From Naval Gazing to Navel Gazing: Thinking about and with Metaphor

With this week's video we're back to the "ways of knowing" miniseries, and a look at metaphor, and how it connects the development of sailing technology and "the journey of life":

This one has quite a long history. It was originally a series of three posts on my very first blog (1 2 3), which I later updated and combined into one long post on my second blog, and you can now also access that version here on my current website. Basically the backstory is that I was teaching a course in narrative, and one of the thematic groupings of texts I put together was travel narrative. As I was preparing this, I noticed that there was an interesting parallel between the way the "journey of life" metaphor was used in many texts and the development in sailing technology from the ancient world into the 20th century. I've always been interested in the relationship between science and technology on the one hand, and literature and culture on the other, and I've sometimes worked this into my lectures a bit; that's the genesis for this idea.

There weren't many stipulations for this narrative course other than that we were to consider narrative from fairly broad terms. I decided to divide the course into two parts. First we would survey some of the major narrative genres of western literature — myth, folktale, legend, etc.; epic and saga; romance; the novel; the short story — and then we'd spend the rest of our time on thematic units. I wanted to consider narrative broadly speaking as a way human beings tend to organise information and make sense of their world. Starting off with myth was a particularly good way of introducing this idea. We compared parallel stories such as creation myths, destruction myths (like flood myths), and so forth from the Bible, Greek myth, and Norse myth. This also gave us the opportunity to do a bit of comparative mythology and consider the differences in religious beliefs and some of the different world views these reflect, for instance the very personal relationship between humans and God in the Judeo-Christian world and the relationship based on fear in the Greco-Roman world.

I also wanted to spend some time on some of the fundamental narratives of western culture, and the first thematic unit that I settled on was travel and exploration. As I was prepping my lectures on this topic it occurred to me that there was an interesting parallel pattern between the travel and exploration literature and the world views reflected by this imagery on the one hand, and the development of sailing technology on the other. I suggested to the class that the travel and exploration metaphor could be seen as reflective of cultural change from the ancient world to the modern. This narrative metaphor often describes humans' relation to the world in which they live — the narrative is symbolic of people's place in the universe. And the use of this narrative metaphor changes over time to reflect different beliefs about people's place in the world.

I've held on to this idea over the years, and when I started to work on this web series, it was one of the first things I wanted to come back to and adapt for video, since it would be nicely visual. Indeed the concept map is figured here as an actual map, and the chronological journey of the development of this metaphor is figured as a journey.

The centrality of metaphor to our language and our cognition is perhaps most importantly explored in the groundbreaking book Metaphors We Live By (1980), by George Lakoff and Mark Johnson. Though Lakoff's useful index of conceptual metaphors, the Conceptual Metaphor Homepage, no longer seems to be available at its old ulr, it's mirrored here (at least for now), so have a look. Here is the relevant section that includes the "life as a journey" metaphor. Interestingly, the idea of fundamental cultural metaphors was explored earlier by Ernst Robert Curtius in European Literature of the Latin Middle Ages (1948). I first encountered Curtius while writing my doctoral dissertation, and, after constructing the appropriate footnotes for that project, I filed him away as something I should come back to later. More recently, there's the very exciting The Mapping Metaphor with the Historical Thesaurus project at the University of Glasgow, which is drawing on the Oxford English Dictionary's Historical Thesaurus to map out how metaphors in English have developed and changed over the history of the English language. I'm very excited to see the (ongoing) results of this excellent project. You can read more about the project and see some fascinating visualizations on their blog.

And one final link for those interested in reading a little further: if you want to know more about the development of sailing technology in the ancient world (and beyond) a good starting place is this useful overview.

Programming note: in two weeks we'll go back to looking at word origins with the first of a very special two-parter about an interesting etymology and the surrounding cultural connections. The final part of the "ways of knowing" miniseries, looking at narrative, will be coming later, so stay tuned...

Words, words, words!

