The metaphorical uses of the word "the economy"
University of Neuchatel. Seminar: Metaphors. David Wilson. Summer semester 2005.
1. Introduction 1
2. How to detect metaphors?
3. The metaphorical gradient
4. Metaphors as manipulation
5. "The economy": a thing with strange properties.
6. "THE ECONOMY" IS A THING
7. "THE ECONOMY" IS A NUMBER
8. "THE Economy" Is a place
9. "THE Economy" is a complex thing
10. "the economy" is a person
11. Zooming
12. Conclusion
1. Introduction
In this work, I analyse some of the metaphorical uses of the word "the economy" and the way they can affect our understanding of economic phenomena. However, I argue that there is no solution of continuity between metaphorical and non-metaphorical uses of a word, but a gradient going from non-metaphorical or slightly metaphorical expressions up to very metaphorical expressions. All of them should be analysed together, as parts of the same semantic system. In the case of the word "the economy" –as defined in section 5 below–, it can be used in two ways, either as a simple thing deprived of inner complexity or as a complex thing or territory, and both typically metaphorical and arguably non-metaphorical uses of the word are to be found in each category. I argue that such a process, where the language provides two ways of considering the same thing, either from inside or from outside, is very prevalent in the language and in our cognition.
2. How to detect metaphors?
When a speaker affirms (or implies, as many examples in this paper will show) that "A is B", how can we know it is a metaphor? I will not aim at a full definition here, but I think that everybody would agree about one essential criterion: the affirmation that "A is B", taken in an literal sense, needs to be false. However, how can we decide it is false? If you say: “My neighbour is an animal”, it can be a metaphor or not depending on your position on the scale ranging from "Creationists" –who think that human beings are no animals at all– to "Darwinists" –who think that human beings are unambiguously animals. It depends on your mood too: in real life, the by far most likely interpretation of that sentence is metaphorical and derogatory, even if uttered by the staunchest Darwinist. To take another example, if someone says that “Victor Hugo is a god”, we normally understand this as a metaphor, but this is a most ethnocentric view, since Victor Hugo is after all one of the three main divinities of the Vietnamese religion Cao Dai.
Ideally, the speaker's opinion should be the one that matters. However, if the linguist does not know what the speaker means, there is nothing they can do except rely on their own intuition: If "A is B" is false in the linguist’s opinion, “A is B” is a metaphor. Of course, the objectivity of this approach is very questionable. The most scientific way to tackle particular instances of metaphors in particular contexts might consist in conducting opinion pools, but this is not sure at all, because it would probably not be so easy to get "normal" informants (i.e. people who are no linguists) interested in such absurdly abstract questions as "is this a metaphor or not?". Furthermore, I would not have enough space in this paper to list the results, so I contented myself with the "bad subjective approach".
3. The metaphorical gradient
It is often impossible to decide if a particular use of a word is metaphorical or not. There is rather a "metaphorical gradient", i.e., some metaphors are "more metaphorical" than others, as the made-up examples below illustrate:
1. Deeply touched by the misery of the poor, the booming economy has kindly provided them with housing, food and legal drugs.
2. The booming economy has provided the poor with housing, food and legal drugs.
3. Thanks to the country's booming economy, the poor have been provided with housing, food and legal drugs.
4. In the context of a booming economy, the poor got access to housing, food and legal drugs.
Example 1 is clearly a metaphor, since it implies that the economy has enough consciousness to be "deeply touched", but not everybody might agree whether examples 2-4 are metaphorical or not. Example 4 is clearly less metaphorical than example 2, because the subject of the verb "to provide" is normally an agent –often human–, which is not an obvious feature for an "economy". Number 3 could be less metaphorical than number 2, because the object of the preposition "thanks to" probably carries less "agency taint" than the subject of "to provide". A possible definition for the metaphorical gradient could be: The more semantic constraints are violated –both in quantity and in intensity– the more metaphorical an expression is. This entails two important points:
The more concrete the target domain, the less metaphorical an expression. A COMPANY IS A PERSON is less metaphorical than "THE ECONOMY" IS A PERSON. A company can me metonymically identified with its managers, so it sounds less absurd to endow a company with human features than to do so with an "economy".
The more concrete the source domain, the more metaphorical an expression. "THE ECONOMY" IS A PERSON is more metaphorical than "THE ECONOMY" IS A LIVING THING, because "a person" is endowed with more semantic features to be violated than "a living thing".
This second example illustrates another important point. The more metaphorical expression presupposes the less metaphorical one. "The economy" can be a person only if it is a living thing. And it can be a living thing only because it is supposed to have certain properties like moving, reacting, etc. It is not essential to decide whether it is metaphorical or not to attribute such qualities to "the economy". It matters much more to understand that this is the ground on which the more typical metaphors will be built.
The notion of metaphorical gradient rises many issues that cannot be tackled in this paper. For example, how is the metaphorical gradient related to the well-known notions of "live" and "dead" metaphors? On the one hand, it can be argued that a metaphor could be dead, like "the leg of the table", but still be "very metaphorical", since "animacy", an essential semantic feature of "legs", is violated very strongly. On the other hand, it can be argued that in that particular expression this semantic feature is very much attenuated, if not dead altogether.
