![]() If you do an Internet image search on "bright idea" you'll get a page full of drawings like the one on the left that illustrate the cliché of an idea represented as a lit bulb. It has a twofold core meaning: "to regard with the mind," and "to hold or keep in view." Likewise with "bright," an English word of Germanic origin whose core meaning is "radiating or reflecting light," and whose common metaphoric meaning is "quick-witted or intelligent." Consider, for example, behold, one of English's ur-verbs, dating from the 9th century. The metaphoric usage of these is brilliantly illustrated (if I may) in the well-known 19th century hymn by Clara Scott, " Open My Eyes That I May See":Įnglish did not learn about the metaphoric extension of light and related metaphors from Latin descendants. ![]() Luster, in turn, is from a Latin lustrare, "to brighten." Illumine and illuminate (literally, "make bright or brighter") are even closer to the "light source," both being derived from Latin lumen. The word underlying illustrate is luster, a word that denotes the quality of something that shines with reflected light. When you illustrate something, you either supply it with illustrations or give a clarifying example, in order to bring greater understanding. Back in 2011 I looked at the language of mottos and discovered that "light," in English or in some inflection of Latin lux or lumen, was one of the most common words in the mottos of various institutions - particularly institutions of learning, owing to the pervasive metaphor of light as knowledge. Indeed, there is hardly a noun, verb, or adjective in English with a core meaning arising from light and vision that cannot be used in metaphoric extension to depict knowledge and understanding. In her famous autobiography The Story of My Life,Helen Keller, deaf and blind from infancy, regularly uses see, light, and other related metaphors perhaps as frequently as any other writer would, and it is instructive to look at the ways in which these tropes fully inform her language, even though as an adult she retained no memories of the faculty of sight that she enjoyed for only a few months after birth. Could you elucidate your remarks? It's a transparent argument. What is your outlook on that? I view it differently. It looks different from my point of view. ![]() Understanding is seeing ideas are light sources discourse is a light-medium Lakoff and Johnson, in their foundational work Metaphors We Live By, identify this collection of concepts thus: "Light," in such idioms as "shed light," "shine a light on something," "bring something to light," and "see the light," represents not a physical but a cognitive phenomenon that suggests clarity, understanding, and information. To "see" something is to understand or comprehend it. Seen in that context, how could light not be fundamental to everything that we experience?Įverything we see, of course, is dependent on the presence of light, and it is this fact that lays the groundwork for many metaphoric equations, in which the constant elements are light and vision as the sources, knowledge and understanding as the targets. ![]() This is rendered in English as "Let there be light," in German as "Es werde licht," and in Hebrew, the original, as אור יהי, making "light" the second, third, or fourth word to issue from the lips of the Almighty, but by any account, the first content word that God bestowed on his creation. In the Judaeo-Christian account of creation, God created a big dark place but he wasn't prepared to do anything with it till he turned the lights on - a feat that he accomplished through a performative speech act, the like of which has never been duplicated. It's one of the most productive concepts for metaphor in English.īefore peering further down this illuminated path, let's first clear up a confusion that's unique to English, since it actually has two different words represented by the spelling l-i-g-h-t: there's the light that is opposite to heavy (a subject for another day), and the light that is opposite to dark, which is the focus of the International Year of Light. This year's observance is "designed to highlight the key role light and optical technologies play in our daily lives and their importance for our future and for the sustainable development of the society we live in." The Language Lounge will observe the solemnity of the occasion in a more low-tech way, by taking up the idea of light in language. The designation is an initiative of the United Nations, which has long record of international-years-of.
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