Category: Metaphors
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Situational metaphors, satire and sense-making
I was idly perusing Bluesky on 13 August when I read this exchange: “This evening, a fire truck was coming from the opposite direction, sirens blaring, lights blazing. There was an obstinate car that refused to make way. I later realized it was a Waymo driverless car. It didn’t know better. I hope that clueless…
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Let there be light!
We recently visited Derby and, for the first time in forty years, I actually went into the Cathedral. It doesn’t look very prepossessing from the outside, but boy the inside is great. It is full of light. It was built in 1725 and reflects and interacts with the ideas and values of the Enlightenment era. I…
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The Making Science Public blog: An introduction
I have now said farewell several times to my old university blogging platform, but I haven’t really started building up a new readership here. Newbies to the blog might wonder what the old Making Science Public blog was all about; what topics it covered before venturing to press the subscribe button….. As a gentle introduction…
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Synthesising genomes: Future promises, past metaphors
Yesterday morning I was packing for a holiday and briefly listened to the Today programme on Radio 4, just at the time that Pallab Ghosh was talking about a new initiative funded by the Wellcome Trust, namely a new Synthetic Human Genome (SynHG) project. I didn’t really have time to listen or read about it…
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Geoengineering and metaphors, 2009 to 2025: Continuity and change
Since around 2006, I have been interested in speculations about geoengineering, that is, attempts to deal with climate change by directly intervening in the planet’s atmosphere, oceans, or land. Such interventions include pulling carbon dioxide from the atmosphere or dampening solar radiation. In the UK there have been three inflection points in reflections about such…
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The (not) de-extinct dire wolf: Metaphors, myths and magic
This post is a collaboration between Brigitte Nerlich and Kate Roach, both retired social scientists with interests in science, culture and society. *** I (Brigitte) first heard about the dire wolf in a post by the science writer Carl Zimmer linking to an article he had written for the New York Times. I had never…
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Compound weather: Some linguistic musings
You might have heard of a ‘compound fracture’ or of ‘compound interest’ or even, if you are a linguist, of a ‘compound noun’ (nouns consisting of more than one noun). But have you come across ‘compound weather’? I recently came across this expression when looking at some extreme weather disasters which were compounded by compound…
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Steel porcupine: A metal metaphor for our times
When Covid spread I started to collect metaphors. Now the world has suddenly changed again. Metaphors of fighting a virus are replaced by talk about fighting literal wars. But metaphors are never far away. European leaders gathered in London on 2 March 2025 to talk about the Ukraine-Russia-US situation and make plans for a just…
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Planes, ships and metaphors
We all know that meaning in language only happens in context. Words don’t mean in isolation; they acquire meaning in context. Metaphors even more so. The word ‘pig’ means different things in a farmyard, during a policy encounter or when a mother visits a teenager’s room. Mostly, meanings emerge in context because a speaker has…
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Floods and fires: Reciprocal metaphorical mappings in crisis response
Psychologists, sociologists, linguists and many others have studied how people respond to extreme weather events, such as floods or wildfires. Some linguists have been interested in particular in analysing the use and impact of metaphors. When we studied the 2021 German floods, Rusi Jaspal and I found that floods were either metaphorically framed as human,…
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