4. Metaphors as manipulation
Economy has a central place in the value system of our society, as it were our principal religion. An amazing number of decisions are taken in the name of "the economy". There are several systems of economic beliefs, just as there are several religions. As in religion, believers in a system will tend to affirm that their own system is the truth. The economic field is a battlefield, and not always a merely metaphorical one, witness the big demonstrations and police display outside each WTO or G7 meeting. So it would be naïve not to address the language used in this field without being very careful.
Do people purposefully use metaphors in a manipulative way, i.e. do they try to prevent other people from understanding the pros and cons of certain issues and from making up their own opinion? The political field provides us with a candidate for a manipulative metaphor: "the Axis of Evil". This phrase, purposefully coined for the White House, might lead the listener to believe two obviously wrong things:
1. "Evil" is a machine. Only machines have axes. It follows that "Evil" is an organic whole, whose parts work together, as if all enemies of America where united in a coherent organization with a well defined hierarchy.
2. There is an "Axis" comparable to the Axis of World War II (However, contrary to Germany, Italy and Japan, the new "Axis powers" –Iran, Iraq and North Korea– never planned to attack America with their armies and, above all, have never signed a pact together).
In an evil and manipulative attempt to make my case more convincing, I have intentionally chosen an example linked with George Bush, a most unpopular person in Europe, whom everyone would suspect of manipulation. However, I must unfortunately admit that I cannot demonstrate that the "Axis of Evil" is a manipulative metaphor, as defined above. It might well have been simply pedagogical in the mind of its promoters, who just wanted to convey the information that those countries were as dangerous as the Axis once was, though of course in a different way. As a matter of fact, the White House have never affirmed anything like points 1 and 2 above. Anyway, the large majority of the user of the metaphor have probably not analysed carefully its implications and just want to sound fashionable or colourful.
This example shows the big advantage of manipulative metaphors over lies: no one can prove you have actually done it, it is a crime as safe as a Swiss bank. It is a planet the linguists must know about but that will never be open to exploration. All we can do is demonstrate that certain metaphors lead to believe wrong things, but the mind behind the language will remain unfathomable.
5. "The economy": a thing with strange properties.
The word "economy" has several meanings. In this paper I concentrate on only one of those meanings, defined by the two dictionary definitions below:
"the system of trade and industry by which the wealth of a country is made and used" (Cambridge Advanced Language Dictionnary)
"a system of producing, distributing, and consuming wealth" (Webster).
These definitions show that "the economy" is actually a strange thing, which uses what it makes (or consumes what it produces), a modern avatar of Penelope. When we say that "the economy is doing well", it is just as saying: "Penelope has worked very well today, she has made and unmade a huge amount of tapestry". This ambivalence can be illustrated by the common collocation "contribute to the economy", which can be used either for the workers that produces wealth and earn money or for the consumers that spend their money.
However, the supply-side of the economy is clearly dominant, at least in the language. Determiners referring to the way an economy produces wealth: "peasant economy, manufacturing economy, industrial or post-industrial economy, service economy" are much more common than expressions that refer to the way wealth is used, like "leisure economy" or "subsistence economy".
Not only is the economy two-faced, but it seems to be able to take over all kind of thematic roles, as illustrated in the chart below1:
Economy as "subject"
Economy as "non-subject"
1. Possession
"the economy's goods and services"
"Britain has a service economy"
2. Movement
"The economy is moving to a recession"
"…bring industry and the economy within the framework of a Fascist, Nazi state"
3. Location
"adverse trading position of the British economy"
"in the economy"
4. Condition
"the British economy staged a revival in that decade".
"revive the economy"
5. Activity
"the economy is doing well"
"run the economy", "boost the economy", "direct the economy", "manage the economy", "mismanage the economy"
6. Creation
"the economy produces wealth"
"create a new form of economy"
7. Growth
"the economy is growing"
"expanding the economy out of the slump"
However, the impression of symmetry given by the chart is misleading. Some of the metaphors in it are more productive than others. They are discussed in the following sections.
6. "THE ECONOMY" IS A THING
We cannot affirm with certainty that economy is a thing. After all, Thatcher’s possibly most famous sentence was "There is no such thing as society". If we affirm that “there is no such thing as economy”, it follows that "THE ECONOMY IS A THING" is a metaphor.
A "thing" seems at first sight to be an empty concept, totally deprived of any semantic features. But this is not true; we expect certain characteristics from a thing. For example, "the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower" is normally not considered as one thing, but as two things. A typical thing should have some inherent unity, for example not be located simultaneously on two far off continents, not move up and down simultaneously, not grow bigger and smaller simultaneously, etc.
When we hear that "the economy is growing", it is supposed to mean that it produces and uses "more wealth" –according to the definitions in section 3–, but usually it just means that it produces "more", as in the hypothetical cases below:
more weapons, an increase in criminality follows, more jails
an increase in the condemnation of innocent people, even more jails
more tobacco
more cars and more cures because of more car accidents
more tranquillisers for people that should better not use them (like in France, the world's Number One in tranquillisers addiction)
more hamburgers for obese people
more oil, because people have to drive longer to go to work
From these examples, we could induce that it is possible for a "growing economy" to produce less wealth, i.e. to shrink. If we consider that a typical "thing" should not grow and shrink at the same time, we should not consider "the economy" as a thing.
