The Prince's Pride: Metaphors And The War On Words

I again find myself in that curious place of doubting everything I do here. I struggle against an overwhelming sense of futility. Fatalism knocks at the door; when I attempt to escape through a window, I find that doubt has screwed closed the sash. You see, there are just too many fronts on which I fight. On the one hand, I fight myself; on the other, I fight those who, from all sides, want to keep me from thinking. There is death in the air, and I am breathing hard.

George Soros reminds some of us why we hated those large group discussions in high school: there was always that set of lobotomists, somehow popular, who pronounced with confident clarity the rot that should have left them banished to the back of the bus. For Mr. Soros engages us, like the good linguist he suddenly has suddenly become, with a lesson in language. That Mr. Soros, a ruthless (or so I believe) billionaire who perhaps owns the Democratic Party, is a known numbers man, is not the sort of fact that might stay this man's hubris; for he presumes, in a recent Wall Street Journal essay, to lecture us on the complexities and dangers of metaphors. It is a true relief to learn that a billionaire can find an audience these days, especially one who moonlights as an armchair George Lakoff.

Soros begins his pedagogy with this bold statement: "The war on terror is a false metaphor …" Immediately one finds oneself mesmerized by his dizzying intellect: His mastery is inconceivable. But the first question we must ask is not whether Mr. Soros is right about whether the war on terror is a false metaphor, but whether the war on terror is a metaphor at all. Is it?

Defining A Few Things

What is a metaphor anyway? Here's one definition (from the Oxford American Dictionary):

Metaphor: a figure of speech in which a word or phrase is applied to an object or action to which it is not literally applicable

Is the phrase "the war on terror" a figure of speech†? What parts of it are figures? Is something other than "war" meant; is there something figurative about "on" or "terror?" Has the assumedly prosaic President of the United States meant it as a poetic image? Is President Bush going about the country speaking in figures; is he artfully crafting turns of phrase that are not to be taken literally?

Any good linguist knows that meaning is not determined by something static; what a word means is not based on the authority of a dictionary. A word's meaning is determined by how it is used. That is why dictionary publishers are built around usage panels, those collections of scholars who determine a word's many uses (by writers and speakers). It is such usage panels that say yea or nay to a word's various connotations. With this in mind, we must ask whether it is at all likely that President Bush has ever once uttered the phrase in question in any manner than a literal one. But wait! Why bother? Mr. Soros has handed us something truly mind-bending in only his second sentence:

"…a misleading figure of speech applied literally has unleashed a real war …" [italics added]

OK. Confused? I hope so.

Here is metaphoric language: I married a fox. Here is more: George Soros is a sinkhole. Of course, neither of these is to be taken literally. I did not marry a feral vixen; and though Mr. Soros might be depressing, he is no sinkhole. You get the point.

Here is something literal and straightforward: The war on terror.

How Is The Phrase Used?

President Bush has not for one second (or so it seems) thought there was not a real war against real terrorists. (Some may accuse me of equivocation here, changing "terror" to "terrorists", but I have not. Even critics of Mr. Bush, critics like Mr. Soros, use the terms interchangably. In fact, "terror" is really just a shorthand for "terrorism" or "terrorists." But since usage determines meaning [though not solely], we know what is meant when such interchanges occur: Bush and others LITERALLY mean there is a war on terror, terrorism, and terrorists. Smart people get that part.) Apparently, Mr. Soros thinks all our woes are due to obfuscation, or to linguistic laziness. That Mr. Soros offers us no other linguistic framework than to suggest that calling this conflict "war" limits us is all so much nothing. If there is after all a false metaphor at work here, what is Soros' idea of a true one? President Bush has constantly argued that this "war" is NOT like other wars and therefore is to be fought differently; he gets the nuance his critic argues he does not get. Thus, the only person abusing language here is Mr. Soros. He wants us to take the President figuratively (sort of) and him literally; even when the President has been quite literal from the start and nuanced enough to know that "war" is not constrained by the narrow definition Soros and his supporters appear (which is important) to want to give it. Or is Soros really making a different mistake? Is he actually arguing that the President has been literal when he should have been metaphorical? In part, I think that is what he is arguing.

Plus, that Soros calls terrorism an "abstraction" is utterly useless. Every word is an abstraction. Even the name "George Soros" is abstracted from the totality of the man; he cannot ever be known in a completely concrete way. None of us can, and none of us will (except by God). But it is equally true that terrorism is not a total abstraction, just like no other word (except ones like hobbit and fairy) is a total abstraction: We know what terrorism is; we know who terrorists are; we know what terror feels like. If we knew none of these things, we'd have nothing to discuss and we would not have the words terror, terrorism and terrorist.

In the strictest linguistic sense, the President has been demonstrably clear: the war is real and it is against Islamofascists. They may not be in uniform, they may not stand on certain battle lines, but that does not mean they are invisible, vague, unknown or fictive. We know, to some degree, who our enemy is; we know where he lives and how he generally operates. It is not like we are battling a predator in an action movie that moves in some other fantastic dimension from our own.

All this to say that Soros is wrong in his first eight words: the war on terrorism is not only not a false metaphor, it isn't even a true one. It's never been a metaphor except in Soros' essay. Hence, everything else Soros argues is built to justify a false conclusion (which serves as a false premise in a truly circular way). But this all further points out something radically important: the language of Mr. Soros, if adopted as an alternative to Mr. Bush's pugilism, is also pugilistic; it also could lead to more conflict and suffering. There is nothing gained by reframing things in better, more nuanced language. This conflict is not merely due to a battle of words. It's due to a clash of worlds.

Peace.

BG

©Bill Gnade 2006/Contratimes - All Rights Reserved.
†I am all for arguing that in the final analysis all speech is figurative. But if I accept this, do I contradict my argument here? I don't really care. For it is Mr. Soros who makes the distinction between metaphorical and literal speech. His whole argument hinges on this separation.

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