Here's my latest Endless Knot video, all about the origin and history of the word "album":

So first of all, a programming note: we're taking a break this week from the "ways of knowing" mini-series, which was the focus of the last two videos. We'll come back to that soon with upcoming videos about metaphor and narrative. But this week, I wanted to launch what will be the ongoing series of videos you'll see on my channel, videos that cover the often surprising origins and histories of words. This week's word is album.

The idea here is to look for the hidden connections with words. Words that are etymologically connected even if they don't look like it. Words with particular historical and cultural connections that are made the richer by knowing the formation and history of the word itself. The word and its origin are a jumping off point to then explore the related history and culture, and I hope by rooting the word in its context and connecting the history to language, both become more memorable. In a lot of ways, this is where the real idea for this channel started, since it was something I could do on an ongoing basis, and since at heart I'm a real word nerd.

This particular video was inspired by noticing that the White Album was a redundantly repetitive name, and everything else followed from there. It's also a bit of a "get off my lawn, you youngsters" moment for me as I lament the diminution of album art, but actually I like electronic albums as much as the next guy and mostly listen to music on my iPhone anyway. Still, it's a nice bit of historical circularity that the signing of record albums brings it back to the album amicorum.

Now there are number of different ways to track down these sorts of connections. Of course there is the well-known and authoritative Oxford English Dictionary (OED), which is excellent for tracking the changes in words and how they are used over the course of English history. It doesn't, however, always give the deeper etymologies and more distantly related words. For that, one of the best bets is American Heritage Dictionary (AHD), and in particular the excellent Indo-European Roots appendix by Calvert Watkins. This appendix lists all the Proto-Indo-European (PIE) roots that make their way into English, through a variety of intermediary languages and in a variety forms, so it's a good way of finding distantly related words. Also useful on the Indo-European front is the Indo-European Lexicon from the University of Texas at Austin, which lists the derivative words found in many languages that come from PIE roots, and it's nicely cross-indexed in a number of different ways (by PIE root, by derivative language, by semantic field), and both this website and the Calvert Watkins appendix give cross indexes to the older, very authoritative work on PIE vocabulary by Julius Pokorny, Indogermanisches Etymologisches Wörterbuch. (Trivia fans: Pokorny is apparently mentioned in James Joyce's Ulysses!) Another excellent tool for tracking down surprisingly related words is John Ayto's excellent Dictionary of Word Origins. It's by no means comprehensive, but has interesting discussions and useful cross references.

Other etymological resources I use frequently are the excellent Online Etymology Dictionary by Douglas Harper, The Oxford Dictionary of English Etymology by C.T. Onions, and Webster's Dictionary of Word Origins. And for names, there's Behind the Name. For specific specific stages of English there are the older Old English dictionaries by J.R. Clark Hall and by Bosworth & Toller, and the still-in-progress Dictionary of Old English (where I worked as a research assistant while I was a graduate student), and the Middle English Dictionary. For other languages, there are the Old Norse dictionaries by Zoëga and Cleasby & Vigfusson, and for Latin and Greek the Logeion website (and handy iOS app) which contains a variety of Greek and Latin dictionaries, including the authoritative Lewis & Short Latin and Liddell & Scott Greek dictionaries.

And of course there are many other popular word history books, such as Word Histories and Mysteries from the AHD, David Crystal's The Story of English in 100 Words, Mark Forsyth's Etymologicon (and blog), and many, many others. Also influential to me in the past was the entertaining Podictionary podcast by Charles Hodgson, but it's now sadly discontinued.

In keeping with the album theme of this video, I've uploaded some of the music I've created for the channel to SoundCloud as a kind of "album release" (get it?), so if you're into listening to background/theme music you can find that here. I've had a lot of fun recording music (another hobby of mine), and put a lot of effort into these recordings which in the end can't really be heard that clearly over my talking, so I figured it would be a good idea to do something else with them as well.

And finally, I didn't actually mention all the English words related to album in the video -- there are a few others, some more obscure and some more common. So my question to you, dear readers, is, can you think of any others? Answers in the comment section if you care to!