When the economy "gets better", it is usually supposed to mean that people get richer or get better opportunities to get rich. But what shall we do with the numerous cases when some people's enrichment is linked with other people's impoverishment? If oil price rises, it is good for oil sellers but bad news for oil buyers. It is of course similar for real estate and many other things. Pay rises are usually considered good news, but the common collocation "wage inflation" is normally to be found in disapproving contexts and is normally supposed to be "bad for the economy", as in
"Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov disclosed grim new evidence of wage inflation here".
This notion of "wage inflation", combined with current believes about "the economy", leads us to the following demonstration:
If your salary does not rise, the economy fares well,
if the economy fares well, your salary rises,
if your salary rises, the economy fares badly.
Therefore: if the economy fares well, it fares badly.
We do certainly not expect prototypical "things" to get worse every time they get better. However, we hear everyday in the medias that the economy grows or contract, gets better or worse. Is this omnipresent metaphor, "THE ECONOMY" IS A THING, used in a manipulative way? As I explained above, it is impossible to demonstrate. But I definitely think it is a misleading metaphor.
7. "THE ECONOMY" IS A NUMBER
Personally, when I want to know the size of such a simple thing as two-dimensional sheet of paper, I need too numbers: length and width. Surprisingly enough, very complex things are supposed to be one-dimensional and measurable with one number only. For example, human intelligence is supposed to be measurable with the IQ and "the economy" is supposed to be measurable with the GNP. Most economists will agree that the notion GNP is theoretical, i.e. by definition a simplification of reality. However, in common usage, the economy is the GNP, as when we hear that "the economy has grown by 5%".
A number can go up and down with a flourish of colourful expressions, as witnessed by the rich vocabulary used to describe price fluctuations. Indeed, prices can leap, rise, shoot up, rocket or soar, until they touch a certain level or even the top, or until they peak or reach a peak. If the prices do not move, you can boost them, shove them up, raise them, lift them or prop them up. If they do too much, cool them or put a lid on them. On the contrary, prices can also drop, fall, tumble or recede from a peak, until they get to rock bottom
(the majority of these example is from the Financial Times).
Many of these expressions used with prices can be used with other figures, like oil outputs, investment flows, quota ceilings, union membership, etc. All of them could possibly also be used with the GNP. i.e. "the economy". I found such examples as "lift the economy out of recession", "economic rebound" or "the economy sinks into deeper gloom". I have read somewhere on the Internet that in Chinese culture, "the economy" is very often metaphorised as the sea, with its tides and ebbs.
But actually, "the economy" rather tends to move forwards:
A poor country's fragile economy just can't keep up with population growth.
But in the past five years the economy has been pulled along at an even faster pace than that medited by its industrial over-achievers.
Weaknesses in the financial system will hamper the real economy's ability to pull through the hard days now at hand.
Not surprisingly, I have seen cartoons where "the economy" was represented as a car or a plane. It can decelerate, be sluggish or slow down. However, economic slowdown is often depicted by the language as an external obstacle. "The economy" can "move into a recession" or "be in a recession". Recessions can even become full-fledged geographic obstacles:
The recession of the 1870s was shallow, but one that took the economy a long time to climb out of.
However, Mr Dennis also reckons that the current GNP numbers (still subject to revision) may be under-estimating the true steepness of the current downturn.
By a surprising inversion of the metaphor, crises themselves can go up or grow:
The occasion of the revolution would be a culminatory economic crisis.
But what was really neutralizing the power of the unions was the growing economic crisis and resultant unemployment.
8. "THE Economy" Is a place
Everything can happen "in the economy", you can have a "role in the economy", or make an "intervention in the economy", there can be "excess capacity in economy", "employment in the economy", an "amount of money in the economy", "trends in the economy" or even "growth in the economy". Other spatial prepositions are possible, although less common:
Certain democratic aspects of the British polity have heaped problems on to the capitalist economy…
Britain is moving to a service economy
The economy has sectors and has a "supply-side" and presumably a "demand-side". I feel that it is already more metaphorical than the previous examples, because the spatial semantic feature of "sides" or "sectors" are presumably less worn out than it is the case with "in" and the other spatial prepositions, but I really do not know if this felling would be shared by other people. However, there are clearly "more metaphorical" instances too, for example "the heartland of the modern economy" (Galbraith), "a centralized economy" or "Britain is a service economy", where "the economy" seems to be viewed as a country that has to be administered.
9. "THE Economy" is a complex thing
This metaphor is clearly related to the previous one, because a territory is a kind of complex thing and a complex thing has normally some extension in the space. However, there is no clear hierarchical relation between them. "THE ECONOMY" IS A COMPLEX THING means that the economy is endowed with different "parts":
"Professional producer services, such as accountancy, advertising agencies, merchant banks and legal practices, have become an increasingly important component in the British economy."
"…a more rural economy which was nevertheless also heavily dependent on its armaments and mining industries."
