22–23, 26, 31–32, 38–
Fairclough, Norman, 151 40, 48–52, 54, 56, 92–93, 95–98,
Fallows, James, 99–102 100–102, 110–12, 116–20, 122,
family resemblance, 83 126, 140–41, 149–50, 156; con-
Fauconnier, Gilles, 175 tainer, 50, 54, 118, 141; contention,
190 Index
image schemas (continued) Lakoff, George, ix, 1–2, 14, 19, 22,
22–24, 39, 48, 50, 56; cooperative, 24–25, 27, 58, 65, 72, 79–80, 85,
39, 48–49, 52, 101, 116–17, 167; 95, 97, 111, 134, 136, 175
death, 96; game, 52, 54; hostile-ac- Leiber, Jerry, 76
tion, 31, 38, 40, 48, 50, 52, 100– Levin, Sander, 4–11, 70, 89
101, 141; journeying, 48, 126; lin- licensing stories, xii, 93, 105, 108–14,
ear progress, 154, 157; peace, 38– 116–26, 128, 130–31, 135, 144
39, 50; verticality, 96, 110, 112, life span, metaphoric, xi, 62–73
119, 156; war, 24, 48, 50, 102, 144 Linzey, Tim, 72–73, 110
implicative complex and system of as- literal concepts: international trade fi-
sociated commonplaces, 15–16, 93 nances war, 36, 40; money is mili-
inflection of metaphors, 3, 6–8, 14, 18, tary power, 35–36, 40; trade is peace,
25, 27–28, 32, 40, 42–44, 51, 56, 26, 32, 34–40, 43, 45, 47–50, 52,
60, 84, 94, 96, 111, 114, 119, 133, 56, 67, 148, 163–64, 166; trade is
136, 139, 147–49, 151, 158–59, war, 59; war is for economic gain,
166 35–36, 42. See also reference, literal
intensifying metaphors, xi, 7, 9, 11–12, literalization of metaphors, 55, 59–60,
28–29, 32, 45–47, 50–53, 68, 98, 92, 98, 112, 151
100, 120, 128–29, 139, 141, 143, literary language, literary metaphors,
145, 149. See also ascribing meta- and literary examples, 20–22, 47–
phors; attenuating metaphors; 48, 65, 71, 76, 84, 97, 105–6
claiming metaphors
interaction theory of metaphor, 13, 15– MacDonald, Susan Peck, 151
17, 78 mapping, xii, 23–24, 44–46, 56–59,
invariance principle, 95–97, 101, 111 63, 90–102, 105, 107, 109–22, 133,
invention, 46, 155 139, 145, 147–49, 156–57
invisible hand, the, 135–36, 148 Marius, Richard, 153, 155
irony, 57, 59, 103 Marx, Karl, 42–43, 87
Iser, Wolfgang, 20 Marxism, 150–51
McCloskey, Donald, 53, 58, 104–6,
Jakobson, Roman, 104 135–36
Japan, xi, 4–11, 28, 37, 39, 41, 43–45, metaphors, common: college-as-moun-
48–56, 58–60, 68–71, 86–88, 92, tain-climbing, 154–57; education-
99–102, 119, 130, 134, 141–43, as-joining, 135–36, 148; invisible
163 hand, 135–36, 147–51, 158; man
Johnson, Mark, ix, 1–2, 14, 22, 24, 27, is a wolf, 17–19, 21, 167, 175; mar-
58, 65, 134, 136, 175 ketplace of ideas, 137, 147–51,
158; my love is (like) a rose, 18,
Kantor, Mickey, 6 62–63, 75–78, 83; trickle down,
Katz, Albert, 76 135; windowpane theory, 152; zero
Kepler, Johann, 94 sum, 17, 167. See also conceptual
Keysar, Boaz, 88 metaphors; metaphors discussed in
Khrushchev, Nikita, 150 focus groups
Kinsley, Michael, 4–8, 10 metaphors, conceptual. See conceptual
Kittay, Eva Feder, 13, 74–76, 78, 80 metaphor, theory of; conceptual
Korea, 56–57, 68, 79, 118 metaphors
Krugman, Paul, 53, 89 metaphors discussed in focus groups:
Kuhn, Thomas, 16, 94–95, 138 business is a bombing mission, 109;
Index 191
business is a joint excursion, 116; polysemy, 32, 64

