Word: metaphors
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Dates: during 2000-2009
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...disagreement with somebody and you acknowledge what they're feeling, it can really help them hear you," he says. And while he acknowledges that some within his firm were concerned about the image of a disabled athlete, they became convinced that the one-legged runner was an apt visual metaphor for overcoming adversity...
...Harvard to deliver the prestigious Charles Eliot Norton lectures. Judging by their content, one could think Borges was not in touch with the profound transformations occurring all around him—rather than talking politics, he devoted the lectures to his recurrent literary themes: remembering and forgetting, poetry and metaphor, the craft of verse...
...ideas fail to amount to much in the end because their creators don't bother to do any research on who else has already tried something similar and then what roadblocks they ran into. Ignoring the work of others, Sindell says, is a form of laziness hidden behind "the metaphor trap of 'not reinventing the wheel.' In reality, the wheel gets reinvented all the time because we need an almost infinite variety of wheels. The gear was a reinvention of the wheel, as was the pneumatic tire. Nano wheels are being invented that will [run] nano machines, coming soon...
...course, not all economic metaphors are as long-lasting as the housing "bubble." Back in the beginning of 2008, when we were all still skittish about actually using the word recession, one metaphor some people turned to was that of an economic "undertow": it takes you out to sea. But undertow didn't make it into the canon - do you ever hear people talking about how much the undertow is easing up? - which leads to an important lesson...
...quite some time, but it took a while for the OED to give them their own entries. "We're not going to just put in buzzwords," says Sheidlower. "We're not going to put in something that will go away three months from now." Which is perhaps a good metaphor for economic metaphors. Just because we use a phrase in conversation today doesn't mean that it will shape the way we think tomorrow...