Whether this vision of "the economy" as a complex thing is metaphorical or not, it is a ground for clearly metaphorical expressions, as "THE ECONOMY" IS AN ARMY or "THE ECONOMY" IS A MACHINE (unfortunately I have lost the examples). Another important metaphor seems to be "THE ECONOMY" IS A COMPANY:
"Our credibility as an economy"
"A cost on the economy"
However, companies are often described through more concrete metaphors than economies, amongst which many human features:
private equity arm (Financial Times, 19.3.5)
CVC eyes Post Danmark (Financial Times, 19.3.5)
…giving the Central Bank virtually a free hand (Financial Times, 19.3.5)
the polyglot corporation. It combines great size with highly diverse lines of manufacture (J.K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State)
It is not unconceivable to endow the economy with such features and I hypothesize it sometimes happens. However, an economy is a much less concrete being than a company and is bound to be anthropomorphized much less often and less intensely, just as an octopus will be anthropomorphized less than a chimpanzee.
10. "the economy" is a person
The economy is like children. You have to help it so that it can help you in the future:
The aim is to build Labour's credibility by creating an economy which will sustain higher spending on its social programme.
You have to do certain things for the economy, "the needs of the economy" are often mentioned. You should try to communicate with it, you might get an answer:
It is clear that the economy is already responding to the measures we have taken.
So the economy can "perform", it can "export things", it can "work", be "adaptive and dynamic". You need a strong economy, else you are in trouble:
The weakness of the economy still makes it harder for companies to service their debt.
As for the "state of the economy" or "the condition of the economy", the economy has to be "healthy". Incidentally, if it is not, it is very seldom "unhealthy" or "sick", but usually "ailing":
…he offered few new prescriptions for the ailing economy…
Economic diseases are usually economic:
…the UK economy is suffering from severe structural weaknesses
A metaphor like this one is exceptional:
That compares to the seventy billion pounds that Japan recently injected into its own economy on feeling an economic cold coming on.
As seen in the example above, the usual cure for an ailing economy is money, which has to be injected. However, it is a potentially dangerous cure:
…injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy…
Crazy doctors can be really dangerous:
Anyway, why put a new straitjacket around the economy until recovery is more than a twinkle in the market's eye?
The last example shows us how far the personification of the economy can go. Actually, an economy even seems to have a consciousness and experience things (not always pleasant, however):
in an economy already experiencing positive inflation
an economy experiencing substantial levels of unemployment
…the [german] economy is in trouble (Wall Street Journal Europe, 24.3.2005)
The economy can even be "immature". Fortunately, it can still "enjoy growth".
11. Zooming
In the examples of the preceding sections, "the economy" is either viewed as a very simple thing that can only go up, down or forwards, or as a complex territory, machine or organization. This has nothing to do with the evocative power of the metaphors: a phrase like "the economy sinks into deeper gloom" could well be uttered by a speaker that only knows that the GNP is going to decrease and thinks about "the economy" as something uni-dimensional.
I propose to call "zooming" this type of semantic process, where you can view something alternatively from inside and outside. I have strong presumption that it is not only relevant for "the economy", but for thousands of other words, and even for many function words or grammatical categories. For example, the difference between "in" and "at" in English is often described in comparable terms:
We use at when we see the cities as points on a journey, and in when we see them as enclosed areas where we stayed for some time.2
The French partitive article is a related case. When a speaker says "du vin", this involves that the wine in question can be divided, which is already characteristic of some complexity, while "le vin" can be used without reference to inner complexity. However, the partitive article is a restricted case of zooming, since the stuff in question –e.g. "du vin", "du monde", or "du bois"– is viewed as homogeneous. The Russian distinction between perfective and imperfective verbs –often compared to the French partitive– is probably another case of restricted zooming.
12. Conclusion
Although this paper focused on a very restricted theme –the metaphorical uses of one word in one of its meanings–, I clearly have not exhausted the subject and I have not discovered all the current metaphors in existence. If further research is pursued on this topic, my general believes about language lead me to hypothesize that
a few categories not mentioned in this paper are still to be discovered,
no two persons working on this subject would come up with exactly the same categories,
some isolated metaphors would not fall easily into any category.
Language is systematic to a great extent, otherwise we could not use it. However, the systems of two speakers will never completely overlap and any speaker always has the possibility to invent new irregular things at odd with the system.
Metaland, the land of metaphors, has characteristics that would bewilder even Einstein. In real life, if a car is a moving thing, you cannot infer that every moving thing is a car. In Metaland, as soon as the speaker community has accepted that "the economy" is a moving thing, then it is universally acceptable and understandable to transform "the economy" into whatever every type of vehicle, animal, climatic phenomenon or other moving thing you can think of.
While these examples are still compatible with the traditional conceptual metaphors framework, it must be emphasised that Metaland space (which could be called the metaspace) has distinctive properties of its own. For example, it does not make any difference to be inside or outside something. There can be "recession in the economy" while "the economy faces recession" or "growth in the economy" instead of "the growth of the economy". Who would say such a thing as "there has been a lot of growth in my child lately, I am very impressed"? This "suspension of physical laws" in the "metaspace" has probably a claim for further research.
I am still not sure whether it makes sense to say that "THE ECONOMY IS A THING" is a metaphor. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that it is an abstract notion and that abstract notions share certain things in common with metaphors, like "the suspension of physical laws", replaced by another type of logic. This other type of logic is not every day logic, but rather every night logic, the crazy logic at work in our dreams.
University of Neuchatel. Seminar: Metaphors. David Wilson. Summer semester 2005.