business is a two-way street, 109, Porter, James E., 138–39, 157
116; business is combat, 111–12; postmodernism, 41, 159
business is like football, 109; com- preconditioning of metaphor, 19, 159
panies are animals, 113; economy is protectionism, 5–7, 10–11, 36, 43–44,
a machine, the, 109, 114; IBM is a 56–57, 70, 91, 134, 166
giant, 109; IBM is Babe Ruth, 109; prototypes, 60–61, 80–81, 83–85, 87–
markets are bubbles, 109; markets 89
are containers, 117; markets are
fortresses, 109; markets are walled- Raleigh, Sir Walter, 35–36, 175
in spaces, 117; trade is a dance, 109, Reagan administration, 38, 99, 135
114–16; trade is a voyage of explo- recognition of metaphor. See identifica-
ration, 109, 121; trade is war, 109, tion of metaphor
117, 121, 140. See also conceptual Reddy, Michael, 152
metaphors; metaphors, common reference, literal, 68–70, 86–87. See
metonymy, 34–35, 47, 54, 80, 103–4, also literal concepts
132, 160 response, rhetorical, x–xi, 26, 30–31,
Microsoft Corp., 121–22, 124–31 33, 37, 44, 56, 72–73, 98–99, 137,
Mill, John Stuart, 149 140, 157–59
Miller, Carolyn, 152, 159 rhetorical cost, 42, 44, 46, 50–52, 55
Milton, John, 149 rhetorical etiquette, xi–xii, 9–11, 29,
Mitsubishi Corp., 59 32, 46, 50, 55, 61, 73, 101, 139–41,
mixed metaphors, 24, 57, 82 143–47, 158–59, 175
Morita, Akio, 59 Richards, I. A., 14, 16, 20, 92
Mosbacher, Robert A., 56–59 Ricouer, Paul, 13–14, 16, 74
multilateralism. See unilateralism, bi- Rips, Lance, 75–76
lateralism, and multilateralism Rodgers, Richard, 98
Myers, Greg, 106 Rosch, Eleanor, 79–80, 85
Russia. See Soviet Union
narrative. See stories and narrative
negation, 33, 38 Schank, Roger C., 107–8
Netscape, 128 Schön, Donald A., 104, 134–36
Nixon, Richard, 121, 150 scripts, 107
North America Free Trade Agreement Searle, John, 64
(NAFTA), 5 Seitz, James, 152–53
Shakespeare, William, 20, 105, 125
O’Leary, Sean, 59 Shen, Yeshayahu, 78–79
only language, metaphor as, 142–43, simile, 14–15, 72, 75, 86–87, 156
145–46, 148, 163–64 Smith, Adam, 89, 135, 144
ordinary language. See everyday and Soviet Union, 57, 87, 143
ordinary language Spain, 40
Ortony, Andrew, 75 Spector, Phil, 76
speech act theory, 20
Paine, Thomas, 36–37 stories and narrative, 19, 40, 45, 93,
Perry, Matthew, 45, 59, 61 97, 103–8, 110–35, 144, 160
perspectival view of metaphor, 13 substituting metaphors, 9, 69
Plato, 23 Sun Microsystems, 127
point slot, 100–101 Sununu, John, 4–12, 59, 70
192 Index
Super 301 clause, 44–46, 49, 51, 54– United States, xi, 1, 4–8, 18, 21, 24,
56, 58–59, 90 28, 34, 37, 43–45, 47–49, 51–53,
Swales, John, 144, 159 55, 57–60, 68–69, 71, 85–86, 92,
synecdoche, 18, 94, 132 99–101, 113, 120, 126–27, 130,
system of associated commonplaces. 147–48, 150–51, 154, 164–67
See implicative complex and system Uno, Sousuke, 58
of associated commonplaces
Vietnam, war in, 68, 72, 145, 164
target and source, xi, 16, 19, 22, 63, Vygotsky, Lev, 132
75–78, 83, 89, 92–93, 95–96, 102,
105, 114, 116 Weiss, Timothy, 152
tenor and vehicle, xi, 16, 19 Westmoreland, William, 145
3Com Corp., 129–30 Williams, Joseph M., 78, 100, 154,
Thurow, Lester, 38–39, 51–53, 86–87, 157
142–43, 163, 166 Winner, Ellen, 93
topic-comment structure, 78–79 Wittgenstein, Ludwig, 83
Tourangeau, Roger, 75–76 World War II, 34, 45, 59, 62, 70,
trade war, 2, 5–6, 8–10, 21, 31, 42–45, 89, 91, 98, 118–19, 128, 142, 145,
52, 56, 59, 67–71, 88–91, 141, 143 164
truisms, 35, 38, 110, 113, 134, 151, 164 writing and composition pedagogy, 24,
truth value, 38, 40, 111, 131 106, 137, 151–54, 158
Turner, Mark, ix, 19, 21–22, 65, 85–
87, 95–97, 111, 175 Xerox Corp., 131
Tversky, Amos, 79
Yamamoto, Isoroku, 130
unilateralism, bilateralism, and multi-
lateralism, 34–35, 49, 57–58 zeugma, 78–79
Philip Eubanks is an assistant professor of English at Northern Illinois
University, where he teaches courses in rhetoric and technical/professional
writing. His work has appeared in Written Communication, Poetics To-
day, and the Journal of Business and Technical Communication.

