This is why you feel like you're always wasting time

Metaphors are all over language. And they're influencing the way you think about things like time.

George Lakoff was teaching an undergraduate seminar at UC Berkeley in the 1970s when a student came into class crying. “I’ve got a metaphor problem with my boyfriend. He said our relationship has reached a dead-end street,” she said.

The class topic shifted to help this student make sense of what her boyfriend was telling her.

They knew it was a metaphor that meant the relationship wasn’t going anywhere. Just like when you’re driving a car and you reach a dead-end, you realize that the road you’re on isn’t going anywhere.

The journey of love.

What was interesting was that they realized that the relationship was being viewed as a journey. And they noticed that English is filled with these kinds of expressions:

• It’s been a long, bumpy road.

• We’re going in different directions.

• We’re at a cross-road in this relationship.

• This marriage is on the rocks.

• It’s off-track.

• We’re spinning our wheels.

English speakers, they hypothesized, were taking the abstract, difficult-to-make-sense-of concept of love and using the concrete image of a journey to understand it.

Since that class, Lakoff has spent much of his career working on these language comparisons, known as conceptual metaphors. Spoiler alert: He found it’s not just love being conceptualized as a journey. Conceptual metaphors are all over language.

Your time is valuable

The metaphors we use to make sense of the world around us are culturally specific. Perhaps the best example of this is the metaphor that time is money (the very fact that we have this expression in English is further proof of how entangled these terms are). We appear to use the same verbs we use for money for time, as well:

• I spent so much time on that.

• I wasted hours setting it up.

• I saved time by taking the freeway.

• That detour cost me an hour.

• I need to budget my time better.

• I invested a lot of time on the project.

Time is money.

The conceptual metaphor “time is money” has allowed us to organize our society in such a way in which an elusive concept like time is suddenly quantifiable and understood. For example, we’ve structured the workplace in terms of hourly wages, yearly budgets, interest on loans.

Lakoff argues that the existence of these expressions in our language affect the way we think about time. This isn’t difficult to imagine in our hustle-culture age. Time is very much something that could be wasted, gained, and budgeted. Just open Youtube and you’ll see videos on how to waste less time and make more time in your day.

But time is just time. In other cultures in which time isn’t viewed as a commodity, time cannot be stopped and packaged (if you think about it, it’s really weird that we act like we can stop time and package it). And by consequence, in these cultures they likely don’t stress about wasting their time (at least not in the same sense that we do).

Argument is War

Similarly, in English we conceptualize arguments as wars. We use terms like:

• Find the weak points in the argument.

• All she cares about is winning the argument.

• My boss shot down all my arguments.

• You don’t agree? Okay, shoot!

These phrases, Lakoff and Johnson (2008) believe, show that English speakers think of argument as if it were war. They want to beat their opponent. They want to attack their positions.

The words create the reality in which their actions (e.g. what they say, how they act) are dictated by these metaphors. Arguments may look different across languages, depending on how they conceptualize arguing. If they conceptualize it as dance, for example, it might affect the form in which they argue.

The big deal to Lakoff and Johnson is that metaphors affect cognition, how speakers think about things. English speakers understand that argument and war are different things. However, they use the concept of war to understand arguments. This, in turn, shapes how they approach arguing.

Plagiarism is Disease

What happens when people manipulate conceptual metaphors? Keefer et al. (2020) did an experiment to see if they could lessen the amount of plagiarism done by undergraduate students by presenting plagiarism to them through the metaphor of disease. They presented the test group with language like:

• Plagiarism is a disease that is infecting campuses around the country

• To prevent plagiarism

• The spread of plagiarism

The results found that the participants in the test group perceived plagiarism as more serious than the control group (they received a paragraph that didn’t contain a metaphor).

Plagiarism is disease.

Manipulating the language and creating a conceptual metaphor—a way to make sense of the issue of plagiarism in terms of something they knew was bad—affected the participant’s thoughts.

These studies hint that the language we use to speak about things affect the way we think about them. In other words, how we say things may be as important as what we say.

Never without some criticism

A large piece of criticism of Lakoff’s work has to do with the fact that it’s largely based on the researcher’s intuition.

McGlone (2007) gives a funny example. He writes about the idiom spitting image, as in “she’s the spitting image of her mother,” (which means she looks exactly like her mother).

Intuitively, we, as researchers, may think that that’s a conceptual metaphor which compares spit to an uncanny resemblance. And we’ll go through the English language searching for other examples that may fit our hunch.

But wait, McGlone (2007) says, we could do that, and we could find matches. The problem is that our initial hunch is wrong. The phrase spitting image is a contraction of the longer historical version the spirit and the image.

So it’s not that conceptually we’re viewing spit as an uncanny experience. It’s simply a coincidence that spirit and contracted into spitting.

It comes from historical linguistic changes, outside of cognition.

Much of Lakoff’s work finds these patterns in language and assumes that the pattern is a result of cognition, or thinking about these concepts as being similar. However, there’s no proof of that, and as McGlone says, many could just be coincidences.

Conclusion

Whether you believe conceptual metaphors affect the way we think about the world, it’s interesting to be aware of these patterns.

For one, if English is a language you’re learning, you can make sense of several phrases that otherwise would seem confusing.

Many learners will ask questions, like “Why do you say waste time and not lose time?” Teaching the conceptual metaphor time is money can give them an answer¹.

Conceptual metaphors also give us a rhetorical strategy for persuasion, as the plagiarism article showed. It shows us the power of how we can use language to affect people’s thoughts. It also makes us aware of how other’s may be doing the same to us—whether intentionally or not.

Discussion

Thank you so much for reading this article! I would love if you commented below or replied to this email telling me:

1. Do you think conceptual metaphors affect the way we think about concepts, like time or love? Why or why not?

2. If you’re multilingual, do the conceptual metaphors discussed in this article exist in the other languages you speak?

Work Cited

The introduction was based on this video by George Lakoff.

The majority of the examples come from this book:

Lakoff, G., & Johnson, M. (2008). Metaphors we live by. University of Chicago press.

The plagiarism study can be found here:

Keefer, L. A., Brown, M., & Rothschild, Z. K. (2020). Framing plagiarism as a disease heightens students' valuation of academic integrity. International Journal of Psychology, 55(2), 210-214.

1. It would also make a great activity to ask students if they use the same phrases in their first languages. Do they also use the same verbs for time/money, for example?