1. Introduction 1
2. How to detect metaphors?
3. The metaphorical gradient
4. Metaphors as manipulation
5. "The economy": a thing with strange properties.
6. "THE ECONOMY" IS A THING
7. "THE ECONOMY" IS A NUMBER
8. "THE Economy" Is a place
9. "THE Economy" is a complex thing
10. "the economy" is a person
11. Zooming
12. Conclusion
1. Introduction
In this work, I analyse some of the metaphorical uses of the word "the economy" and the way they can affect our understanding of economic phenomena. However, I argue that there is no solution of continuity between metaphorical and non-metaphorical uses of a word, but a gradient going from non-metaphorical or slightly metaphorical expressions up to very metaphorical expressions. All of them should be analysed together, as parts of the same semantic system. In the case of the word "the economy" –as defined in section 5 below–, it can be used in two ways, either as a simple thing deprived of inner complexity or as a complex thing or territory, and both typically metaphorical and arguably non-metaphorical uses of the word are to be found in each category. I argue that such a process, where the language provides two ways of considering the same thing, either from inside or from outside, is very prevalent in the language and in our cognition.
2. How to detect metaphors?
When a speaker affirms (or implies, as many examples in this paper will show) that "A is B", how can we know it is a metaphor? I will not aim at a full definition here, but I think that everybody would agree about one essential criterion: the affirmation that "A is B", taken in an literal sense, needs to be false. However, how can we decide it is false? If you say: “My neighbour is an animal”, it can be a metaphor or not depending on your position on the scale ranging from "Creationists" –who think that human beings are no animals at all– to "Darwinists" –who think that human beings are unambiguously animals. It depends on your mood too: in real life, the by far most likely interpretation of that sentence is metaphorical and derogatory, even if uttered by the staunchest Darwinist. To take another example, if someone says that “Victor Hugo is a god”, we normally understand this as a metaphor, but this is a most ethnocentric view, since Victor Hugo is after all one of the three main divinities of the Vietnamese religion Cao Dai.
Ideally, the speaker's opinion should be the one that matters. However, if the linguist does not know what the speaker means, there is nothing they can do except rely on their own intuition: If "A is B" is false in the linguist’s opinion, “A is B” is a metaphor. Of course, the objectivity of this approach is very questionable. The most scientific way to tackle particular instances of metaphors in particular contexts might consist in conducting opinion pools, but this is not sure at all, because it would probably not be so easy to get "normal" informants (i.e. people who are no linguists) interested in such absurdly abstract questions as "is this a metaphor or not?". Furthermore, I would not have enough space in this paper to list the results, so I contented myself with the "bad subjective approach".
3. The metaphorical gradient
It is often impossible to decide if a particular use of a word is metaphorical or not. There is rather a "metaphorical gradient", i.e., some metaphors are "more metaphorical" than others, as the made-up examples below illustrate:
1. Deeply touched by the misery of the poor, the booming economy has kindly provided them with housing, food and legal drugs.
2. The booming economy has provided the poor with housing, food and legal drugs.
3. Thanks to the country's booming economy, the poor have been provided with housing, food and legal drugs.
4. In the context of a booming economy, the poor got access to housing, food and legal drugs.
Example 1 is clearly a metaphor, since it implies that the economy has enough consciousness to be "deeply touched", but not everybody might agree whether examples 2-4 are metaphorical or not. Example 4 is clearly less metaphorical than example 2, because the subject of the verb "to provide" is normally an agent –often human–, which is not an obvious feature for an "economy". Number 3 could be less metaphorical than number 2, because the object of the preposition "thanks to" probably carries less "agency taint" than the subject of "to provide". A possible definition for the metaphorical gradient could be: The more semantic constraints are violated –both in quantity and in intensity– the more metaphorical an expression is. This entails two important points:
The more concrete the target domain, the less metaphorical an expression. A COMPANY IS A PERSON is less metaphorical than "THE ECONOMY" IS A PERSON. A company can me metonymically identified with its managers, so it sounds less absurd to endow a company with human features than to do so with an "economy".
The more concrete the source domain, the more metaphorical an expression. "THE ECONOMY" IS A PERSON is more metaphorical than "THE ECONOMY" IS A LIVING THING, because "a person" is endowed with more semantic features to be violated than "a living thing".
This second example illustrates another important point. The more metaphorical expression presupposes the less metaphorical one. "The economy" can be a person only if it is a living thing. And it can be a living thing only because it is supposed to have certain properties like moving, reacting, etc. It is not essential to decide whether it is metaphorical or not to attribute such qualities to "the economy". It matters much more to understand that this is the ground on which the more typical metaphors will be built.
The notion of metaphorical gradient rises many issues that cannot be tackled in this paper. For example, how is the metaphorical gradient related to the well-known notions of "live" and "dead" metaphors? On the one hand, it can be argued that a metaphor could be dead, like "the leg of the table", but still be "very metaphorical", since "animacy", an essential semantic feature of "legs", is violated very strongly. On the other hand, it can be argued that in that particular expression this semantic feature is very much attenuated, if not dead altogether.