The War of Words

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A War of Words

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Library of Congress Cataloging-in-Publication Data

Eubanks, Philip, 1954–

HF1008 .E78 2000

1. A Conversation among Metaphors 1

metaphors demonstrates. Second, I challenge categorical violation. Cat-

Foreign trade is a war in which each party seeks to extract wealth

Metaphor is usually seen as a sentence-level phenomenon—a nonliteral

Metaphors We Live By, identifying groupings of metaphors now com-

executive uses a particularly striking trade-as-war metaphor. The FBI’s

Then [Terry Wilson] said something that was a common phrase

Whether we are offended or amused by “the customer is the enemy,” most

ernment, and perhaps other discourses. Where these discourses converge

Trade Discourse: Strange Bedfellows and Standard Rhetorics

Four Discussants, Eight Positions

Kinsley: The point is what President Clinton is going to propose

second. But Kinsley decries sanctions as “a tax on American consumers.”

The Inflection of Metaphors

plex rhetorical etiquette: claiming, ascribing, substituting, attenuating,

or artillery attacks, probably less heated than swords or muskets. A stick

Trade is warfare by other means, and the United States is losing.

The conversation that surrounds and subsumes metaphors is a sizable

Eco is correct that metaphor theory, even as it struggles to go beyond Aris-

Furthermore, the transfer [of meaning from one semantic domain to

therefore, creates (Black uses “create” in a loose sense) similarity, rather

Black does not claim that communicative circumstances do not matter

The Status of Examples

the conversation of language at large—is precisely what we must con-

conceptual metaphors are singular, unvarying entities. Moreover, while

Because conceptual metaphors have little to do with correspondences

in the context of broadly comprehended scenes of contention. Stabbing

model of the family, and liberals to a nurturing model of family. Of course,

Conceptual Metaphor and Rhetoric

in conversation with conforming and contrasting literal concepts and

and its understood commitments, or just as often, we utter it only in order

of speaking subjects—which is to say, a unit characterized by its partici-

Bakhtin’s notion of language’s dynamic concatenation is profoundly dis-

Friendship, Trade Is A Journey, and trade is peace. These alternate con-

Metaphor and the Literal: Trade Is Peace

A Brief History of “Trade Is Peace”

Clearly, this is no ordinary trade transaction. However, to corrupt Clause-

Defoe is concerned with a specific manner of warring, through mercenary

Paine’s observation may seem commonsensical, but it is not necessarily

Trade is cooperative, I think. When I think of the Japanese and the

The conceptual residue of antiquity is unconsciously re-envoiced by this

“Trade Is Peace” Versus Trade Is War

Thurow’s evaluation of trade is peace underscores just how complex the

History teaches us that strong trading ties are no guarantee of peace-

refers to the “military metaphor,” and he discusses trade is peace as a mat-

Trade Is War and Its Many Inflections

A Brief History of Trade Is War

Strictly speaking, it is difficult to say whether or not this amounts to an

Trade Is War in Recent Years

else-has-already-started-one inflection, preferred only by an alarmist fac-

teenth-century predecessors.” This, of course, links the Super 301 loose

in a scattershot fashion; the warning shot suggests a shot fired by an in-

These relatively cooler images of war are taken from commentaries

Contrasting Metaphors: Trade Is Friendship

phors. For example, Life Is A Journey must be recruited in order to com-

Of course, one could never “walk the path of prosperity” in a contend-

Partially Compatible Metaphors: Markets Are

to claim an alternative metaphor. However, the alternative metaphor need