4. Metaphors as manipulation
Economy has a central place in the value system of our society, as it were our principal religion. An amazing number of decisions are taken in the name of "the economy". There are several systems of economic beliefs, just as there are several religions. As in religion, believers in a system will tend to affirm that their own system is the truth. The economic field is a battlefield, and not always a merely metaphorical one, witness the big demonstrations and police display outside each WTO or G7 meeting. So it would be naïve not to address the language used in this field without being very careful.
Do people purposefully use metaphors in a manipulative way, i.e. do they try to prevent other people from understanding the pros and cons of certain issues and from making up their own opinion? The political field provides us with a candidate for a manipulative metaphor: "the Axis of Evil". This phrase, purposefully coined for the White House, might lead the listener to believe two obviously wrong things:
1. "Evil" is a machine. Only machines have axes. It follows that "Evil" is an organic whole, whose parts work together, as if all enemies of America where united in a coherent organization with a well defined hierarchy.
2. There is an "Axis" comparable to the Axis of World War II (However, contrary to Germany, Italy and Japan, the new "Axis powers" –Iran, Iraq and North Korea– never planned to attack America with their armies and, above all, have never signed a pact together).
In an evil and manipulative attempt to make my case more convincing, I have intentionally chosen an example linked with George Bush, a most unpopular person in Europe, whom everyone would suspect of manipulation. However, I must unfortunately admit that I cannot demonstrate that the "Axis of Evil" is a manipulative metaphor, as defined above. It might well have been simply pedagogical in the mind of its promoters, who just wanted to convey the information that those countries were as dangerous as the Axis once was, though of course in a different way. As a matter of fact, the White House have never affirmed anything like points 1 and 2 above. Anyway, the large majority of the user of the metaphor have probably not analysed carefully its implications and just want to sound fashionable or colourful.
This example shows the big advantage of manipulative metaphors over lies: no one can prove you have actually done it, it is a crime as safe as a Swiss bank. It is a planet the linguists must know about but that will never be open to exploration. All we can do is demonstrate that certain metaphors lead to believe wrong things, but the mind behind the language will remain unfathomable.
5. "The economy": a thing with strange properties.
The word "economy" has several meanings. In this paper I concentrate on only one of those meanings, defined by the two dictionary definitions below:
"the system of trade and industry by which the wealth of a country is made and used" (Cambridge Advanced Language Dictionnary)
"a system of producing, distributing, and consuming wealth" (Webster).
These definitions show that "the economy" is actually a strange thing, which uses what it makes (or consumes what it produces), a modern avatar of Penelope. When we say that "the economy is doing well", it is just as saying: "Penelope has worked very well today, she has made and unmade a huge amount of tapestry". This ambivalence can be illustrated by the common collocation "contribute to the economy", which can be used either for the workers that produces wealth and earn money or for the consumers that spend their money.
However, the supply-side of the economy is clearly dominant, at least in the language. Determiners referring to the way an economy produces wealth: "peasant economy, manufacturing economy, industrial or post-industrial economy, service economy" are much more common than expressions that refer to the way wealth is used, like "leisure economy" or "subsistence economy".
Not only is the economy two-faced, but it seems to be able to take over all kind of thematic roles, as illustrated in the chart below1:
Economy as "subject"
Economy as "non-subject"
1. Possession
"the economy's goods and services"
"Britain has a service economy"
2. Movement
"The economy is moving to a recession"
"…bring industry and the economy within the framework of a Fascist, Nazi state"
3. Location
"adverse trading position of the British economy"
"in the economy"
4. Condition
"the British economy staged a revival in that decade".
"revive the economy"
5. Activity
"the economy is doing well"
"run the economy", "boost the economy", "direct the economy", "manage the economy", "mismanage the economy"
6. Creation
"the economy produces wealth"
"create a new form of economy"
7. Growth
"the economy is growing"
"expanding the economy out of the slump"
However, the impression of symmetry given by the chart is misleading. Some of the metaphors in it are more productive than others. They are discussed in the following sections.
6. "THE ECONOMY" IS A THING
We cannot affirm with certainty that economy is a thing. After all, Thatcher’s possibly most famous sentence was "There is no such thing as society". If we affirm that “there is no such thing as economy”, it follows that "THE ECONOMY IS A THING" is a metaphor.
A "thing" seems at first sight to be an empty concept, totally deprived of any semantic features. But this is not true; we expect certain characteristics from a thing. For example, "the Taj Mahal and the Eiffel Tower" is normally not considered as one thing, but as two things. A typical thing should have some inherent unity, for example not be located simultaneously on two far off continents, not move up and down simultaneously, not grow bigger and smaller simultaneously, etc.
When we hear that "the economy is growing", it is supposed to mean that it produces and uses "more wealth" –according to the definitions in section 3–, but usually it just means that it produces "more", as in the hypothetical cases below:
more weapons, an increase in criminality follows, more jails
an increase in the condemnation of innocent people, even more jails
more tobacco
more cars and more cures because of more car accidents
more tranquillisers for people that should better not use them (like in France, the world's Number One in tranquillisers addiction)
more hamburgers for obese people
more oil, because people have to drive longer to go to work
From these examples, we could induce that it is possible for a "growing economy" to produce less wealth, i.e. to shrink. If we consider that a typical "thing" should not grow and shrink at the same time, we should not consider "the economy" as a thing.
When the economy "gets better", it is usually supposed to mean that people get richer or get better opportunities to get rich. But what shall we do with the numerous cases when some people's enrichment is linked with other people's impoverishment? If oil price rises, it is good for oil sellers but bad news for oil buyers. It is of course similar for real estate and many other things. Pay rises are usually considered good news, but the common collocation "wage inflation" is normally to be found in disapproving contexts and is normally supposed to be "bad for the economy", as in
"Prime Minister Nikolai Ryzhkov disclosed grim new evidence of wage inflation here".
This notion of "wage inflation", combined with current believes about "the economy", leads us to the following demonstration:
If your salary does not rise, the economy fares well,
if the economy fares well, your salary rises,
if your salary rises, the economy fares badly.
Therefore: if the economy fares well, it fares badly.
We do certainly not expect prototypical "things" to get worse every time they get better. However, we hear everyday in the medias that the economy grows or contract, gets better or worse. Is this omnipresent metaphor, "THE ECONOMY" IS A THING, used in a manipulative way? As I explained above, it is impossible to demonstrate. But I definitely think it is a misleading metaphor.
7. "THE ECONOMY" IS A NUMBER
Personally, when I want to know the size of such a simple thing as two-dimensional sheet of paper, I need too numbers: length and width. Surprisingly enough, very complex things are supposed to be one-dimensional and measurable with one number only. For example, human intelligence is supposed to be measurable with the IQ and "the economy" is supposed to be measurable with the GNP. Most economists will agree that the notion GNP is theoretical, i.e. by definition a simplification of reality. However, in common usage, the economy is the GNP, as when we hear that "the economy has grown by 5%".
A number can go up and down with a flourish of colourful expressions, as witnessed by the rich vocabulary used to describe price fluctuations. Indeed, prices can leap, rise, shoot up, rocket or soar, until they touch a certain level or even the top, or until they peak or reach a peak. If the prices do not move, you can boost them, shove them up, raise them, lift them or prop them up. If they do too much, cool them or put a lid on them. On the contrary, prices can also drop, fall, tumble or recede from a peak, until they get to rock bottom
(the majority of these example is from the Financial Times).
Many of these expressions used with prices can be used with other figures, like oil outputs, investment flows, quota ceilings, union membership, etc. All of them could possibly also be used with the GNP. i.e. "the economy". I found such examples as "lift the economy out of recession", "economic rebound" or "the economy sinks into deeper gloom". I have read somewhere on the Internet that in Chinese culture, "the economy" is very often metaphorised as the sea, with its tides and ebbs.
But actually, "the economy" rather tends to move forwards:
A poor country's fragile economy just can't keep up with population growth.
But in the past five years the economy has been pulled along at an even faster pace than that medited by its industrial over-achievers.
Weaknesses in the financial system will hamper the real economy's ability to pull through the hard days now at hand.
Not surprisingly, I have seen cartoons where "the economy" was represented as a car or a plane. It can decelerate, be sluggish or slow down. However, economic slowdown is often depicted by the language as an external obstacle. "The economy" can "move into a recession" or "be in a recession". Recessions can even become full-fledged geographic obstacles:
The recession of the 1870s was shallow, but one that took the economy a long time to climb out of.
However, Mr Dennis also reckons that the current GNP numbers (still subject to revision) may be under-estimating the true steepness of the current downturn.
By a surprising inversion of the metaphor, crises themselves can go up or grow:
The occasion of the revolution would be a culminatory economic crisis.
But what was really neutralizing the power of the unions was the growing economic crisis and resultant unemployment.
8. "THE Economy" Is a place
Everything can happen "in the economy", you can have a "role in the economy", or make an "intervention in the economy", there can be "excess capacity in economy", "employment in the economy", an "amount of money in the economy", "trends in the economy" or even "growth in the economy". Other spatial prepositions are possible, although less common:
Certain democratic aspects of the British polity have heaped problems on to the capitalist economy…
Britain is moving to a service economy
The economy has sectors and has a "supply-side" and presumably a "demand-side". I feel that it is already more metaphorical than the previous examples, because the spatial semantic feature of "sides" or "sectors" are presumably less worn out than it is the case with "in" and the other spatial prepositions, but I really do not know if this felling would be shared by other people. However, there are clearly "more metaphorical" instances too, for example "the heartland of the modern economy" (Galbraith), "a centralized economy" or "Britain is a service economy", where "the economy" seems to be viewed as a country that has to be administered.
9. "THE Economy" is a complex thing
This metaphor is clearly related to the previous one, because a territory is a kind of complex thing and a complex thing has normally some extension in the space. However, there is no clear hierarchical relation between them. "THE ECONOMY" IS A COMPLEX THING means that the economy is endowed with different "parts":
"Professional producer services, such as accountancy, advertising agencies, merchant banks and legal practices, have become an increasingly important component in the British economy."
"…a more rural economy which was nevertheless also heavily dependent on its armaments and mining industries."
Whether this vision of "the economy" as a complex thing is metaphorical or not, it is a ground for clearly metaphorical expressions, as "THE ECONOMY" IS AN ARMY or "THE ECONOMY" IS A MACHINE (unfortunately I have lost the examples). Another important metaphor seems to be "THE ECONOMY" IS A COMPANY:
"Our credibility as an economy"
"A cost on the economy"
However, companies are often described through more concrete metaphors than economies, amongst which many human features:
private equity arm (Financial Times, 19.3.5)
CVC eyes Post Danmark (Financial Times, 19.3.5)
…giving the Central Bank virtually a free hand (Financial Times, 19.3.5)
the polyglot corporation. It combines great size with highly diverse lines of manufacture (J.K. Galbraith, The New Industrial State)
It is not unconceivable to endow the economy with such features and I hypothesize it sometimes happens. However, an economy is a much less concrete being than a company and is bound to be anthropomorphized much less often and less intensely, just as an octopus will be anthropomorphized less than a chimpanzee.
10. "the economy" is a person
The economy is like children. You have to help it so that it can help you in the future:
The aim is to build Labour's credibility by creating an economy which will sustain higher spending on its social programme.
You have to do certain things for the economy, "the needs of the economy" are often mentioned. You should try to communicate with it, you might get an answer:
It is clear that the economy is already responding to the measures we have taken.
So the economy can "perform", it can "export things", it can "work", be "adaptive and dynamic". You need a strong economy, else you are in trouble:
The weakness of the economy still makes it harder for companies to service their debt.
As for the "state of the economy" or "the condition of the economy", the economy has to be "healthy". Incidentally, if it is not, it is very seldom "unhealthy" or "sick", but usually "ailing":
…he offered few new prescriptions for the ailing economy…
Economic diseases are usually economic:
…the UK economy is suffering from severe structural weaknesses
A metaphor like this one is exceptional:
That compares to the seventy billion pounds that Japan recently injected into its own economy on feeling an economic cold coming on.
As seen in the example above, the usual cure for an ailing economy is money, which has to be injected. However, it is a potentially dangerous cure:
…injecting a bigger dose of inflation into the economy…
Crazy doctors can be really dangerous:
Anyway, why put a new straitjacket around the economy until recovery is more than a twinkle in the market's eye?
The last example shows us how far the personification of the economy can go. Actually, an economy even seems to have a consciousness and experience things (not always pleasant, however):
in an economy already experiencing positive inflation
an economy experiencing substantial levels of unemployment
…the [german] economy is in trouble (Wall Street Journal Europe, 24.3.2005)
The economy can even be "immature". Fortunately, it can still "enjoy growth".
11. Zooming
In the examples of the preceding sections, "the economy" is either viewed as a very simple thing that can only go up, down or forwards, or as a complex territory, machine or organization. This has nothing to do with the evocative power of the metaphors: a phrase like "the economy sinks into deeper gloom" could well be uttered by a speaker that only knows that the GNP is going to decrease and thinks about "the economy" as something uni-dimensional.
I propose to call "zooming" this type of semantic process, where you can view something alternatively from inside and outside. I have strong presumption that it is not only relevant for "the economy", but for thousands of other words, and even for many function words or grammatical categories. For example, the difference between "in" and "at" in English is often described in comparable terms:
We use at when we see the cities as points on a journey, and in when we see them as enclosed areas where we stayed for some time.2
The French partitive article is a related case. When a speaker says "du vin", this involves that the wine in question can be divided, which is already characteristic of some complexity, while "le vin" can be used without reference to inner complexity. However, the partitive article is a restricted case of zooming, since the stuff in question –e.g. "du vin", "du monde", or "du bois"– is viewed as homogeneous. The Russian distinction between perfective and imperfective verbs –often compared to the French partitive– is probably another case of restricted zooming.
12. Conclusion
Although this paper focused on a very restricted theme –the metaphorical uses of one word in one of its meanings–, I clearly have not exhausted the subject and I have not discovered all the current metaphors in existence. If further research is pursued on this topic, my general believes about language lead me to hypothesize that
a few categories not mentioned in this paper are still to be discovered,
no two persons working on this subject would come up with exactly the same categories,
some isolated metaphors would not fall easily into any category.
Language is systematic to a great extent, otherwise we could not use it. However, the systems of two speakers will never completely overlap and any speaker always has the possibility to invent new irregular things at odd with the system.
Metaland, the land of metaphors, has characteristics that would bewilder even Einstein. In real life, if a car is a moving thing, you cannot infer that every moving thing is a car. In Metaland, as soon as the speaker community has accepted that "the economy" is a moving thing, then it is universally acceptable and understandable to transform "the economy" into whatever every type of vehicle, animal, climatic phenomenon or other moving thing you can think of.
While these examples are still compatible with the traditional conceptual metaphors framework, it must be emphasised that Metaland space (which could be called the metaspace) has distinctive properties of its own. For example, it does not make any difference to be inside or outside something. There can be "recession in the economy" while "the economy faces recession" or "growth in the economy" instead of "the growth of the economy". Who would say such a thing as "there has been a lot of growth in my child lately, I am very impressed"? This "suspension of physical laws" in the "metaspace" has probably a claim for further research.
I am still not sure whether it makes sense to say that "THE ECONOMY IS A THING" is a metaphor. It would perhaps be more accurate to say that it is an abstract notion and that abstract notions share certain things in common with metaphors, like "the suspension of physical laws", replaced by another type of logic. This other type of logic is not every day logic, but rather every night logic, the crazy logic at work in our dreams.
